Kuhn, Thomas

Kuhn, Thomas (Samuel)

(1922– ) philosopher, historian of science; born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Trained as a physicist, he became interested in the historical development of science and in 1962 published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a study of how scientific theories are formed, judged, and supplanted; its proposition that even the most "objective" scientific theories are influenced by external factors has had wide currency in many areas of contemporary thought. He taught at Harvard (1948–57), the University of California: Berkeley (1957–64), Princeton (1964–79), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (from 1979).