Kuhn’s paradigms and their early critics

Abstract In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , Thomas Kuhn fashioned and made fashionable the concept of a paradigm . He tied it closely to his concept of ‘normal science’ and contrasted normal science with processes he called ‘scientific revolutions’. Several important critics took issue with his concept of a paradigm or with theses he took to constitute that concept. In this paper the earliest criticisms of the concept are outlined.