Thomas Kuhn Quotes - Page 2

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Community Logic Revolution Science

"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

Mean, Science, Past

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Book by Thomas Kuhn, 1962.

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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.

Thomas Kuhn

Nature, Science, Understanding

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

Thomas Kuhn

Change, Science, Research

Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.52, University of Chicago Press

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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.

Thomas Kuhn

Science, Impact, Political Revolution

Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.94, University of Chicago Press

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To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.

Thomas Kuhn

Science, Views, Criticism

Thomas S. Kuhn (2011). “The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change”, p.273, University of Chicago Press

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

Thomas Kuhn

Science, World, May

Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.111, University of Chicago Press

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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

Science, History, Anecdotes

Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.1, University of Chicago Press

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Groups do not have experiences except insofar as all their members do. And there are no experiences... that all the members of a scientific community must share in the course of a [scientific] revolution. Revolutions should be described not in terms of group experience but in terms of the varied experiences of individual group members. Indeed, that variety itself turns out to play an essential role in the evolution of scientific knowledge.

Thomas Kuhn

Knowledge, Science, Play

Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Thomas S. Kuhn (1989). “Die Wissenschafts Philosophie Thomas S. Kuhns: Rekonstruktion und Grundlagenprobleme”

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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

Philosophical, Thinking, Analysis

Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.88, University of Chicago Press

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Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world... I am convinced that we must learn to make sense of statements that at least resemble these. What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a re-interpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable.

Thomas Kuhn

Science, Data, Understanding

Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.121, University of Chicago Press

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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 Kuhn

Men, Evaluation, Facts

Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.7, University of Chicago Press

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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

Fall, Opponents, Criteria

Thomas S. Kuhn (1970). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”

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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.

Thomas Kuhn

Science, Political Revolution, Issues

Thomas S. Kuhn (1970). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”

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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

Philosophy, Science, Law

Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.133, University of Chicago Press

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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

Science, Environmental, Progress

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The resolution of revolutions is selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge.

Thomas Kuhn

Knowledge, Science, Practice

Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.171, University of Chicago Press

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Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.

Thomas Kuhn

Home, Science, Past

Thomas S. Kuhn (1987). “Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912”, p.364, University of Chicago Press

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Born: July 18, 1922
Died: June 17, 1996
Occupation: Physicist
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