Thomas Kuhn Quotes on Knowledge
Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is the most widely cited work of twentieth-century philosophy of science. Normal science, Kuhn argues, proceeds within the puzzle-solving framework of a paradigm — a constellation of exemplary problem-solutions, methodological commitments, and shared values that organize a scientific community's work. Anomalies accumulate, crisis ensues, and a scientific revolution replaces the old paradigm with a new one whose categories are incommensurable with the old in ways that Kuhn analyzed through Gestalt-switch analogies and the distinction between world-pictures. The framework reorganized history and philosophy of science around the actual practice of working scientists rather than the rational reconstructions of logical empiricism.
Quotes
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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:
“Two scientists working in different paradigms see different worlds.”
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Attributed to Thomas Kuhn:
“A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share.”
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Attributed to Thomas Kuhn:
“Out of context, the new is unintelligible to the old.”
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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