Kuhn Scientific Revolutions Quotes & Sayings

Groups do not have experiences except insofar as all their members do. And there are no experiences ... that all the members of a scientific community must share in the course of a [scientific] revolution. Revolutions should be described not in terms of group experience but in terms of the varied experiences of individual group members. Indeed, that variety itself turns out to play an essential role in the evolution of scientific knowledge. — Thomas Kuhn

The resolution of revolutions is selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge. — Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has probably been more widely read - and more widely misinterpreted - than any other book in the recent philosophy of science. The broad circulation of his views has generated a popular caricature of Kuhn's position. According to this popular caricature, scientists working in a field belong to a club. All club members are required to agree on main points of doctrine. Indeed, the price of admission is several years of graduate education, during which the chief dogmas are inculcated. The views of outsiders are ignored. Now I want to emphasize that this is a hopeless caricature, both of the practice of scientists and of Kuhn's analysis of the practice. Nevertheless, the caricature has become commonly accepted as a faithful representation, thereby lending support to the Creationists' claims that their views are arrogantly disregarded. — Philip Kitcher

The term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his highly influential landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. — Stephen R. Covey

Of all the major developments in the history of science, there may be no better example than that of the periodic system to argue against Thomas Kuhn's thesis that scientific progress occurs through a series of sharp revolutionary stages.20 Indeed, Kuhn's insistence on the centrality of revolutions in the development of science and his efforts to single out revolutionary contributors has probably unwittingly contributed to the retention of a Whiggish history of science, whereby only the heroes count while blind alleys and failed attempts are written out of the story.21 — Eric Scerri

As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, new scientific theories in any field are regarded with skepticism because scientists become attached to the old perspective earlier in their careers. — Marilyn Ferguson

Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution? In the face of the vast and essential differences between political and scientific development, what parallelism can justify the metaphor that finds revolutions in both?

One aspect of the parallelism must already be apparent. Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, 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. In both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution. — Thomas S. Kuhn