THE STRUCTURE OFSCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION -Thomas Kuhn

THE STRUCTURE OF
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
Presented to :
prof. Yasser Mansour
professor of architecture
faculty of engineering
ainshams university
PRESENTED BY: Nouran adel elkiki
may 2016
PhD- Arc 703 - Philosophical investigation in architecture

Thomas S . Kuhn (1922- 1996)
• An American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science.
• B S in Theoretical Physics from Harvard University (1934)
• MS and Ph. D in Physics at 1946 and 1949, respectively under the supervision of John Van Vleck
• Three years of freedom (1948 to 51) as Harvard Junior Fellow of society of fellows allowed switch from:
Physics History of Science Philosophy of science
• Affected by James B. Conant,(president of Harvard University)who introduced him to the history of science and thus initiated the
transformation in his conception of the nature of scientific advance.
• Random Explorations
• Studding :Alex andre Koyré ,Emile Meyerson, Hélène Metzger, and Anneliese Maier
Scientific thought were very different from those current today
• Studding :A. O.Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being Conception of what The History of Scientific Ideas can be.
• Influenced by: Auguste Comte and Gaston Bachelard (Comte's stages and transform from stage to another one)
• Series of 8 public lectures delivered at Lowell Institute in Boston(1951) on “The Quest for Physical Theory.”
• Taught course on History of Science at Harvard University (1956)
• Studding : Centre for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science (1958- 59)
Thomas Kuhn is most famous for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) in which he presented the idea that
science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls "paradigm shifts."
Introduction

1- The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957
2-The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (First Edition)
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
3-The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (second Edition)
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969
4-The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977
5-Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
6- The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in
the Development of Western Thought (revised)
Thomas S. Kuhn (Author), James Bryant Conant (Foreword)
Harvard University Press; Revised edition (January 1, 1992)
7-The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
: 50th Anniversary Edition
Thomas S. Kuhn (Author)
,Ian Hacking (Introduction)
University Of Chicago Press;(April 30, 2012)
Beirut 2007
Kuwait 1992

.
THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONIntroduction
• Scientists do not in fact falsify theories in the ‘instant’ way specified by Popper .While at the level of empirical hypotheses
Popperian falsificationism may operate, this cannot be maintained at the level of broader theoretical structures or the
evolution of science as a whole.
• In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn argues that science evolves – not in a logically linear fashion but
through dramatic shifts in how scientists see the world.
• He coins the term “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” like the shift from Newtonian physics to Quantum physics
• Paradigms: Scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of
practitioners.
• According to Kuhn scientific progress in science happens through revolutions.
• Each scientific revolution alters the historical perspective of the community that experiences it, then that change of
perspective should affect the structure of post-revolutionary textbooks and research publications.
• A shift in the distribution of the technical literature cited in the footnotes to research report…ect. Each of these
contributed to a Paradigm Shift
• The development of a science is the distinction between the pre- and the post-paradigm periods

THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONoutline
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Introduction
The route to normal science
The nature of normal science
Normal science as puzzle solving
The priority of paradigms
Anomaly and the emergence of scientific discoveries
Crisis and the emergence of scientific discoveries
The response to crisis
The nature and necessity of scientific revolutions
Revolutions as changes of world view
The invisibility of revolutions
The resolution of revolutions
Progress through revolutions
NormalscienceTransition
Scientific
revolutions

1-A Role for History
History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive Transformation
in the Image of Science.
Science is the
constellation of
facts , theories and
methods collected
in current texts
Scientists are the men
who, successfully or not,
have striven to contribute
one or another element to
that particular constellation.
Scientific development becomes the
piecemeal process by which these items have
been added, singly and in combination, to the
ever growing stockpile that constitutes
scientific techniques and knowledge
History of science becomes the
discipline that chronicles both these
successive increments and the
obstacles that have inhibited their
accumulation
If
• Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific just because they have been discarded.
• The Historical Research that displays the difficulties in isolating individual inventions and discoveries gives ground for profound
doubts about the cumulative process through which these individual contributions to science were thought to have been compounded.
The result of all these doubts and difficulties is a Historiographical Revolution in the Study of Science.
Historians of science:
Its more and more difficult to fulfill the functions that the concept of development by accumulation assigns to them. As
chroniclers of an incremental process, they discover that additional research makes it harder, not easier, to answer questions like:
When was oxygen discovered? Who fist conceived of energy conservation?
Simply the wrong sorts of questions to ask. Science doesn't develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and invention

Paradigm: Greek word for pattern
Normal Science :
The standard paradigm
Anomalies :
Things that cannot be
explained by normal science
Paradigm Shift:
A new paradigm is created to
account for anomalies
1- A Role for History
THE following Terms & Concept book articulated

THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONoutline
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Introduction
The route to normal science
The nature of normal science
Normal science as puzzle solving
The priority of paradigms
Anomaly and the emergence of scientific discoveries
Crisis and the emergence of scientific discoveries
The response to crisis
The nature and necessity of scientific revolutions
Revolutions as changes of world view
The invisibility of revolutions
The resolution of revolutions
Progress through revolutions
NormalscienceTransitionScientificrevolutions

THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
Part1
Normal Science
2-The Route to Normal Science
Means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular
scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundations for its further practice
Normal
Science
These Achievements must be
Unprecedented Open-Ended
Paradigm
BEFORE AFTER
Ptolemaic Astronomy TO Copernican
A r i s t o t e l i a n D y n a m i c s T O N e w t o n i a n
C o r p u s c u l a r O p t i c s T O Wa v e O p t i c s

Part1
Normal Science
2-The Route to Normal Science
Transformations of paradigm are scientific revolutions, and is the usual developmental pattern of mature science
It begins with a
“collection of facts
A “school” or a “movement”
encourages collection of
these facts
Continuous development
leads to the emergence of
one paradigm
The new paradigm must
seem better than its
competitors to be
accepted
The new paradigm “implies a new and more
rigid definition of the field”. It leads to “the
formation of specialized journals, and the
foundation of specialists societies
How are paradigms developed?
Paradigms have furthered the research process by:
Creating an inquisitive process
Developing alternative
methodologies
Determining the relevance of
disciplinary functions
Two meanings of Paradigm:
• Entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community.
• The concrete puzzle- solution which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the
resolution of the remaining puzzles of normal science

Part1
Normal Science
3-The nature of normal science
• Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the
group of practitioner has come to recognize as acute This follows a lot of mopping-up work, which is carrier out by
successive scientists of that normal- science, once the paradigm assumes shape
• Normal science has a drastically restricted vision, which is essential for the development of science. The paradigm forces
scientists to investigate some part of the nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable
Three normal foci for factual scientific investigation
directed by normal or paradigm-driven science :
Determination of scientific facts:
Attempt to increase accuracy and scope of class of
facts that the paradigm has shown to be particularly
revealing of the nature of things
Matching facts with theory:
Facts/ observations from nature that can be
compared directly with the prediction of the
paradigm
Articulation of theory:
Articulation of paradigm theory by exhausting the
fact gathering activity of the normal science
Experiments and
observations
Effort to bring theory and
nature into closer agreement
Determination of
quantitative laws

Part1
Normal Science
3-The nature of normal science
1. Articulation of theories the paradigm already supplies
2. Attempt to force nature into the inflexible boxes
3. No effort to discover anomalies (Ignored or unnoticed)
4. No effort to invent new theory (and no tolerance for those who try
The problems with normal science
These problems of normal science “exhaust the literature of normal
science, both empirical and theoretical”

1. It must be characterized “by more than an acceptable solution”
2.There must be predefined rules that “limit both the nature of acceptable solutions and the steps by which they are
to be obtained”
3.There must be a “strong network of commitments – conceptual, theoretical, instrumental, and methodological”.
Part1
Normal Science
4-Normal science as puzzle solving
• Normal science aim little to product major novelties, conceptual or
phenomenal.
• Outcome that doesn’t fall in the narrow range is usually just a research
failure, one which reflects not on nature but on the scientist
• Scientist become expert puzzle solvers and the challenge of the puzzle
is an important part of what usually drives him on.
How do you relate puzzle
classification to a
research question?
you can’t just make any composition with puzzle
pieces, there must exist some rules of how the
outcome would be.
Doing research is essentially like solving a puzzle.
Puzzles have rules. Puzzles generally have predetermined solutions.

Part1
Normal Science
5-The priority of paradigms
A paradigm may serve many scientific groups, BUT it is not the same paradigm for them all.
• Paradigms of a mature science community can be determined with relative ease, but not rules
• Lack of a standard interpretation or of an agreed reduction to rules will not prevent a paradigm from guiding
research
“Rules derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide research even in the absence of rules"
• Subspecialties are differently educated and focus on different applications for their research findings.
• A paradigm can determine several traditions of normal science that overlap without being coextensive.
• Consequently, changes in a paradigm affect different subspecialties differently—"A revolution produced within one
of these traditions will not necessarily extend to the others as well"
• Relative difficulty in discovering the rules
• Scientists always learn new theories along with application, not in abstraction
• For as long as the problem- solution is accepted by the community, no rule is asked for
• Substituting rules with paradigms make diversity of field understandable
Rules came later than paradigms because:

Part2
Transition
6-Anomaly and the emergence of scientific discoveries
If normal science is so rigid and if scientific communities are so close-knit, how can a paradigm change take place? This
chapter traces paradigm changes that result from discovery brought about by encounters with anomaly
How does paradigm change come about? (paradigm Shift)
Discovery — novelty of fact
Discovery begins with the awareness of anomaly
Perceiving an anomaly is essential for
perceiving novelty
The area of the anomaly is then explored
Invention—novelty of theory.
Not all theories are paradigm theories
Unanticipated outcomes derived from theoretical studies can lead
to the perception of an anomaly and the awareness of novelty.
Why normal science is very effective in causing anomalies (Though it is not directed to novelties) ?

