ABSTRACT
Thomas Kuhn has passed into the Western intellectual canon and his main ideas are related in rote fashion as much as those of any classical philosopher. Kuhn trained as a physicist and received his doctorate in that most scientific of scientific fields, physics. Kuhn cited a newly developing concept of science history which discarded the Whig history and attempted to give proper understanding to each episode of scientific discovery on its own terms, citing the work of Alexander Koyre in particular. Kuhn is sometimes seen as a philosopher of science in the tradition of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle who somehow went astray or whose account of paradigm change has certain plausibility when applied to large changes of scientific worldview, such as the Copernican revolution, but which is implausible when applied to the way science is usually done.
