Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

37 Sourced Quotes

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

Thomas Kuhn
Scientists, it should already be clear, never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves. Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start encountered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications.

Thomas Kuhn
No theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time; nor are the solutions already achieved often perfect.

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
What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.

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

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
Scientific fact and theory are not categorically separable, except perhaps within a single tradition of normal-scientific practice. That is why the unexpected discovery is not simply factual in its import and why the scientist's world is qualitatively transformed as well as quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory.

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

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
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
Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.

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
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
[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
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