Part2
Transition
7-Crisis and the emergence of scientific discoveries
Paradigm changes that result from the invention of new theories brought about by the failure of existing theory to solve the
problems defined by that theory. This failure is acknowledged as a crisis by the scientific community
As is the case with discovery, a change in an existing theory that results in the invention of a new theory is also brought about
by the awareness of anomaly.
A.The emergence of a new theory is generated by the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to be solved as they
should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones (68). These failures can be brought about by
1. observed discrepancies between theory and fact—this is the "core of the crisis" .
2. changes in social/cultural climates (knowledge/beliefs are socially constructed?)
Examples of
revolutions:
Copernican astronomy,
Newtonian physics and
Darwinian biology

Part2
Transition
8-The response to crisis
In this critical chapter, Kuhn discusses how scientists respond to the anomaly in fit between theory and nature so that a
transition to crisis and to extraordinary science begins, and he foreshadows how the process of paradigm change happen.
Paradigm is declared invalid ONLY if an alternate candidate is available
The transition to a new paradigm is Scientific Revolution
This is the transition from normal to Extraordinary Research
Crisis which begin with blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules of normal research.
They end with: Normal science ultimately proves to be able to
handle the crisis provoking problem
Problem persists and scientists declare the problem
unsolvable, and set for future time
Lead to emergence of a new candidate for a
paradigm and battle over its acceptance
All crises close in one of three ways:
Normal science able to handle the crisis-
provoking problem
The crisis ends with a new candidate
for paradigm
The problem resists. Problem set aside for future
generations
Almost always the men who
achieve fundamental inventions of
a new paradigm have been either
very young or very new to the field
whose paradigm they change

Part3
Scientific revolution
9-The nature and necessity of scientific revolutions
Why should a paradigm change be called a revolution? What are the functions of scientific revolutions in the development of science?
1848 lithography of a German uprising
A scientific revolution that results in paradigm change is analogous
to a political revolution
Normal research is cumulative, but scientific revolution is non-cumulative
Rejection of a paradigm requires the rejection of its assumptions and its rules (Incompatibility)z

Part3
10-Revolutions as changes of world view
What is this?
What else is this?
What had to happen to shift your perspective?
“I see a bird.” “I see a rabbit!”
During scientific revolutions, we see new things when looking with instruments in places we looked before
How do paradigms change the world? Do scientific
revolutions assist in the evolution of human thought?
1. The view of scientists does change during periods of scientary
revolution.
2. This change in perception is known as a “Gestalt Shift”
A gestalt shift requires personal recognizance, and may
require acceptance of an earlier perception
A gestalt switch: "I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite."
(This leaves open the possibility that the earlier perception was once
and may still be correct).
A paradigm shift: " I used to see a planet, but I was wrong."

Part3
11- The invisibility of revolutions
Because paradigm shifts are generally viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge, and because the
history of the field is represented in the new textbooks that accompany a new paradigm, a scientific revolution seems invisible
These
misconstructions
render revolutions
Invisible

Part3
12-The resolution of revolutions
Paradigm displaces another after a period of paradigm-testing that occurs
only after persistent failure to solve a noteworthy
puzzle has given rise to crisis.
competition between two rival paradigms for the allegiance of
the scientific community
Transitions between paradigms can’t be made a step a time, but rather it’s a switch. It may
occur at once or not at all
No theory ever solves all the puzzles at once
If every failure justifies theory rejection, all
theories must be rejected at all times
The process of paradigm-testing parallels two popular philosophical theories
about the verification of scientific theories
Theory-testing through probabilistic verification
All theories have agreed with the facts, but only more or less
Better sense to ask which of two competing theories fits the facts BETTER
Theory-testing through falsification (Karl Popper)

Part3
13-Progress through revolutions
The net result of a sequence of revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal
research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call Modern Scientific knowledge
The term scienceis reserved for fields that Do progress in obvious ways.
Does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?
Progress is an inherent function within the field of science
“Normal science progresses because the enterprise shares certain salient characteristics”
In other words progress can be seen from a multitude of perspectives:
1. Progress is subjective
2. This can be viewed from a social and a natural perspective. Which method is more conducive for effective problem
solving? What are the differences in these fields?
- Social scientists believe in the use of “original sources”, the proper evaluation of alternative solutions, and
the “selection of competing paradigms”
- Natural scientists believe in the effectiveness of textbooks, and they “are systematically substituted for the
creative scientific literature that made them possible”

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