Kuhn, Thomas Samuel

US historian and philosopher of science, who showed that social and cultural conditions affect the directions of science. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) argued that even scientific knowledge is relative, dependent on the paradigm (theoretical framework) that dominates a scientific field at the time.

Such paradigms (for example, Darwinism and Newtonian theory) are so dominant that they are uncritically accepted as true, until a ‘scientific revolution’ creates a new orthodoxy. Kuhn's ideas have also influenced ideas in the social sciences.