The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, is an analysis of the history of science, published in 1962. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and it triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities. In this work, Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in ‘normal science’ (the routine work of scientists experimenting within a paradigm).
Scientific progress had been seen primarily as ‘development-by-accumulation’ of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. During revolutions in science the discovery of anomalies leads to a whole new paradigm that changes the rules of the game and the ‘map’ directing new research, asks new questions of old data, and moves beyond the puzzle-solving of normal science.
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