Thomas Kuhn Quotes

#1. Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.

Thomas Kuhn

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

Thomas Kuhn

#5. Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all

Thomas Kuhn

#6. 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

#7. '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

#8. Literally as well as metaphorically, the man accustomed to inverting lenses has undergone a revolutionary transformation of vision.

Thomas Kuhn

#9. 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

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

Thomas Kuhn

#11. 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

#12. In science novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.

Thomas Kuhn

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Thomas Kuhn

#16. We see the world in terms of our theories.

Thomas Kuhn

#17. All significant breakthroughs are break -"withs" old ways of thinking.

Thomas Kuhn

#18. 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

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

Thomas Kuhn

#20. 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

#21. Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists.

Thomas Kuhn

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

Thomas Kuhn

#23. The crises of our time, it becomes increasingly clear, are the necessary impetus for the revolution now under way. And once we understand nature's transformative powers, we see that it is our powerful ally, not a force to feared our subdued.

Thomas Kuhn

#24. 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.

Thomas Kuhn

#25. The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask.

Thomas Kuhn

#26. Crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen.

Thomas Kuhn