BY THOMAS KUHN
(A Reaction Paper)
Submitted by:
RIO KRISTINE MAY B. SILVESTRE
Submitted to:
DR. CARMELA N. HADIA
When I learned that one of our reaction papers will be about Thomas Kuhn’s ‘Structure of Scientific Revolutions,’ I immediately searched through the internet what this article or book is about. Opening one of google’s link, I saw it was a book and (the story) looked very long. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, no! This is going to be a very long and boring read.’ And I knew I will not be able to finish reading it and give a reaction in a week so I looked for a summary of the book, instead. And there were a lot done by different people/organizations.
From the various summaries I read, I found the book interesting because it was not a conventional science book. Yes, it talked a lot about science but the paradigm shift that Kuhn wrote about got my interest. The ‘scientific revolutions’ were true and believable and somehow, I agree with them.
Science, or normal science as Thomas Kuhn put it, is the process of gathering facts to build hypotheses that explain different phenomena in the world. It is a ‘research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.’ And this is the science that almost everybody knows. This is the science I know. I couldn’t care less what those new achievements are. I just watch the Discovery Channel and surf the internet and they would tell me what is new and how things happen in just one click.
In this book, I could almost feel how scientists burn their time for research, proving theories and the like. How happy they must be once their research is successful and becomes basis for explaining how things work. Some even have become legends in their discoveries. I could never imagine myself doing the things they do. It’s