Quotes About Kuhn

Salary arbitration is probably in place - was put in place then and probably is in place now - because I supported it.

Some carry out their work explicitly denying that it is a revolution; others deliberately use Kuhn's language of paradigm shifts to describe the changes they witness.

En cualquier caso, Kuhn insistió en que «la decisión de rechazar un paradigma es siempre simultánea a la decisión de aceptar otro, y el pensamiento o juicio que conduce a esa decisión implica la comparación de ambos paradigmas con el mundo circundante y entre ellos».

Un ejemplo muy influyente de eso fue el uso que Sheldon Wolin hizo de Kuhn para cuestionar la supuesta objetividad de la tendencia «conductista» en las ciencias políticas, una disciplina que se decía seguidora del mismo camino metodológico de las ciencias físicas. «Hasta cierto punto», dijo Wolin, lo que importa no es cuál es el verdadero paradigma, sino cuál es el que tiene que implantarse».

Science, according to Kuhn, has not actually followed the classic myth of steady evolution of accumulating theories based on deeper and deeper probing of the evidence. Rather, science has sometimes made huge transitions as one paradigm, which may have stood for centuries, is found to be inadequate and crashes to the ground, to be replaced by another.

Although it is not as famous as Kuhn's SSR, Bas van Fraassen's book The Scientific Image (1980) has certainly had a profound effect on the philosophy of science

If so, then we must conclude that scientists do not understand the meaning of their own theories and must wait for historians like Kuhn to enlighten them! Such a claim appears arrogant, to say the least, and imposes a burden of proof on Kuhn and other defenders of incommensurability that they have not met. So,

Alexander Bird's Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000

Steven Toulmin's very insightful analysis and critique of Kuhn is found in his outstanding analysis of conceptual change Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evaluation of Human Concepts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972

of Kuhn's and other theories of scientific change, see H. E. LeGrand, Drifting Continents and Shifting Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

The essay "Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability" (abbreviated here as CCC) is found in the collection of Kuhn's writings The Road since Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

The integrity of any theory, Kuhn argued, lies in its falsifiability - that is, its openness to the possibility of repudiation in the light of more evidence, fresh insights or a more creative interpretation of data whose significance was not previously understood.