Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhnwas an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift", which has since become an English-language idiom...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth18 July 1922
CountryUnited States of America
answers solutions asks
The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask.
objectivity prejudice scientist
Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists.
data philosopher construction
Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.
world theory term
We see the world in terms of our theories.
expectations resistance novelty
In science novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.
commitment successful community
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. As a puzzle-solving activity, normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
light community important
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.
philosophical thinking unlocking
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.
powerful way revolution
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.
paradigm rejects
To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.
successful facts novelty
Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
issues political-revolution community
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.
science anecdotes transformation
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.
understanding may evolution
We may... 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... The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings-a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything.