The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Kuhnian image of science has reshaped the understanding of the scientific enterprise and human inquiry in general. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is no doubt one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Kuhn challenges long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Kuhn describes how paradigms are created and what they contribute to scientific (disciplined) inquiry. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. – Chapter I - Introduction: A Role for History; – Chapter II - The Route to Normal Science; – Chapter III - The Nature of Normal Science; – Chapter IV - Normal Science as Puzzle-solving; – Chapter V - The Priority of Paradigms; – Chapter VI - Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries; – Chapter VII - Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories; – Chapter VIII - The Response to Crisis; – Chapter IX - The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions; – Chapter X - Revolutions as Changes of World View; – Chapter XI - The Invisibility of Revolutions; – Chapter XII - The Resolution of Revolutions; – Chapter XIII - Progress Through Revolutions. – [2nd edition : Ibid., 1970, with postscript]. M.–M. V.