“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like”
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
“The answers you get depend on the questions you ask.”
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
“Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.”
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
“Gravity, interpreted as an innate attraction between every pair of particles of matter, was an occult quality in the same sense as the scholastics' "tendency to fall" had been”
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
“Newton's three laws of motion are less a product of novel experiments than of the attempt to reinterpret well-known observations in terms of motions and interactions of primary neutral corpuscles”
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
“The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.”
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
"All significant breakthroughs are break -“withs” old ways of thinking."
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
"Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists."
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
"We see the world in terms of our theories."
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
"Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
"Every important idea in science sounds strange at first."
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)
"Individuals who break through by inventing a new paradigm are almost always either very young men or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. These are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and conceive another set that can replace them."
― Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)