---
title: "Thomas Kuhn"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Thomas Kuhn"
aliases: ["Thomas S. Kuhn"]
first_seen: "2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["mythology of doctrines","paradigm","Quentin Skinner","history of science","myth ledger"]
---


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: [[entity-quentin-skinner|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