Theories as structure

The Kuhn paradigms

Abstract

The article describes how a protagonist in the history of science Thomas Kuhn combined the skills of the historian and scientific knowledge to study how theories have been accepted in one historical moment of science, but in another they have been rejected and thus lost their validity. In his work Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn divides science into normal and abnormal. The former is that which follows the patterns of the scientific community, corresponds to patterns and follows a paradigm in its development without discussion or doubt. Abnormal science implies an anomaly in the way of doing science that cannot be explained by normal science and this derangement of the paradigm causes another paradigm to replace it. In the structure Kuhn generates a whole revolutionary field in the philosophy of science with the study of the paradigm, he explains that several paradigms can coexist at the same time until a revolution is generated and consequently a substitution of the paradigm. However, a new paradigm is not comparable with the old paradigm; in this sense, Kuhn proposes the incommensurability of paradigms.