Thomas Kuhn Quotes

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

One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered.

The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.

In science, it is rare that a transformational change occurs during our lifetimes.

When the basic status of a theory is clear, and all that needs to be cleared are details, you can collaborate. But if the main structure of a hypothesis isn't established, and you want to change the paradigm - like it was the case in the 1960s - it's better to work alone.

Many people, including myself, had our scientific lives changed by the inspiring new vision of science that Popper gave us.

As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn't really overturn a science paradigm.

In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely!

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

In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.

I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.

Individuals who break through by inventing a new paradigm are almost always...either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change....These are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.

Data is not necessarily information. Information does not necessarily lead to knowledge. And knowledge is not always sufficient to discover truth and breed wisdom.

Thus with every advance in our scientific knowledge new elements come up, often forcing us to recast our entire picture of physical reality. No doubt, theorists would much prefer to perfect and amend their theories rather than be obliged to scrap them continually. But this obligation is the condition and price of all scientific progress.

Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world.

Progress in science occurs in fits and starts, and paradigm shifts occur when evidence can be marshaled to support a new point of view.

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.

The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.

If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice--there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.

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

The historian of science may be tempted to claim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.

It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.

The scientific excitement in comparing theory with data, and developing some understanding of global changes that are occurring, is what makes all the other stuff worth it.

Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.