Abstract
The paper sets off with the study of the personality of Kuhn and how a physicist by profession became a philosopher, and a historian of philosophy of science. It further discussed some important concepts without which Kuhn’s paradigmatic philosophy of science may be misunderstood. Amongst the Kuhnian concepts discussed are: pre-science, normal science, extraordinary science, paradigm shift, scientific revolution, disciplinary matrix, scientific community, incommensurability, and so on. The paper extended to the critical examination of Kuhn’s magnum opus: The Structure of Scientific Revolution (SSR), where, with his theory of scientific revolution, he debunked the prevailing positivist assertion that scientific change is necessarily progressive, and therefore, cumulative, objective and linear. By this, new truths are progressively added to the already existing one, in a continuous, unbroken manner. Contrarily, Kuhn replaced this positivist position with his idea of scientific revolution which presents a discontinuous version of scientific development such that the new scientific theory that emerges in the course of scientific revolution is totally different from the old one, leading to a paradigm shift. Despite the heavy scholarly attack on Kuhn’s history of philosophy of science, the paper concluded that his unique idea of scientific revolution gives a good insight towards the perception or understanding of the nature of scientific development, and as such, his account of scientific revolution, which he articulated in his SSR, deserves commendations not only for presenting a new way of conceiving scientific development and/or progress, but above all, for bringing the final demise of logical positivism. The paper finally agreed with the camp that suggests the integration of both cumulative, linear and non-cumulative, non-linear elements in scientific development.
Keywords: Paradigm Shift, Scientific Revolution, PreScience, Normal Science, Incommensurability, Scientific Community, Disciplinary Matrix and Exemplar.
Author names:
Benedict Chukwuemeka Okpata, PhD
Philosophy Unit
Department of General Studies
University of Agriculture and
Environmental Sciences
Umuagwo, Imo State, Nigeria
benedict.okpata@uaes.edu.ng,
+2348063862344
ORCID ID: 0009-0003-0402-2741
Henry Obinze EBO, PhD
Philosophy Unit
Department of General Studies
University of Agriculture and
Environmental Sciences
Umuagwo, Imo State, Nigeria
henry.ebo@uaes.edu.ng,
henryobinze@yahoo.com,
+2348132319733
ORCID ID: 0009-0003-2573-7412
DOI link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23080313
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.