Thomas Kuhn Quotes
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions changed how the development of the natural sciences is understood. Trained originally as a physicist at Harvard, he turned to the history of science and produced studies of the Copernican revolution and of the early quantum theory before publishing the great synthetic work that introduced the vocabulary of paradigms, normal science, anomalies, crises, and revolutionary change. The quotes below are attributed to Thomas Kuhn, organized by topic.
Browse Thomas Kuhn by topic
Thomas Kuhn on Justice
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“If a demarcation criterion exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part of science which Sir Karl ignores.”
Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970)
Thomas Kuhn on Knowledge
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“Normal science means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements.”
p. 10 -
Attributed to Thomas Kuhn:
“Crises are the necessary preludes to the emergence of new theories.”
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Attributed to Thomas Kuhn:
“A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share.”
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“Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970)”
If a demarcation criterion exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part of science which Sir Karl ignores. -
“Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.”
Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970) -
“Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970)”
Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers. -
“I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory.”
Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970) -
“Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970)”
I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance -
“Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.”
Wikiquote -
“We may, to be more precise, 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”
XIII. Progress Through Revolutions | p. 170 -
“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”
V. The Priority of Paradigms | p. 46
Thomas Kuhn on Nature
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“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. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”
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“Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense... that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way.”
VII. Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories | p. 91 (2012 ed.)
Thomas Kuhn on Time
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“Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.”
p. xiii (2012 ed.) -
“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.”
Wikiquote -
“"Normal science" means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.”
II. The Route to Normal Science | p. 10
Thomas Kuhn on Truth
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Attributed to Thomas Kuhn:
“Two scientists working in different paradigms see different worlds.”
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Attributed to Thomas Kuhn:
“Out of context, the new is unintelligible to the old.”