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>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: 19 Jun 1996 03:48:37
>From: jya@pipeline.com
>To: Recipients of conference 
>Subject: Thomas Kuhn Dies
>From: jya@pipeline.com (John Young)
>
>   The New York Times, June 19, 1996, p. B7.
>
>
>   Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm [Obituary]
>
>   By Lawrence Van Gelder
>
>
>   Thomas S. Kuhn, whose theory of sclentific revolution
>   became a profoundly influential landmark of 20th-century
>   intellectual history, died on Monday at his home in
>   Cambridge, Mass. He was 73.
>
>   Robert Dilorio, associate director of the news office at
>   the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the
>   scholar, who held the title of professor emeritus at
>   M.I.T., had been ill with cancer in recent years.
>
>   "The Structure of Scientific RevoIutions," was conceived
>   while Protessor Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical
>   physics and published as a monograph in the International
>   Encyclopedia of Unified Science before the University of
>   Chicago Press issued it as a 180-page book in 1962. The
>   work punctured the widely held notion that scientific
>   change was a strictly rational process.
>
>   Professor's Kuhn's treatise influenced not only scientists
>   but also economists, historians, sociologists and
>   philosophers, touching off considerable debate. It has sold
>   about one million copies in 16 languages and remains
>   required reading in many basic courses in the history and
>   philosophy of science.
>
>   Dr. Kuhn, a professor of philosophy and history of science
>   at M.I.T. from 1979 to 1983 and the Laurence S. Rockefeller
>   Professor of Philosophy there from 1983 until 1991, was the
>   author or co-author of five books and scores of articles on
>   the philosophy and history of science. But Dr. Kuhn
>   remained best known for "The Structure of Scientific
>   Revolutions."
>
>   His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative
>   acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a
>   series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually
>   violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote,
>   "one conceptual world view is replaced by another."
>
>   Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity could challenge
>   Newton's concepts of physics. Lavoisier's discovery of
>   oxygen could sweep away earlier ideas about phlogiston, the
>   imaginary element believed to cause combustion. Galileo's
>   supposed experiments with wood and lead balls dropped from
>   the Leaning Tower of Pisa could banish the Aristotelian
>   theory that bodies fell at a speed proportional to their
>   weight. And Darwin's theory of natural selection could
>   overthrow theories of a world governed by design.
>
>   Professor Kuhn argued in the book that the typical
>   scientist was not an objective, free thinker and skeptic.
>   Rather, he was a somewhat conservative individual who
>   accepted what he was taught and appiied his knowledge to
>   solving the problems that came before him.
>
>   In so doing, Professor Kuhn maintained, these scientists
>   accepted a paradigm, an archetypal solution to a problem,
>   like Ptolemy's theory that the Sun revolves around the
>   Earth. Generally conservative, scientists would tend to
>   solve problems in ways that extended the scope of the
>   paradigm.
>
>   In such periods, he maintained, scientists tend to resist
>   research that might signal the development of a new
>   paradigm, like the work of the astronomer Aristarchus, who
>   theorized in the third century B.C. that the planets
>   revolve around the Sun. But, Professor Kuhn said,
>   situations arose that the paradigm could not account for or
>   that contradicted it.
>
>   And then, he said, a revolutionary would appear, a
>   Lavoisier or an Einstein, often a young scientist not
>   indoctrinated in the accepted theories, and sweep the old
>   paradigm away.
>
>   These revolutions, he said, came only after long periods of
>   tradition-bound normal science. "Frameworks must be lived
>   with and explored before they can be broken," Professor
>   Kuhn said.
>
>   The new paradigm cannot build on the one that precedes it,
>   he maintained. It can only supplant it. The two, he said,
>   were "incommensurable."
>   Some critics said Professor Kuhn was arguing that scieace
>   was little more than mob rule. He replied, "Look, I think
>   that's nonsense, and I'm prepared to argue that."
>
>   The word paradigm appeared so frequently in Professor's
>   Kuhn's "Structures" and with so many possible meanings
>   prompting debate that he was credited with popularizing the
>   word and inspiring a 1974 cartoon in The New Yorker. In.
>   it, a woman tells a man: "Dynamite, Mr. Gerston! You're the
>   first person I ever heard use 'paradigm' in real life."
>
>   Professor Kuhn traced the origin of his thesis to a moment
>   in 1947 when he was working toward a doctorate in physics
>   at Harvard. James B. Conant, the chemist who was the
>   president of the university, had asked him to teach a class
>   in science for undergraduates majoring in the humanities.
>   The focus was to be historical case studies.
>
>   Until then, Professor Kuhn said later, "I'd never read an
>   old document in science." As he looked through Aristotle's
>   "Physics" and realized how astonishingly unlike Newton's
>   were its concepts of motion and matter, he concluded that
>   Aristotle's physics were not "bad Newton" but simply
>   different.
>
>   Professor Kuhn received a doctorate in physics, but not
>   long afterward he switched to the history of science
>   exploring the mechanisms that lead to scientific change.
>
>   "I sweated blood and blood and blood, and finally I had a
>   breakthrough," he said.
>
>   Thomas Samuel Kuhn, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an
>   industrial engineer, and the former Annette Stroock, was
>   born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati.
>
>   In 1943, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a
>   bachelor's degree in physics.
>
>   During World War II, he served as a civilian employee at
>   Harvard and in Europe with the Office of Scientific
>   Research and Development.
>
>   He received master's and doctoral degrees in physics from
>   Harvard in 1946 and 1949. From 1948 to 1956, he held
>   various posts at Harvard, rising to an assistant
>   professorship in general education and the history of
>   science.
>
>   He then joined the faculty of the University of California
>   at Berkeley, where he was named a professor of history of
>   science in 1961. In 1964, he joined the faculty at
>   Princeton, where he was the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of
>   Philosophy and History of Science until 1979, when he
>   joined the faculty of M.I.T.
>
>   Professor Kuhn was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954-55, the
>   winner of the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science
>   in 1982, and the holder of honorary degrees from many
>   institutions, among them the University of Notre Dame,
>   Columbia University, the University of Chicago the
>   University of Padua and the University of Athens.
>
>   He is survived by his wife, Jehane and three children,
>   Sarah Kuhn of Framingham, Mass., Elizabeth Kuhn of Los
>   Angeles and Nathaniel Kuhn of Arlington, Mass.
>
>   [Photo] Thomas S. Kuhn
>
>   [End]



