Quotes from Thomas Kuhn

All significant breakthroughs are break -"withs" old ways of thinking.

Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.

In science novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.

Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.

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.

Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.

Every important idea in science sounds strange at first.

Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists.

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.

The crises of our time, it becomes increasingly clear, are the necessary impetus for the revolution now under way. And once we understand nature's transformative powers, we see that it is our powerful ally, not a force to feared our subdued.

Crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen.

What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.

Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.

Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed a single man and never overnight

Examining the record of past research from the vantage of contemporary historiography, the historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before.

Lawrence Freedman

It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.

Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.