--- title: Thomas Kuhn author: Ryan Schram date: June 9, 2025 bibliography: /mnt/volume_nyc3_01/cyborg.rschram.org/data/bibliographies/cyber.yaml csl: /mnt/volume_nyc3_01/cyborg.rschram.org/data/csl/chicago-17.csl --- Thomas Kuhn contributes several ideas that have influenced the study of the history and philosophy of science. He is best known for an argument that science is not cumulative, and that intellectual progress is not linear. Instead, he says, scientific history is marked by a series of revolutionary changes [@kuhn_structure_1962]. Scientists do not operate in a vacuum. Rather, their inquiry is guided by a paradigm, a set of shared assumptions that form a framework for asking questions and interpreting data to find answers. Within one paradigm, certain kinds of claims are not possible because certain kinds of questions are not even askable. When confronted with empirical observations that challenge previous findings, scientists will classify them as anomalies, and explain them by modifying or qualifying previously settled knowledge that could forms to the assumptions of the dominant paradigm. Only after many anomalies accumulate do people begin to question the paradigm itself leading to a "paradigm shift," the wholesale replacement of one dominant paradigm by a new framework founded on new assumptions which is thus a basis for asking totally new questions. Because scientific knowledge is formulated within the context of one dominant paradigm at one time, it means that over history knowledge formulated in one era is incommensurate with knowledge formulated in another era when another paradigm dominates. In this respect, Coon draws on Wittgenstein's ideas: normal science within one paradigm is a language game, which only makes sense relative to the rules of that game, but is incomprehensible in the context of another language game. ::: {.refs} # References :::