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Thomas Kuhn -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
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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
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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
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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
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[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
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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
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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.
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The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skillful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well.
Thomas Kuhn
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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
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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
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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
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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
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"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
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Quote of the day
The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Thomas Kuhn
Wikipedia
Born:
July 18, 1922
Died:
June 17, 1996
(aged 73)
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