          21-JUN-1996 16:06:49.62
From:   IN%"omt@listproc.stfx.ca"
To:     IN%"omt@listproc.stfx.ca"  "Multiple recipients of list"
CC:
Subj:   OMT digest 104

Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 16:51:15 -0500
From: Dwight Lemke 
Subject: Kuhn

After vowing to never have another paradigm discussion with Lex Donaldson,
I still feel I must report the passing of Thomas Kuhn. From today's
_Milwaukee Journal Sentinel_:

Cambridge, Mass-- Thomas S. Kuhn, a central figure in contemporary thought
about how scientific progress evolves, has died of cancer at 73.

Kuhn, who died Monday, was the author of the 1962 book "The Stucture of
Scientific Revolutions," which remains a key work for those studying the
impact of history on science and technology.

While working on his doctorate, Kuhn realized that Aristotle's views of
motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's.

--
|>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>| Dwight Lemke 
            http://juliet.stfx.ca/~/dlemke/dwight.html



From           daf@netcom.com (Dana A. Freiburger)
Organization   NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
Date           Fri, 21 Jun 1996 02:34:06 GMT
Newsgroups     soc.history.science
Message-ID     



From today's San Jose Mercury News (6/21/96): the Obituaries
section contained a short article on the death of Thomas Kuhn
at age 73.

--
[              Dana A. Freiburger      daf@netcom.com               ]
[     The opinions expressed above are mine, solely, and do not     ]
[    necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of anyone else.   ]