Historiography of Science - Thomas Kuhn and The 1960s

Thomas Kuhn and The 1960s

From the 1940s through the early 1960s, most histories of science were different forms of a "march of progress", showing science as a triumphant movement towards truth. Many philosophers and historians did of course paint a more nuanced picture, but it was not until the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that this approach became seriously suspected as being misleading. Kuhn's argument that scientific revolutions worked by paradigm shifts seemed to imply that truth was not the ultimate criterion for science, and the book was extremely influential outside of academia as well. Corresponding with the rise of the environmentalism movement and a general loss of optimism of the power of science and technology unfettered to solve the problems of the world, this new history encouraged many critics to pronounce the preeminence of science to be overthrown.