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Jul 28, 2008

Greg rated it:

I first read Kuhn's book during my first year as a Ph.D. student, and found it rather interesting. It challenges notions of scientific progress as liner by suggesting instead a process of "paradigm shift." Essentially, Kuhn argues that researchers in a branch of science accept as normal a set of "received beliefs" that guide and bound their investigations into new phenomena. Because of this set of accepted beliefs and assumptions, new ways of looking at the world are often su More...

2 comments like (8 people liked it)

Sep 15, 2008

Coral rated it:

Bit of a preface: I hated this book. It contains some really good ideas, which are totally worth discussing, but the whole thing is so much wordier and denser than it needs to be (this, coming from me!); seriously, the ideas put forth in this 200-page monstrosity would have been better shared in a 5-10 page article. Still, we were assigned to read it for LIS 2000, Understanding Information, and asked to write a 400-word review, describing "how the content of this book relates to the info More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Mar 07, 2009

Tyler rated it:

Within this book, a 15-page essay somehow gets crammed into 174 tedious pages and crowned by a lengthy 35-page postscript. In its chapters Kuhn, father of the expression “paradigm shift,” shows us how science advances in spasmodic fractures that shatter previous models of nature. But at 210 pages, mission creep sinks in.

The book does more than propose a new model of scientific progress. It also tells us why other models are mistaken. Kuhn refutes the correspondence theory of truth, More...

7 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 22, 2009

Gary rated it:

A rebellion against science is running rampant in the West, causing such oddities as the cult of Global Warming. Here we can focus on one of the most important fomenters of this rebellion: Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), author of the enormously influential "Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

Kuhn rejects the traditional view that science is a linear accretion of knowledge. In the traditional view, scientists build on the corpus that preceded them; through experiment and observati More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Oct 28, 2008

Wayne rated it:

This book was a revelation...I felt the scales literally fall from my eyes and knew the world would never be the same again. In fact I experienced a "paradigm-shift" experience in the reading of it. If you want to know what that is click on the 'book cover' icon and you'll end up at a site where more eloquent people than me can and will tell you about the content of this book and all about the "paradigm-shift".
GREAT STUFF!!!
I had to read it as part of my Education More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 19, 2007

Mark rated it:

This book could be said to fall under the category of either the history or the philosophy of science. Kuhn sets out to explain the actual process by which science develops and ends up shedding an interesting, if disturbing light on the nature of the entire scientific undertaking. His major thesis is that scientific "progress" is largely illusory; it does not consist of a vast accumulation of knowledge over the course of the centuries leaving the present generation perpetually be More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 19, 2011

Erik rated it:

Kuhn, a physicist and philosopher and historian of science, wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, producing other editions until his death in 1996. The book was very influential (see description), serving as a starting point for reappraisals within several disciplines. One, psychology, was specifically covered by John Bannon's Philosophy of Psychology class held during the second semester of 1982/83 at Loyola University Chicago.

I found the book profoundly stimulati More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2012

Laura rated it:

I’ve seen citations to this book for decades, and it’s been on my shelf, unread-by-me, nearly as long. Finally read it. Kuhn contends that the then-accepted description of scientific process as a largely smooth increase in human knowledge isn’t accurate. Instead, it’s Hegelian-esque: an accepted model less and less satisfactory as more and more things are observed that do not fit; new models emerge and are resisted for reasons rational and not; and one fine day, the paradigm shifts. For reaso More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Oct 07, 2011

Adam rated it:

a response to some of the reviews here:

From those giving the book a negative rating, we inevitably get the standard accusation of relativism, which is bullshit and Kuhn and his followers have responded appropriately. A positive three-star review says Kuhn's major thesis is that scientific progress is largely illusory, when Kuhn says nothing of the sort and has also defended himself against such objections in the past by explaining, very simply, what a careful reader would have already More...

