Thomas S. Kuhn Quotes

#1. No language thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on "the given." Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#2. The man who succeeds proves himself an expert puzzle-solver, and the challenge of the puzzle is an important part of what usually drives him on.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#3. How could history of science fail to be a source of phenomena to which theories about knowledge may legitimately be asked to apply?

Thomas S. Kuhn

#4. Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions

Thomas S. Kuhn

#5. I may even seem to have violated the very influential contemporary distinction between "the context of discovery" and "the context of justification." Can

Thomas S. Kuhn

#6. Because scientists are reasonable men, one or another argument will ultimately persuade many of them. But there is no single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#7. Because it demands large-scale paradigm destruction and major shifts in the problems and techniques of normal science, the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#8. The depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession, the same profession that places the highest of all values upon factual details of other sorts.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#9. Gravity, interpreted as an innate attraction between every pair of particles of matter, was an occult quality in the same sense as the scholastics' "tendency to fall" had been

Thomas S. Kuhn

#10. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#11. Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like

Thomas S. Kuhn

#12. We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth. It

Thomas S. Kuhn

#13. Newton's three laws of motion are less a product of novel experiments than of the attempt to reinterpret well-known observations in terms of motions and interactions of primary neutral corpuscles

Thomas S. Kuhn

#14. 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

Thomas S. Kuhn

#15. Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and

Thomas S. Kuhn

#16. Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That

Thomas S. Kuhn

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

Thomas S. Kuhn

#18. Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#19. Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?

Thomas S. Kuhn

#20. The answers you get depend on the questions you ask.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#21. Very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#22. Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."8

Thomas S. Kuhn

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

Thomas S. Kuhn

#24. These three classes of problems-determinations of significant fact, matching facts with theory, and articulation of theory-exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#25. And even when the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#26. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed a single man and never overnight

Thomas S. Kuhn

#27. Inevitably those remarks will suggest that the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell's 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#28. Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#29. If these out-of date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge

Thomas S. Kuhn

#30. Another of the older views, and they are simply read out

Thomas S. Kuhn

#31. Unable either to practice science without the Principia or to make that work conform to the corpuscular standards of the seventeenth century, scientists gradually accepted the view that gravity was indeed innate

Thomas S. Kuhn

#32. idiosyncrasy than

Thomas S. Kuhn