“Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism” refers to an intellectual trajectory from which philosophy has arguably exerted its greatest cross-disciplinary influence in the second half of the twentieth century. At the very least, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is generally acknowledged as the most influential single book on the nature of science in this period. It continues to be popular with humanists and social scientists, although Kuhn thought he had nothing of interest to say to them, except that their knowledge pursuits failed to fit his cyclical model of normal and revolutionary science. (See science as a social movement.) Interestingly, Kuhn singularly failed to persuade the physicists in whose subject he was professionally trained and whose history provides the primary data for his model. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that Structure is a remarkably self-exemplifying text, since Kuhn correctly – if again unwittingly – identified the key psychosocial mechanism responsible for his own book's success.

If, as Socrates believed, the recognition of ignorance is the first step to wisdom, then Structure has proved to be an obstruction. The book did much to establish the relevance of the history of science to an understanding of contemporary science, but without encouraging its readers to check the accuracy or applicability of Kuhn's particular version. Readers claim to have found in Kuhn's account of paradigm formation a compelling model for their own disciplines.