3 comments like (5 people liked it)

Aug 16, 2011

Bojan rated it:

As a practicing scientist and someone who has always been interested in history and the development of scientific ideas "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" has for long time been the book that loomed large on my intellectual horizon. Thomas Khun's book has for a long time had a reputation as the definitive and seminal work on understanding how new scientific ideas come about and how and why they gain support. Part of my reluctance to start reading this book stemmed from my belief More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 05, 2011

Grace rated it:

I approached this with some trepidation. Science isn't something I know very much about and I thought it might be quite dense. However, such a pleasant surprise! It did help that this is a classic and you start it sort of knowing the overall thrust of the argument. It was excellently pitched, well written and easily accessible for someone more familiar with the humanities/social sciences even so. He did use plenty of illustrative examples from the history of science but anyone with basic knowled More...

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May 07, 2011

Luke rated it:

I guess the reason this book is so popular and influential is because it is so very clear and well argued. The narration sounds like Kryten from Red Dwarf, and was pretty slow, but the "2x" mode on my ipod made it an easy listen.

While I have some issues with the overall thesis of the book, I'm not a historian, nor am I a scientist, nor am I a historian of science, so I'll leave the criticisms to other more capable reviewers.

However, I do like the idea that this More...

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Feb 18, 2011

Aaron added it

As a person with a considerable interest in science, I found a few interesting aspects of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Particularly interesting was the postulation that new scientific theories (or paradigms) gain widespread acceptance not because they are necessarily true, or more true than a previous theory, but because they answer more questions, or answer questions better, than a previous theory. Also that these paradigms are accepted by the younger and/or more darin More...

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Apr 07, 2010

Clif rated it:

Warning - this book is not light reading.

I give the book only 3 stars because, not being a member of the scientific community, I have no way of judging the accuracy of the author's assertions.

However, as a layman and an avid follower of science, what he has to say rings true.

Kuhn claims that science is not cumulative, that is it isn't a simple tower of knowledge with each level built upon and adding to the earlier levels. Rather, science is practiced and has m More...

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Jul 12, 2009

Nicholas rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Jun 16, 2009

Marcus rated it:

The premise of the book is that science doesn't progress by the cumulative addition of knowledge, but instead advances by major shifts in paradigms that replace, rather than increment, large parts of previous paradigms.

To begin with, scientific research in a specific subject is carried out within the bounds of a generally accepted framework that defines what scientists already know about the field, as well as the questions that remain unanswered. This is what Kuhn calls a paradigm. More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 16, 2009

Douglas rated it:

Great.

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jan 08, 2011

Trevor rated it:

Let’s start elsewhere. Watch this and then we can talk paradigms:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoa...

Now, I don’t normally do that – nor do I like to talk about optical illusions. I generally think illusions mean quite other things to what most people like to say they mean. I find that people tend to say the most boringly predictable things about optical illusions. That is a large part of the source of my aversion to them, like Pavlov’s dogs, I have been taught More...

4 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jul 27, 2011

Ann rated it:

I read this book as a college freshman. It was important to me then; I recall talking with fellow students about paradigms and relating Kuhn's science socio-historical ideas to other transformational events in other arenas of discovery, art, etc.

I re-read it just recently, and I still think it's a significant book. Kuhn is very clear (and may strike many readers as redundant--but he was trained in rhetoric in the 1950s, and for those days, his style is actually quite readable!). His th More...

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Jun 03, 2011

Mark rated it:

A couple of years ago, a friend told me about this book that explores the way scientific progress actually happens: a series of revolutions, generally resisted by the scientific "establishment," that bring about a complete "paradigm shift" from prevailing scientific "dagma. (Paradigm shift, by the way, is a term coined by Kuhn. Written way back in 1962, this little book was named one of "The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the Second World War." So two yea More...

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Jun 03, 2009

Jamie rated it:

This is a book/author that was referenced many times in my college classes, both in psychology and philosophy, though the book itself is specifically centered around the nature of science and the history of science. I'm really glad that I got around to reading it.

