The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is a work of philosophy of science by Thomas S. Kuhn that introduced the concepts of paradigms and paradigm shifts into the vocabulary of intellectual culture. It is one of the most-cited academic books of the twentieth century, and also one of the most misread.

Kuhn's central argument is that science does not progress by linear accumulation of knowledge. Instead, periods of normal science — puzzle-solving within an established paradigm — are interrupted by scientific revolutions in which the paradigm itself is challenged and replaced. The transition between paradigms is not fully rational in the sense that no neutral algorithm could dictate it; the new paradigm is chosen partly on aesthetic, pragmatic, and sociological grounds, and partly because it opens new problems even as it closes old ones.

The book's reception illustrates its own thesis. It was adopted by sociologists of knowledge to argue that scientific truth is socially constructed; Kuhn spent the rest of his career insisting this was not what he meant. The concept of 'paradigm shift' entered management, self-help, and political discourse, severed entirely from its technical meaning. A book about how ideas resist misappropriation was itself misappropriated. This is irony of a historical density that Kuhn, a historian of science, might have appreciated.