Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Paradigm Shifts

Thomas Kuhn, a Harvard-trained physicist turned historian and philosopher of science, published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 as volume II, number 2 of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, the very series Otto Neurath had founded to advance the logical positivists' unity-of-science program — a fact often noted for its irony, since Kuhn's book would do more than any other single work to dismantle the positivist and Popperian pictures of cumulative, purely logical scientific progress. Kuhn's central concept, the paradigm, denotes an entire constellation of shared theoretical commitments, exemplary problem-solutions ("exemplars"), instrumentation, values, and metaphysical assumptions that a scientific community accepts as the model for how to practice its discipline — a notoriously polysemous term that the sociologist of science Margaret Masterman, in a 1965 conference paper later published in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970), identified as being used by Kuhn in over twenty distinct senses across the book's first edition.