Thomas Kuhn Quotes
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.
Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists.
Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.
In science novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.
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.
Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.
Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.
Literally as well as metaphorically, the man accustomed to inverting lenses has undergone a revolutionary transformation of vision.
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
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.
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.
The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
