[2] For example, Kuhn's analysis of the Copernican Revolution emphasized that, in its beginning, it did not offer more accurate predictions of celestial events, such as planetary positions, than the Ptolemaic system, but instead appealed to some practitioners based on a promise of better, simpler solutions that might be developed at some point in the future.

Kuhn called the core concepts of an ascendant revolution its "paradigms" and thereby launched this word into widespread analogical use in the second half of the 20th century.

Kuhn's insistence that a paradigm shift was a mélange of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not a logically determinate procedure, caused an uproar in reaction to his work.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was first published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, then as a book by University of Chicago Press in 1962.

Kuhn dated the genesis of his book to 1947, when he was a graduate student at Harvard University and had been asked to teach a science class for humanities undergraduates with a focus on historical case studies.

He claimed that the exchange of ideas led to the establishment of a thought collective, which, when developed sufficiently, separated the field into esoteric (professional) and exoteric (laymen) circles.

[9] One theory to which Kuhn replies directly is Karl Popper's "falsificationism," which stresses falsifiability as the most important criterion for distinguishing between that which is scientific and that which is unscientific.

Stressing the importance of not attributing traditional thought to earlier investigators, Kuhn's book argues that the evolution of scientific theory does not emerge from the straightforward accumulation of facts, but rather from a set of changing intellectual circumstances and possibilities.

[11] Kuhn did not see scientific theory as proceeding linearly from an objective, unbiased accumulation of all available data, but rather as paradigm-driven: The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not "the given" of experience but rather "the collected with difficulty".

Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm.

In Ptolemy's school of thought, cycles and epicycles (with some additional concepts) were used for modeling the movements of the planets in a cosmos that had a stationary Earth at its center.

Galileo put forward a bold alternative conjecture: suppose, he said, that we always observe objects coming to a halt simply because some friction is always occurring.

The Ptolemaic approach of using cycles and epicycles was becoming strained: there seemed to be no end to the mushrooming growth in complexity required to account for the observable phenomena.

These scientists, judging that a crisis exists, embark on what Kuhn calls revolutionary science, exploring alternatives to long-held, obvious-seeming assumptions.

Kuhn cites, as an example, that Alexis Clairaut, in 1750, was able to account accurately for the precession of the Moon's orbit using Newtonian theory, after sixty years of failed attempts.

Kuhn states that the probabilistic tools used by verificationists are inherently inadequate for the task of deciding between conflicting theories, since they belong to the very paradigms they seek to compare.

He noted that he was substituting the term "exemplars" for "paradigm", meaning the problems and solutions that students of a subject learn from the beginning of their education.

Shapere noted the book's influence on the philosophical landscape of the time, calling it "a sustained attack on the prevailing image of scientific change as a linear process of ever-increasing knowledge".

These sociologists expanded upon Kuhn's ideas, arguing that scientific judgment is determined by social factors, such as professional interests and political ideologies.

For instance, neoclassical economists have claimed "to be at the second stage [normal science], and to have been there for a very long time – since Adam Smith, according to some accounts (Hollander, 1987), or Jevons according to others (Hutchison, 1978)".

For instance, the abstract of Olivier Blanchard's paper "The State of Macro" (2008) begins: For a long while after the explosion of macroeconomics in the 1970s, the field looked like a battlefield.

In 1965, a special symposium on the book was held at an International Colloquium on the Philosophy of Science that took place at Bedford College, London, and was chaired by Karl Popper.

"[51] Stephen Toulmin defined paradigm as "the set of common beliefs and agreements shared between scientists about how problems should be understood and addressed".

His criticism of the Kuhnian position was that the incommensurability thesis was too radical, and that this made it impossible to explain the confrontation of scientific theories that actually occurs.

For example, when Kepler and Tycho Brahe are trying to explain the relative variation of the distance of the sun from the horizon at sunrise, both see the same thing (the same configuration is focused on the retina of each individual).

At a secondary level, for Kordig there is a common plane of inter-paradigmatic standards or shared norms that permit the effective confrontation of rival theories.

He finds that there are at least two different definitions: Projecting this distinction backwards in time onto Newtonian dynamics, we can formulate the following two hypotheses: According to Field, it is impossible to decide which of these two affirmations is true.

[57] Jerry Fodor attempts to establish that this theoretical paradigm is fallacious and misleading by demonstrating the impenetrability of perception to the background knowledge of subjects.

[58] In epistemology, for example, the criticism of what Fodor calls the interpretationalist hypothesis accounts for the common-sense intuition (on which naïve physics is based) of the independence of reality from the conceptual categories of the experimenter.

Other critics, such as Israel Scheffler, Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke, have focused on the Fregean distinction between sense and reference in order to defend scientific realism.