19 quotes
Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
By now it may be clear that the position I'm developing is a sort of post-Darwinian Kantianism.
The Road Since Structure (2002)
In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.
Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have either been very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.
Scientific enterprise, according to Kuhn revolution is exceptional and, indeed, extra-scientific, and criticism is, in ‘normal’ times, anathema...
Normal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature science realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
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.
The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
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
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
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.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
"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.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
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.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
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.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
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
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
We must now ask how changes of this sort can come about, considering first discoveries, or novelties of fact, and then inventions, or novelties of theory. That distinction between discovery and invention or between fact and theory will, however, immediately prove to be exceedingly artificial.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
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.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)