04 November 2019

Thomas S Kuhn - Collected Quotes

"No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"No theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time; nor are the solutions already achieved often perfect." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently, generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is ‘really there’." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"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." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"Scientists, it should already be clear, never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves. Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start encountered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications." (Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms." (Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"[...] the power of a science seems quite generally to increase with the number of symbolic generalizations its practitioners have at their disposal." (Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"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."(Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change", 2011)

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