Top 100 Kuhn's Quotes
#1. Although it is not as famous as Kuhn's SSR, Bas van Fraassen's book The Scientific Image (1980) has certainly had a profound effect on the philosophy of science
Howard Margolis
#2. 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
#3. Our minds are not interested in truth. They are our private twenty-four hour news cycle putting a constant spin on reality. It's like The Matrix. Everyone is getting plugged into the Bullshit Express.
Shane Kuhn
#4. 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
#5. I believe that in each generation God has called enough men and women to evangelize all the yet unreached tribes of the earth. It is not God who does not call. It is man who will not respond!
Isobel Miller Kuhn
#6. Sometimes you can get a shark to eat itself if you fill the water with enough blood.
Shane Kuhn
#7. That's what I love about you. You're a freak. Like me.
Shane Kuhn
#8. It is quite exciting, incidentally, to know that the Genesis account of the creation of mankind through its first parentage in Adam and Eve bears the marks of derivation from the primary Egyptian symbolic depiction.
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
#10. Salary arbitration is probably in place - was put in place then and probably is in place now - because I supported it.
Bowie Kuhn
#11. Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
Thomas S. Kuhn
#12. The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name.
Maggie Kuhn
#13. To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.
Thomas S. Kuhn
#14. Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That
Thomas S. Kuhn
#16. 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
#17. Baseball is beautiful ... the supreme performing art. It combines in perfect harmony the magnificent features of ballet, drama, art, and ingenuity.
Bowie Kuhn
#18. 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
#19. They're more interested in their fucking iPhones than doing their jobs. I can see the glow of their phone screens on their faces as they check e-mail, update their Facebook slaveware, dream of living, breathing, and fucking through the anonymity of text and memes.
Shane Kuhn
#20. 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
#21. Prayers offered up in Christian worship in the earliest days of the faith were addressed to 'Our Lord the Sun,' evidencing that 'primitive' Christians were quite in the spirit of Pagan forms and ideologies.
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
#22. Old age is not a disease - it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.
Maggie Kuhn
#23. 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
#24. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong.
Thomas S. Kuhn
#25. I am wet shoes.
I am cold, damp breath.
I am sweating hands.
I am gravity crushing the grass beneath my boots.
I am Kevlar and metal and lead.
I am laser sighting.
I am death.
And I am coming.
Shane Kuhn
#26. Sometimes I wish I could sneak a peek into that mind of yours and see what you're thinking. Especially when you smile at me like that. ~ Oliver Sand
Chris Kuhn
#27. 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
#29. The more he learned, the more he realized that there is too much to learn in anyone's lifetime.
Shane Kuhn
#30. 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
#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. Another of the older views, and they are simply read out
Thomas S. Kuhn
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Clarity equals victory. Look at successful people. Do you really think they have seven effective habits? Fuck no. Who's got time for that? They have one effective habit: DOING. When you are a 'doer' you lap the rest of the rats in the race.
Shane Kuhn
#36. Time and place, I have concluded, no matter how brief and no matter how small, can have infinite influence on one's wellbeing.
Marc Kuhn
#37. 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
#38. When you're on your own as a youngster, you're fresh meat and there's a line of cannibals just waiting to fire up the grill.
Shane Kuhn
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. So it's been a slow process and it's taken some patience. That's why patients are called patients I think - patience is required.
Bowie Kuhn
#42. 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
#43. If old age is good for anything it's good for being generous.
William Kuhn
#44. Everything is so fleeting and impermanent. It's enough to drive you bat shit crazy.
Shane Kuhn
#45. 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
#46. The body is a place where our mind resides, and that's what I'm photographing.
Mona Kuhn
#47. 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
#48. Digital [photography] has sped up the process to a point that it's a bit self-destructive. It is like driving by a new neighborhood without stopping for a walk. Special discoveries need time.
Mona Kuhn
#49. 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
#50. The answers you get depend on the questions you ask.
Thomas S. Kuhn
#51. Sometimes doing what's necessary seems crazy but it's the highest form of sanity.
Shane Kuhn
#52. There is one domain in which untruth is insupportable, that field of the human soul's endeavor of which Truth is the very substance and being, - religion
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
#53. We are not antiheroes with a silver lining. And we are sure as hell not relatable or sympathetic.
