Thomas Kuhn and The Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution refers to the historical changes in thought and belief to changes in social and institutional organizations that came upon in Europe between roughly 1550-1700; beginning with Nicholas Copernicus, who presented a heliocentric cosmos, and it ended with Issac Newton who proposed universal laws and a Mechanical Universe (Hatch, R., n.d). Kuhns thoughts later in the future, offer a great expertise opinion on what the Scientific Revolution is and the great attempts and success Kuhn has showed and taught us about the scientific advancements and also the progress when the Scientific Revolution took place (Hatch, R.

, n.d).

According to Thomas Kuhn, in his words about the Scientific Revolution, he said, “… attempts to refine and clarify the distinction between normal and revolutionary scientific development (Kuhn, T., 1981). After an introductory presentation of the issue most of the chapter is devoted to the presentation of… the transition from an Aristotelian to a Newtonian understanding of motion… A concluding section epitomizes three features common to the examples (Kuhn, T.

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, 1981). All are locally holistic in that they require a number of interrelated changes of theory to be made once; only at the price of incoherence could these changes have occurred one step at a time (Kuhn, T., 1981). All require changes in the way some set of inter-defined scientific terms attached to nature, in the taxonomy provided by scientific language itself (Kuhn, T., 1981). And also involved changes in something very like metaphor, in the scientist’s acquired sense of what objects or events are like each other and of which differ” (Kuhn, T.

, 1981). Thomas Kuhn was a remarkable man when it came to presenting his own theories and nature of putting in place his knowledge, thoughts, and questions and building his own thoughts and making his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

According to Thomas Kuhn, the scientific progress of any discipline could be recognized by a pre-paradigm phase, a normal science phase and a revolution phase (Pires, F., 2013). The science advances when a scientific revolutions takes place after a silent period of normal science and the scientific community moves ahead to a paradigm shift (Pires, F., 2013). According to the current paradigm, exercise would be probably limited by alterations in either central command or peripheral skeletal muscles, and fatigue would be developed in a task-dependent manner (Pires, F., 2013). But, scientists will not abandon the existing belief while there is no credible alternative (Pires, F., 2013). However, bolder scientists explore alternatives to traditional assumptions while the majority of the community opposes conceptual changes (Pires, F., 2013).

In particular, the discussion has indicated that Scientific Revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one (Kuhn, T., 1962). There is more to be said, however, and an essential part of it can be introduced by asking one further question (Kuhn, T., 1962). The Scientific Revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that the paradigm itself had previously led the way (Kuhn, T., 1962).

In earlier responses to Thomas Kuhn’s ideas in Japan stimulated the discussions in social studies of science in the 1970s and the 1980s and their following significance (Ito, K., 2012). Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” happened to be introduced into Japanese-language scholarship in the early 1970s (Ito, K., 2012). Two things set the stage for Japan’s reception of Kuhn’s ideas (Ito, K., 2012). One was political and cultural upheaval after the revolutionary year of 1968 (Ito, K., 2012). For a decade or so thereafter, there were intellectual and cultural trends strongly opposed to science (Ito, K., 2012). Sibatani, a Biologist in Australia interpreted Kuhn’s ideas in different ways Ito, K., 2012). His writings often lacked scholarly rigor but revealed extreme foresight, raising various social issues earlier than most others (Ito, K., 2012). He regarded paradigms as these conventions within an expert community (Ito, K., 2012). Sibatani interpreted Kuhn’s notion of paradigm and normal science as addressing concern about self-serving and self-proliferating aspects of scientific communities, which made science detrimental to the well-being of society (Ito, K., 2012). He claimed that to overcome these defects, there should be a paradigm shift in science itself, a Scientific Revolution that would completely change scientific practice and the place and role of science in society (Ito, K., 2012). In fact, the new age science movement that followed incorporated Sibatani’s ideas, and some proponents formulated their agenda as a search for a new paradigm for science (Ito, K. 2012).