Thomas Kuhn
1922–1996 · American historian, physicist and philosopher (1922 – 1996)
Topics: learning
Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.
— Thomas KuhnScientists 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
— Thomas KuhnNormal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.
— Thomas KuhnIn science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.
— Thomas KuhnNormal 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.
— Thomas KuhnFew 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.
— Thomas KuhnScientific 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.
— Thomas KuhnThe 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.
— Thomas KuhnMen whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice.
— Thomas KuhnWe 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
— Thomas Kuhn