03 Jul 2012 11:35:10
Kuhn's study of scientific revolutions was not an instant bestseller. It sold just 919 copies in 1962-63 and slightly less the following year. But more than 1.4m copies have been bought since then, and the influence of this seminal text spread far beyond the history and philosophy of science. As Ian Hacking rightly says in his excellent introduction to this 50th anniversary edition: "Great books are rare. This is one." Kuhn argued that science was not just about the simple delineation of material facticity but also included "an apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident". "Normal science" was a function of the "paradigm", a model of how nature worked. The discovery of anomalies led scientists to question the paradigm, and this in turn led to a scientific revolution that he famously termed a "paradigm shift". Kuhn's book prepared the ground for a revolution in the study of science, one with which he himself was not always comfortable. But, as Hacking says, "one of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today".
