Thomas Kuhn - Paradigm Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
[The] most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms... is that "the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds."

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
Probably, the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that led the old one to a crisis..

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

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

Thomas Kuhn
The transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.

Thomas Kuhn