Fifty years of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, twenty-five of Science in Action

摘要

The year 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Even at 50, Structure remains one of the touchstones of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Kuhn challenged dominant popular and philosophical pictures of the history of science, rejecting formalist accounts in favor of attention to the cultures and activities of scientific research, and rejecting Whiggish narratives in favor of revolutions that produced his famous or infa­mous incommensurable paradigms. Structure was, as Michael Lynch describes below, self-exemplifying, initiating a break with previous ways of studying science.