Thomas Kuhn Quotes on Time
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) reorganized twentieth-century philosophy of science around the historical analysis of scientific change over time. The central thesis is that the apparent continuous progress of science conceals a more discontinuous structure: long periods of normal science, in which research articulates and extends an established paradigm, are punctuated by revolutionary episodes in which an accumulating crisis of anomalies forces a paradigm shift to an incommensurable successor framework. The vocabulary — paradigm, normal science, anomaly, crisis, revolution, incommensurability — shaped the subsequent history and sociology of science through Lakatos, Feyerabend, Hacking, and the broader humanistic engagement with the temporal development of scientific knowledge.
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:
“Out of context, the new is unintelligible to the old.”
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“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) -
“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, 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.”
p. 5 -
“"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