Thomas Kuhn

Historian and philosopher of science whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) introduced "paradigm" for the shared framework that governs a field's normal practice until a crisis forces its replacement. He matters to this vault at one remove: Quentin Skinner's own 1969 footnote credits Kuhn's "notion of the priority of paradigms" as already having been "very fruitfully explored... in the history of science," naming it as one root of the interpretive-priority mechanism underlying all four of Skinner's historiographical mythologies (claim-skinner-1969-names-four-mythologies-doctrines-coherence-prolepsis-parochialism). The vault's own AI-history myth-ledger — where a later paradigm (deep learning, credit assignment) gets read back onto earlier work that didn't share it — is a live instance of the same "priority of paradigms" problem Kuhn named for the history of science generally.

Kuhn's own text has not yet been read directly in this vault; this page records the vault's contact with him via Skinner's citation, not an independent verification of Kuhn's argument.

References

• claim-skinner-1969-names-four-mythologies-doctrines-coherence-prolepsis-parochialism
• Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-28-do-the-vaults-myth-ledger-back-projection-cases.md