"When it was first published in 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. Fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn challenge long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas do not arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation, but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of "normal science," as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn's essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn's ideas to the science of today." --

"A masterly assessment of the way the idea of quanta of radiation became part of 20th-century physics. . . . The book not only deals with a topic of importance and interest to all scientists, but is also a polished literary work, described (accurately) by one of its original reviewers as a scientific detective story."—John Gribbin, New Scientist "Every scientist should have this book."—Paul Davies, New Scientist

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962 and has become one of the most important works of the twentieth century. During the last twenty years of his life, Kuhn was radically rethinking the central concepts of Structure. When he died in 1996, he left an unfinished sequel to Structure and an assortment of essays written since 1977 that lay the conceptual groundwork for some of the unfinished portions of that sequel. Divided into three parts, The Road Since Structure is the fullest record we have at present of the new direction Kuhn was taking during the last two decades of his life. The first part of the book consists of essays in which Kuhn refines the basic concepts set forth in Structure-paradigm shifts, incommensurability, and the nature of scientific progress. In part II, Kuhn replies to many of the criticisms of his earlier work. And the third part of the volume is the transcript of a remarkable autobiographical interview with Kuhn conducted in Athens in 1995, not quite a year before his death. Here, the usually reticent Kuhn discusses his own intellectual development-his upbringing and thoughts about his education, the influence of his training as a physicist, his war work, his relations with his colleagues, the responses to Structure-and his struggles to define his philosophical position both before and after that landmark work. The Road Since Structure will intrigue everyone who has been engaged by Structure and the debates it launched. In it they will find the story not only of Kuhn's development but also of the man himself.

"This book contains the text of Thomas Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as "a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the problems that it raised but did not resolve." The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The Presence of Past Science." The book opens with an introduction by the editor that describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds, and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. Moreover, he intends to show that incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of a real world that science investigates, with the rationality of scientific belief change, and with the idea that scientific development is progressive. This is a must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century"--