Thomas Kuhn
1922-1996 · Philosophy of Science · Prominent
Kuhn was an American philosopher of science who gave the word paradigm its modern sense, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Science spends most of its life solving puzzles inside an inherited framework, he argued, until anomalies the framework cannot resolve pile up and a rival one takes over in a revolution. The two sides then judge success by standards that do not translate, a mismatch he called incommensurability.
Signature
The position Kuhn is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Society
- mildly leans Collectivism
- Language
- Social Construction / Language-Game
Positions on the 4 axes the sources answer
- Society
- mildly leans Collectivism (31 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Mind
- mildly leans Brain Only (38 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Order
- leans Horizontal (75 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Ground of Being
- leans Immanence (28 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
16 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Kuhn refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Highest Good
- Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Perception
- Conceptual Mediation
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Embodied Cognition / Coherence
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Social Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Language
- Social Construction / Language-Game
What is the fundamental nature of language?