The following obituary for Thomas S. Kuhn appeared first on PHILOSOP, and 
has been widely copied. I am forwarding from HOPOS-L, the list for the  
History of the Philosophy of Science. 
 
Ross 
 
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Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1996 16:55:07 -0400 (EDT) 
From: William Buschert <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Thomas Kuhn Dead (fwd) 
 
   The New York Times, June 19, 1996, p. B7. 
 
 
   Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm [Obituary] 
 
   By Lawrence Van Gelder 
 
 
   Thomas S. Kuhn, whose theory of sclentific revolution 
   became a profoundly influential landmark of 20th-century 
   intellectual history, died on Monday at his home in 
   Cambridge, Mass. He was 73. 
 
   Robert Dilorio, associate director of the news office at 
   the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the 
   scholar, who held the title of professor emeritus at 
   M.I.T., had been ill with cancer in recent years. 
 
   "The Structure of Scientific RevoIutions," was conceived 
   while Protessor Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical 
   physics and published as a monograph in the International 
   Encyclopedia of Unified Science before the University of 
   Chicago Press issued it as a 180-page book in 1962. The 
   work punctured the widely held notion that scientific 
   change was a strictly rational process. 
 
   Professor's Kuhn's treatise influenced not only scientists 
   but also economists, historians, sociologists and 
   philosophers, touching off considerable debate. It has sold 
   about one million copies in 16 languages and remains 
   required reading in many basic courses in the history and 
   philosophy of science. 
 
   Dr. Kuhn, a professor of philosophy and history of science 
   at M.I.T. from 1979 to 1983 and the Laurence S. Rockefeller 
   Professor of Philosophy there from 1983 until 1991, was the 
   author or co-author of five books and scores of articles on 
   the philosophy and history of science. But Dr. Kuhn 
   remained best known for "The Structure of Scientific 
   Revolutions." 
 
   His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative 
   acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a 
   series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually 
   violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote, 
   "one conceptual world view is replaced by another." 
 
   Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity could challenge 
   Newton's concepts of physics. Lavoisier's discovery of 
   oxygen could sweep away earlier ideas about phlogiston, the 
   imaginary element believed to cause combustion. Galileo's 
   supposed experiments with wood and lead balls dropped from 
   the Leaning Tower of Pisa could banish the Aristotelian 
   theory that bodies fell at a speed proportional to their 
   weight. And Darwin's theory of natural selection could 
   overthrow theories of a world governed by design. 
 
   Professor Kuhn argued in the book that the typical 
   scientist was not an objective, free thinker and skeptic. 
   Rather, he was a somewhat conservative individual who 
   accepted what he was taught and appiied his knowledge to 
   solving the problems that came before him. 
 
   In so doing, Professor Kuhn maintained, these scientists 
   accepted a paradigm, an archetypal solution to a problem, 
   like Ptolemy's theory that the Sun revolves around the 
   Earth. Generally conservative, scientists would tend to 
   solve problems in ways that extended the scope of the 
   paradigm. 
 
   In such periods, he maintained, scientists tend to resist 
   research that might signal the development of a new 
   paradigm, like the work of the astronomer Aristarchus, who 
   theorized in the third century B.C. that the planets 
   revolve around the Sun. But, Professor Kuhn said, 
   situations arose that the paradigm could not account for or 
   that contradicted it. 
 
   And then, he said, a revolutionary would appear, a 
   Lavoisier or an Einstein, often a young scientist not 
   indoctrinated in the accepted theories, and sweep the old 
   paradigm away. 
 
   These revolutions, he said, came only after long periods of 
   tradition-bound normal science. "Frameworks must be lived 
   with and explored before they can be broken," Professor 
   Kuhn said. 
 
   The new paradigm cannot build on the one that precedes it, 
   he maintained. It can only supplant it. The two, he said, 
   were "incommensurable." 
 
   Some critics said Professor Kuhn was arguing that scieace 
   was little more than mob rule. He replied, "Look, I think 
   that's nonsense, and I'm prepared to argue that." 
 
   The word paradigm appeared so frequently in Professor's 
   Kuhn's "Structures" and with so many possible meanings 
   prompting debate that he was credited with popularizing the 
   word and inspiring a 1974 cartoon in The New Yorker. In. 
   it, a woman tells a man: "Dynamite, Mr. Gerston! You're the 
   first person I ever heard use 'paradigm' in real life." 
 
   Professor Kuhn traced the origin of his thesis to a moment 
   in 1947 when he was working toward a doctorate in physics 
   at Harvard. James B. Conant, the chemist who was the 
   president of the university, had asked him to teach a class 
   in science for undergraduates majoring in the humanities. 
   The focus was to be historical case studies. 
 
   Until then, Professor Kuhn said later, "I'd never read an 
   old document in science." As he looked through Aristotle's 
   "Physics" and realized how astonishingly unlike Newton's 
   were its concepts of motion and matter, he concluded that 
   Aristotle's physics were not "bad Newton" but simply 
   different. 
 
   Professor Kuhn received a doctorate in physics, but not 
   long afterward he switched to the history of science 
   exploring the mechanisms that lead to scientific change. 
 
   "I sweated blood and blood and blood, and finally I had a 
   breakthrough," he said. 
 
   Thomas Samuel Kuhn, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an 
   industrial engineer, and the former Annette Stroock, was 
   born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati. 
 
   In 1943, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a 
   bachelor's degree in physics. 
 
   During World War II, he served as a civilian employee at 
   Harvard and in Europe with the Office of Scientific 
   Research and Development. 
 
   He received master's and doctoral degrees in physics from 
   Harvard in 1946 and 1949. From 1948 to 1956, he held 
   various posts at Harvard, rising to an assistant 
   professorship in general education and the history of 
   science. 
 
   He then joined the faculty of the University of California 
   at Berkeley, where he was named a professor of history of 
   science in 1961. In 1964, he joined the faculty at 
   Princeton, where he was the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of 
   Philosophy and History of Science until 1979, when he 
   joined the faculty of M.I.T. 
 
   Professor Kuhn was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954-55, the 
   winner of the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science 
   in 1982, and the holder of honorary degrees from many 
   institutions, among them the University of Notre Dame, 
   Columbia University, the University of Chicago the 
   University of Padua and the University of Athens. 
 
   He is survived by his wife, Jehane and three children, 
   Sarah Kuhn of Framingham, Mass., Elizabeth Kuhn of Los 
   Angeles and Nathaniel Kuhn of Arlington, Mass. 
 
   [Photo] Thomas S. Kuhn 
 
   [End]