The 42+ Thomas Kuhn Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Communication Across The Revolutionary Divide Is Inevitably Partial.

Research Under A Paradigm Must Be A Particularly Effective Way Of Inducing Paradigm Change.

The Historian Of Science May Be Tempted To Exclaim That When Paradigms Change, The World Itself Changes With Them.