Historian and philosopher of science, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). In the dialogues he is the lens Cameron — who studied under Kuhn at Princeton in 1964–65 — uses to frame McLuhan's project: McLuhan wasn't influenced by Kuhn but was "delighted" to find his own view of science confirmed, and Cameron reads McLuhan as aiming at a Kuhnian revolution in the humanities, analogous to chemistry after 1800.
Across the dialogues
The frame for McLuhan's science — Kuhn's normal vs. revolutionary science, which McLuhan's media project mirrors
McLuhan's view of science tracks Kuhn's normal/revolutionary distinction — a revolution renders the old normal science meaningless and forces a recasting.
"McLuhan's ideas on science are actually quite close to those of T.S. Kuhn. Kuhn distinguishes between normal science and revolutionary science — and one of the things that characterizes revolutionary science is that everything that normal science does becomes more or less meaningless and has to be recast."
McLuhan wasn't shaped by Kuhn — Kuhn's 1962 book simply confirmed a view of science McLuhan already held.
"Kuhn's book comes out in '62, so Marshall's not being influenced by Kuhn. He's just delighted when he reads it a few years later — it confirms what he already had."
Cameron may have been the one who first pointed McLuhan to Kuhn — having read the book closely with Kuhn himself as his Princeton advisor.
"I don't know this for sure, but it's possible that I was the person that brought Kuhn's book to McLuhan's attention, because Kuhn was my advisor in my junior year."
Cameron reads McLuhan as seeking a Kuhnian revolution in the humanities — a "periodic table" moment for media, analogous to chemistry after 1800.
"What McLuhan was aiming at was a revolution in our thinking about the humanities and the social sciences that would be analogous to the revolution that happened after 1800, once people began to intuit the structure of chemical elements."
Cameron's Princeton training under Kuhn — the black-body anomaly as the model of a scientific revolution
Cameron studied at Princeton under both Kuhn and Rorty — "two professors who became more famous than McLuhan."
"you were a student of two professors who, you could say, became more famous than McLuhan."
The black-body anomaly that drove Planck and Einstein to the quantum revolution is Cameron's model of the Kuhnian anomaly that triggers a paradigm shift.
"What happens in 1900 with Planck, and then shortly thereafter with Einstein's papers, is that the whole idea of astronomy, as it had been thought, gets blown up. What leads to these problems is what was called the black body problem."
Connections
McLuhan's normal-vs-revolutionary view of science mirrors Kuhn's — and McLuhan was "delighted" to find his own thinking confirmed when he read Kuhn.
Kuhn was Cameron's junior-year advisor at Princeton (1964–65); he later told Cameron to get his hands dirty in the actual history of science.