PERSON
Thomas Kuhn
American philosopher and historian of science (1922–1996), author of <em>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</em> (1962), whose account of paradigms and incommensurability set the intellectual problem Laudan's career was constructed to solve.
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was among the most consequential books of twentieth-century intellectual life. It argued that science does not progress through the gradual accumulation of truths but through revolutionary shifts between paradigms — frameworks so fundamental that practitioners working within different paradigms literally cannot see the same evidence the same way. The argument undermined the positivist picture of cumulative progress and left philosophers of science facing a hard question: if paradigms are incommensurable, is science rational at all? Laudan's career was the most sustained and successful attempt to answer that question. He accepted Kuhn's empirical observations about the history of science while rejecting the relativist conclusions many drew from them.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Kuhn's framework was developed through his historical work on the Copernican revolution and the transition from classical to quantum physics. He observed that scientists working within different paradigms did not merely hold different theories; they worked with different standards of evidence, different definitions of what
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