Thomas Kuhn Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) has been an enormously influential text for all subsequent students of the nature and logic of scientific and social scientific inquiry.

According to standard views, science is a rational, cumulative process in which discovery builds upon discovery, theory builds upon theory, and the growth of scientific knowledge is linear and relatively constant. Kuhn’s historical investigations suggested a very different view. According to Kuhn, there are two kinds of science. Normal science—which includes most science—is always undertaken internal to a particular paradigm, a worldview that comprises or is constituted by a distinctive set of methodological, conceptual, theoretical, and even metaphysical presuppositions. The task of normal science is to pursue the implications of the paradigm and, in particular, to explain findings or phenomena that seem puzzling or anomalous. Revolutionary science, on the other hand, occurs when anomalous results turn out to be so numerous or important as to undermine the authority of the paradigm. In such a circumstance, the revolutionary scientist proposes an entirely new paradigm—a radically different way of thinking about things; a new worldview emerges that can explain formerly anomalous findings and that gives rise, in turn, to a new practice of normal science. The Copernican theory of planetary motion is a standard case of Kuhnian paradigm change.

In political science, critics of mainstream behaviorism used—and sometimes misused—Kuhn to question the claims and ambitions of those who sought a truly objective science of political behavior involving the formulation of testable empirical hypotheses, the gathering of large sets of data in strictly quantified form, and the rigorous application of statistical tests. These critics argued that behavioralism was, at best, merely one paradigm among many. Hence, behaviorist claims to objectivity were, allegedly for Kuhnian reasons, untenable and political science ought to be, instead, a multiparadigmatic discipline that embraces a wide range of methodological, epistemological, and political perspectives.

Bibliography:

Achinstein, Peter. Concepts of Science: A Philosophical Analysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968.
Kuhn,Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957.
The Essential Tension: Selected Essays in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Nickles, Thomas, ed. Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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