Thomas Kuhn famous quotes

The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Answers #Solutions

All significant breakthroughs are break -“withs” old ways of thinking.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Thinking #Way #Significant

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 change. These are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and conceive another set that can replace them.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Men #Practice #Games

'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 the foundation for its further practice.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Mean #Science #Past

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 their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Philosophical #Thinking #Unlocking

The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong... There is no other effective way in which discoveries might be generated.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Men #Discovery #Design

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 which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Believe #Research #Normal

Each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Fall #Paradigm

As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice--there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Science #Community #Political

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 has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Views #Fields #Transition

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 chemical philosophy'), and this proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Philosophy #Law #Able

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 learn to make sense of statements that at least resemble these. What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a re-interpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Data #Different #World

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 sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Practice #Community #Research

Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Men #Lenses #Scientist

Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed a single man and never overnight
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Men #Evaluation #Facts

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Science #May #World

Literally as well as metaphorically, the man accustomed to inverting lenses has undergone a revolutionary transformation of vision.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Men #Vision #Lenses

No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Normal #Fit #Scientist

We see the world in terms of our theories.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#World #Theory #Term

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. As a puzzle-solving activity, normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Commitment #Successful #Community

To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Paradigm #Rejects

Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Successful #Facts #Novelty

Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Men #Fields #Youth

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 prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Home #Past #Discovery

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 a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Progress #Different #Environment

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 must share in the course of a [scientific] revolution. Revolutions should be described not in terms of group experience but in terms of the varied experiences of individual group members. Indeed, that variety itself turns out to play an essential role in the evolution of scientific knowledge.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Knowledge #Play #Community

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 are now possessed.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Science #Anecdotes #Transformation

Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Way #Research #Paradigm

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 never be unequivocally settled by logic and experiment alone.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Issues #Community #Political

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 adopt new instruments and look in new places. even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Light #Community #Important

Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Communication #Language #Revolutionary

All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. .. Or finally, the case that will most concern us here, a crisis may end with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Acceptance #Words Of Wisdom #Battle

The crises of our time, it becomes increasingly clear, are the necessary impetus for the revolution now under way. And once we understand nature's transformative powers, we see that it is our powerful ally, not a force to feared our subdued.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Powerful #Way #Revolution

We may... have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth... The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings-a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything.
-- Thomas Kuhn

#Understanding #May #Evolution