Thomas Kuhn Quotes

30 quotes in 632 categories

• Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be…
• Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not…
• Groups do not have experiences except insofar as all their members do. And there are no experiences... that all the members of a scientific community…
• 'Normal science' means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying…
• History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we…
• To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field…
• What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the 'new system of…
• Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
• As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice-there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community... this issue of paradigm choice can…
• The historian of science may be tempted to claim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists…
• The resolution of revolutions is selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result of a…
• Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world... I am convinced that we must…
• Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.
• Individuals who break through by inventing a new paradigm are almost always either very young men or very new to the field whose paradigm they…
• All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. .. Or finally, the case that…
• The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask.
• Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those…
• Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
• To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.
• It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of…

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