Kuhn's ideas about science are both fascinating and revolutionary, and they have implications for any sort of hard or soft science or philosophy. Basically, Kuhn presents the idea that science may not be as impartial, linear More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 12, 2010

DoctorM rated it:

One of the key books of the last century in the philosophy of science, and in the study of any number of other intellectual enterprises. A decade or two before Foucault, Kuhn gave us the idea of "normal" science, the idea that science (or economics, or history, or psychology, or political science) at a given moment has a consensus framework that explains a given field, that sets limits on what's acceptable, on what problems and solutions are regarded as 'authentic' or 'reasonable'. Tha More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 06, 2011

Scott rated it:

Stephen Pepper's "World Hypotheses" originally published in 1942 in many repects anticipates Kuhn's work. However, Kuhn is often cited when referencing the fluid, dynamic, and contexual nature of contemporary science. Although, I've never done it, I would recommend reading the two books side by side; either concurrently or consecutively.

Clearly, this book is required reading for those of us living in the 21st Century. If we are going to have the intellectual backgroun More...

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May 05, 2009

Michael rated it:

This is the book that introduced the word "paradigm" into common educated speech. Kuhn takes a look at the way in which scientific theories have developed and finds that, contrary to previous views, they do not neatly "build" upon one another in progression toward the truth. Rather they undergo sudden catastrophic shifts when an old model has been found to leave too many questions unanswered. Then the new model is slowly criticized for the gaps in its explanation, with more a More...

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Aug 26, 2010

Jason rated it:

Remember your 10th grade Geometry class? It was a 55 minute class just before lunch. Picture yourself, 15 years old, Friday, ensconced in Geometry on a beautiful late September day. If you’re a girl, you’re much more interested in whether the new boy is going to sit with Amber during lunch for a third day in a row, and what he’s going to say to her this time; he’s so confident and handsome. If you’re a guy, you’re much more interested in the 17 year old Varsity cheerleader at the front of yo More...

14 comments like (8 people liked it)

Aug 15, 2011

Oliver rated it:

Yet another "important" book, one that advances a theory of "paradigm shift" to explain the transition between scientific worldviews (or transitions from pre-paradigm to paradigm worldviews, in the case of a coalescing field). Although written in an easy-to-understand way, Kuhn's presentation of this material--as evidenced by the somewhat defensive tone he adopts when responding to criticisms about his slipshod use of the term "paradigm" and his tendency to pass be More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 29, 2007

Suzan rated it:

I used this book to debunk some of the myths of library science, most notably that librarians' fear of being taken over by computers was not as unwarranted as they first appeared. It's a fascinating read, and philosophizes that there are crossroads between science, history, and accidents.

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Feb 26, 2009

Amy rated it:

I came to this book after reading and discussing a number of more recent articles on the nature of science for a class in teaching laboratory science. Several of the articles referred to this book or ideas from the book as seminal in changing how science educators view the nature of science. Since my local public library had a copy, I decided I'd read it.

It took me about three weeks to read. For me, that's a long time. I found the vocabulary and the way the author expressed himse More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 29, 2010

Travis rated it:

I am a Neoclassical Economist. My analysis, though I am not a Gate Keeper, is the ebb and flow of the market system look bleak from a long term perspective. It is only a matter of time before economic crisis brings about further justification for changing socio-sci prerogatives. The current situation of mass consumer culture and population expansion in light of a limited resource (oh no I'm Malthusian!) is apparent. The production methods of our culture will not last, the crisis is at More...

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Oct 28, 2011

Andrew rated it:

I've dabbled in Kuhn's ideas in the shallowest way over many years without ever picking up a book or delving too deep, but an argument against Kuhn raised by Paul Churchland got me rather interested, so I picked up this little number.

All in all, I rather liked it. I'm an old hand to philosophy but rather green when it comes to the philosophy of science (and most analytic.) Still, I take this over Churchland and Popper. I think his notion of a "paradigm" is a strong one--almos More...

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