Thomas Kuhn - Science 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
Normal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge.

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

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

Thomas Kuhn
Does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?

Thomas Kuhn
The practice of normal science depends on the ability, acquired from exemplars, to group objects and situations into similarity sets which are primitive in the sense that the grouping is done without an answer to the question, "similar with respect to what?"

Thomas Kuhn
Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.

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
We must explain why science — our surest example of sound knowledge — progresses as it does, and we first must find out how, in fact, it does progress.

Thomas Kuhn