---
title: "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
chunk: 1/9
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"
---

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a 1962 book about the history of science by the philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science.  Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in science in which scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of conceptual continuity and cumulative progress, referred to as periods of "normal science", were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. The discovery of "anomalies" accumulating and precipitating revolutions in science leads to new paradigms.  New paradigms then ask new questions of old data, move beyond the mere "puzzle-solving" of the previous paradigm, alter the rules of the game and change the "map" directing new research.
For example, Kuhn's analysis of the Copernican Revolution emphasized that, in its beginning, it did not offer more accurate predictions of celestial events, such as planetary positions, than the Ptolemaic system, but instead appealed to some practitioners based on a promise of better, simpler solutions that might be developed at some point in the future. Kuhn called the core concepts of an ascendant revolution its "paradigms" and thereby launched this word into widespread analogical use in the second half of the 20th century. Kuhn's insistence that a paradigm shift was a mélange of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not a logically determinate procedure, caused an uproar in reaction to his work. Kuhn addressed concerns in the 1969 postscript to the second edition. For some commentators The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced a realistic humanism into the core of science, while for others the nobility of science was tarnished by Kuhn's introduction of an irrational element into the heart of its greatest achievements.

== History ==
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was first published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, then as a book by University of Chicago Press in 1962. In 1969, Kuhn added a postscript to the book in which he replied to critical responses to the first edition. A 50th Anniversary Edition (with an introductory essay by Ian Hacking) was published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2012.
Kuhn dated the genesis of his book to 1947, when he was a graduate student at Harvard University and had been asked to teach a science class for humanities undergraduates with a focus on historical case studies. Kuhn later commented that until then, "I'd never read an old document in science." Aristotle's Physics was astonishingly unlike Isaac Newton's work in its concepts of matter and motion. Kuhn wrote: "as I was reading him, Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation." This was in an apparent contradiction with the fact that Aristotle was a brilliant mind. While perusing Aristotle's Physics, Kuhn formed the view that in order to properly appreciate Aristotle's reasoning, one must be aware of the scientific conventions of the time. Kuhn concluded that Aristotle's concepts were not "bad Newton," just different. This insight was the foundation of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Central ideas regarding the process of scientific investigation and discovery had been anticipated by Ludwik Fleck in Fleck (1935). Fleck had developed the first system of the sociology of scientific knowledge. He claimed that the exchange of ideas led to the establishment of a thought collective, which, when developed sufficiently, separated the field into esoteric (professional) and exoteric (laymen) circles. Kuhn wrote the foreword to the 1979 edition of Fleck's book, noting that he read it in 1950 and was reassured that someone "saw in the history of science what I myself was finding there."
Kuhn was not confident about how his book would be received. Harvard University had denied his tenure a few years prior. By the mid-1980s, however, his book had achieved blockbuster status. When Kuhn's book came out in the early 1960s, "structure" was an intellectually popular word in many fields in the humanities and social sciences, including linguistics and anthropology, appealing in its idea that complex phenomena could reveal or be studied through basic, simpler structures. Kuhn's book contributed to that idea.
One theory to which Kuhn replies directly is Karl Popper's "falsificationism," which stresses falsifiability as the most important criterion for distinguishing between that which is scientific and that which is unscientific. Kuhn also addresses verificationism, a philosophical movement that emerged in the 1920s among logical positivists. The verifiability principle claims that meaningful statements must be supported by empirical evidence or logical requirements.

== Synopsis ==

=== Basic approach ===
Kuhn's approach to the history and philosophy of science addresses conceptual issues like the practice of normal science, influence of historical events, emergence of scientific discoveries, nature of scientific revolutions and progress through scientific revolutions. What sorts of intellectual options and strategies were available to people during a given period? What types of lexicons and terminology were known and employed during certain epochs? Stressing the importance of not attributing traditional thought to earlier investigators, Kuhn's book argues that the evolution of scientific theory does not emerge from the straightforward accumulation of facts, but rather from a set of changing intellectual circumstances and possibilities.
Kuhn did not see scientific theory as proceeding linearly from an objective, unbiased accumulation of all available data, but rather as paradigm-driven: