Thomas Kuhn Quotes on Truth
Thomas Kuhn's account of how science develops carried radical implications for truth, and the quotes gathered here present them. Kuhn described normal science as research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, the paradigms that define a tradition of inquiry until anomalies provoke a crisis and a revolutionary change. His most unsettling claim concerned progress itself: he suggested that one may have to relinquish the notion that changes of paradigm carry scientists closer and closer to the truth. Because rival paradigms organise experience so differently, he held that two scientists working in different paradigms see different worlds. Drawn from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and later essays, these passages present scientific change as a succession of paradigms rather than a steady approach to a final truth, a thesis that reshaped the philosophy of science.
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:
“Out of context, the new is unintelligible to the old.”
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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) -
“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