3/19/2023 0 Comments Kuhn paradigm shift![]() I hope that this profile-which is longer and more critical of Kuhn than " Reluctant Revolutionary," my May 1991 profile for Scientific American-provides insights into the complicated views of this complicated man. To commemorate the 50 th anniversary of Structure, I'm posting an edited version of my write-up of Kuhn in The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996), which draws heavily on my meeting with him. Whatever you may think of Kuhn, his view of science has become "a permanent part of the repertoire of historians and philosophers and people in science studies in general," as philosopher Ian Hacking, editor of a new edition of Structure, recently told Scientific American's Gary Stix. He was one of the most ambiguous, ambivalent thinkers I have ever encountered, which helps explain why he is still interpreted in so many divergent and even contradictory ways. I finally wore Kuhn down, and in February 1991 I interviewed him for more than three hours in his cluttered office. When I persisted, Kuhn asked to see other profiles I had done, and I mailed him pieces on his MIT colleagues Claude Shannon and Noam Chomsky. He distrusted journalists, and he was still peeved by an old Scientific American review of his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. ![]() ![]() I said I wanted to profile him for Scientific American and "tell readers how you developed your views of the process of science." When he didn't respond, I called. In 1991, when I was a staff writer for Scientific American, I wrote a letter to Thomas Kuhn, then at MIT.
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