Normal Science Does Not Aim

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.

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.

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.

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

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.