---
title: "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
chunk: 7/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:37:26.249284+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Political science ===
In 1974, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was ranked as the second most frequently used book in political science courses focused on scope and methods. In particular, Kuhn's theory has been used by political scientists to critique behavioralism, which claims that accurate political statements must be both testable and falsifiable. The book also proved popular with political scientists embroiled in debates about whether a set of formulations put forth by a political scientist constituted a theory, or something else.
The changes that occur in politics, society and business are often expressed in Kuhnian terms, however poor their parallel with the practice of science may seem to scientists and historians of science. The terms "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" have become such notorious clichés and buzzwords that they are sometimes viewed as effectively devoid of content.

== Criticisms ==

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was soon criticized by Kuhn's colleagues in the history and philosophy of science. In 1965, a special symposium on the book was held at an International Colloquium on the Philosophy of Science that took place at Bedford College, London, and was chaired by Karl Popper. The symposium led to the publication of the symposium's presentations plus other essays, most of them critical, which eventually appeared in an influential volume of essays. Kuhn expressed the opinion that his critics' readings of his book were so inconsistent with his own understanding of it that he was "tempted to posit the existence of two Thomas Kuhns," one the author of his book, the other the individual who had been criticized in the symposium by Professors Popper, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Toulmin and Watkins.
A number of the included essays question the existence of normal science. In his essay, Feyerabend suggests that Kuhn's conception of normal science fits organized crime as well as it does science. Popper expresses distaste with the entire premise of Kuhn's book, writing, "the idea of turning for enlightenment concerning the aims of science, and its possible progress, to sociology or to psychology (or ... to the history of science) is surprising and disappointing."

=== Concept of paradigm ===
Stephen Toulmin defined paradigm as "the set of common beliefs and agreements shared between scientists about how problems should be understood and addressed". In his 1972 work, Human Understanding, he argued that a more realistic picture of science than that presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions would admit the fact that revisions in science take place much more frequently, and are much less dramatic than can be explained by the model of revolution/normal science. In Toulmin's view, such revisions occur quite often during periods of what Kuhn would call "normal science". For Kuhn to explain such revisions in terms of the non-paradigmatic puzzle solutions of normal science, he would need to delineate what is perhaps an implausibly sharp distinction between paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic science.
One of the early critics of Kuhn,  Norwood Russell Hanson, criticized Kuhn's paradigm shift theory as conceptually circular and therefore unfalsifiable.

=== Incommensurability of paradigms ===
In a series of texts published in the early 1970s, Carl R. Kordig asserted a position somewhere between that of Kuhn and the older philosophy of science. His criticism of the Kuhnian position was that the incommensurability thesis was too radical, and that this made it impossible to explain the confrontation of scientific theories that actually occurs. According to Kordig, it is in fact possible to admit the existence of revolutions and paradigm shifts in science while still recognizing that theories belonging to different paradigms can be compared and confronted on the plane of observation. Those who accept the incommensurability thesis do not do so because they admit the discontinuity of paradigms, but because they attribute a radical change in meanings to such shifts.
Kordig maintains that there is a common observational plane. For example, when Kepler and Tycho Brahe are trying to explain the relative variation of the distance of the Sun from the horizon at sunrise, both see the same thing (the same configuration is focused on the retina of each individual). This is just one example of the fact that "rival scientific theories share some observations, and therefore some meanings". Kordig suggests that with this approach, he is not reintroducing the distinction between observations and theory in which the former is assigned a privileged and neutral status, but that it is possible to affirm more simply the fact that, even if no sharp distinction exists between theory and observations, this does not imply that there are no comprehensible differences at the two extremes of this polarity.
At a secondary level, for Kordig there is a common plane of inter-paradigmatic standards or shared norms that permit the effective confrontation of rival theories.
In 1973, Hartry Field published an article that also sharply criticized Kuhn's idea of incommensurability. In particular, he took issue with this passage from Kuhn:

"Newtonian mass is immutably conserved; that of Einstein is convertible into energy. Only at very low relative velocities can the two masses be measured in the same way, and even then they must not be conceived as if they were the same thing."
Field takes this idea of incommensurability between the same terms in different theories one step further. Instead of attempting to identify a persistence of the reference of terms in different theories, Field's analysis emphasizes the indeterminacy of reference within individual theories. Field takes the example of the term "mass", and asks what exactly "mass" means in modern post-relativistic physics. He finds that there are at least two different definitions: