Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1996)

Abstract

Memorial THOMAS S. KUHN (1922-1996) JUNE Z. FULLMER Shortly after Tom Kuhn died, Delo, the Slovenian newspaper pub­ lished in Ljubljana, carried a two-column obituary notice about him.1 That notice proved a sharp reminder; Tom Kuhn, privately mourned, was also lost to a wide public. He had caught the attention and influenced the thought of people all over the globe—does a week now go by that “paradigm” doesn’t surface in a newspaper or magazine?—chiefly through his Structure ofScientific Revolutions? About three-quarters ofa million copies of that book have been sold; it has been translated into more than forty languages.3 The danger exists, however, that if catchphrases like “paradigm shift” and “nor­ mal science” become Tom’s sole legacy, our heritage will be dimin­ ished, and our memory of him impoverished. Tom was quite modest about his achievements; he knew that “par­ adigm shift” had passed into everyday speech and usually winced when reminded of the fact. I remember how awestruck he sounded when he said Sir Ernest Gombrich, the eminent British art historian, had come to hear his London lecture. Yet he was also pleased (and a little amused) when told that the late Rabbi Pearlmutter ofToledo had used The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as the springboard for his remarks during the high holy days. Tom wrote a major book of immense influence, but he stood for far more than a few phrases, Mrs. Fullmer is emeritus professor of history at Ohio State University. 11 am grateful to Merritt Roe Smith and to Deborah Meinbresse at the Massachu­ setts Institute of Technology for guiding me to useful sources. Carole Rogel, at the Ohio State University, very kindly called my attention to “Iznajditelj znanstvene revolucije ,” Delo, 28 June 1996. 2Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Second and third editions have been published, in 1970 and 1996. 31 am grateful to Susan Abrams and Rodney Powell of the University of Chicago Press for this information. Permission to quote from or reprint this memorial may be obtained only from the author. 372 Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) 373 however useful, might indicate. Tom Kuhn stood for civility, for hon­ esty, for intellectual striving of the highest level, and for scholarly decency. Structure, for all its influence, also reflected something of Tom’s teaching style. When you asked him a question, his reply usually be­ gan, “Look”—and look you did.4 He would lead you in such a way thatyou followed the paths ofhis thought, arriving at an appropriate place; often he made it seem as if you yourself had found the way. “Look,” he would say, and more, until the text on which you were focusing yielded a richer message. What Structure did was force us to look anew at the historical world of science and technology. That Tom would focus his attention on “scientific revolutions” is not sur­ prising; during his education he had had to cope with one of the more dramatic changes in the physical sciences, amounting to noth­ ing less than a revolution. In 1943 Harvard had awarded him an undergraduate S.B., summa cum laude, and in 1949, his Ph.D. Al­ though both degrees were in physics, his undergraduate degree also included a concentration in philosophy; his doctoral thesis dealt with the theoretical problem of cohesive energies of monovalent metals. During Tom’s undergraduate years physics was taught chiefly in classical, Newtonian terms; atoms often were described as nuclei made up of protons and neutrons circled by electrons traveling in the orderly “racetracks” of Bohr atoms. After World War II the atoms of graduate school physics became electron smears, called forth by and yielding only to quantum mechanics. Yet, abrupt as this transformation may have appeared, it did not move Tom to consider scientific revolutions the way he did after he confronted the physics of Aristotle. Despite his frequent disclaimer that he was not his own historian, he often recounted what happened when he began to read Aris­ totle.5 While ajunior fellow of the Harvard Society ofFellows (194851 ) he was an assistant in a science course based on “case...