Thomas Kuhn - Community Quotes

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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
"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
Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms

Thomas Kuhn
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
Without commitment to a paradigm there can be no science... the study of paradigms is what prepares a student for membership in a particular scientific community. Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i. e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition.... scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature.

Thomas Kuhn
Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called paradigms. These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.

Thomas Kuhn
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
A paradigm is what members of the scientific community share, and, conversely a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm.

Thomas Kuhn
Normal science... is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community's willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost.

Thomas Kuhn