Shane Kuhn
#54. 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
#55. Did you know that Judaism is based on paradigm shifts, Henry? First came Abraham, then came Moses. Then came the prophets, then came the rabbis. Pretty amazing stuff. Each iteration, reaching for the godhead. What comes next, Henry? What comes next?
Michael Davidow
#56. Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many.
Maggie Kuhn
#57. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
Thomas Kuhn
#58. Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions
Thomas S. Kuhn
#59. Interns are invisible. You can tell an executive your name a hundred times and that executive will never remember it because they have no respect for someone at the bottom of the barrel, working for free.
Shane Kuhn
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. There is not one iota of history as we know it in the entire Bible!
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
#63. 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
#64. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say.
Maggie Kuhn
#65. 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
#66. Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.
Thomas Kuhn
#67. So when I'm up here it feeds, for lack of a better word, nostalgia about my youth. Some people get that way when they see a baseball field or smell trout on the grill. I get that feeling from vertigo and the Freudian fantasy of falling to my certain death on the pavement.
Shane Kuhn
#68. I'm beginning to get the feeling that confession is what we need in order to forgive ourselves.
Shane Kuhn
#69. We need to look resolutely away from the impossibilities and to the Lord. His help will come ...
Isobel Miller Kuhn
#70. 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
#71. Let the light within me salute the light that is within you. Namaste.
William Kuhn
#72. Monsters like us can learn to be human beings from watching movies
Shane Kuhn
#73. The term "paradigm," from the Greek paradeigma ("pattern"), was used by Kuhn to denote a conceptual framework shared by a community of scientists and providing them with model problems and solutions
Fritjof Capra
#74. Butt fucking the American dream so you can buy cheap T-shirts at Old Navy. Isn't life beautiful?
Shane Kuhn
#75. Just as extreme love, in a marriage, for example, can turn to hate. They're the same coin, just different sides.
William Kuhn
#76. 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
#77. I told [reporters] that I sprinkled marijuana on my organic buckwheat pancakes, and then when I ran my five miles to the ballpark, it made me impervious to the bus fumes. That's when [Baseball Commissioner] Bowie Kuhn took me off his Christmas list.
Bill Lee
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Fight or flight is bullshit. Flight is the default. Fight only happens when flight is not an option. Because fight requires a sharp committed mind that can think ten steps ahead.
Shane Kuhn
#81. [The most important factor in making a good picture is] to know who or what you are photographing. It is not about photography; it should be about life.
Mona Kuhn
#82. 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
#83. I felt the blood drain out of my face. The whole thing was a setup-the FBI mole, the mystery client ... I knew the what but the why was what I was trying to Scooby-Doo as we hurtled to an uncertain fate in the back of Zhen's limo. It must have been a play for HR, revenge for our hostile takeover.
Shane Kuhn
#84. Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
Thomas Kuhn
#85. As you proceed through your study of physics, you will find that every one of the measurable quantities that is discussed can be specified in terms of only four basic dimensions: mass, length, time, and electric charge. In this chapter, we will begin a study of the first three of these.
Karl F. Kuhn
#86. So, like the knights of old, I suited up in my trusty intern armor - brownish-green suit, sensible cap-toed oxfords, white button-down, and omnipresent LensCrafters glasses. If I wasn't able to shoot her, I could probably bore her to death.
Shane Kuhn
#87. 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
#88. 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
#90. The job is the job, and I have no choice but to get it done. Bitching about it will only distract me, and let's be honest, has bitching about anything ever helped anybody?
Shane Kuhn
#91. The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology.
Imre Lakatos
#92. Ultimately, when you come up with a classification scheme that is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, then the theory can become what Kuhn called a paradigm.
Clayton Christensen
#93. There are six myths about old age: 1. That it's a disease, a disaster. 2. That we are mindless. 3. That we are sexless. 4. That we are useless. 5. That we are powerless. 6. That we are all alike.
Maggie Kuhn
#94. 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
#95. A healthy community is one in which the elderly protect, care for, love and assist the younger ones to provide continuity and hope.
Maggie Kuhn
#96. Literally as well as metaphorically, the man accustomed to inverting lenses has undergone a revolutionary transformation of vision.
Thomas Kuhn
#97. '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
#98. the well-paid pickings for PhD Program Dropouts Who Only Have Experience Working in Academia were basically nonexistent
Sarah Kuhn
#99. Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.
James Gleick
#100. There must be a goal at every stage of life! There must be a goal!
Maggie Kuhn
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