Insofar as they tended to share certain assumptions, debates among philosophers within the consensus could be considered "internal" to that consensus, and these tended to dominate philosophy of science until the sixties. There were always critics who stood outside the dominant consensus (e.g. Michael Polanyi, Pierre Duhem, Alfred North Whitehead or Alexandre Koyre). However, their disagreement with the dominant consensus could be considered "external" to the main field of debate within philosophy of science, and was thus largely ignored within the consensus. But ultimately disagreements and internal problems within the consensus weakened it to the point where the "dam broke" and the once dominant consensus became flooded with both internal and external problems. This happened to coincide rather closely with the publication of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions [SSR], which therefore often has been seen as a primary cause for the dissolution of the consensus. It is certainly an exaggeration to regard Kuhn's book as having "caused" the break up of the empiricist consensus, but as events happened, its time of publication was such that debates in philosophy of science during the breakup of the consensus often took Kuhn's work as a point of departure.