Kuhn Quotes & Sayings

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 — Thomas S. Kuhn

Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions — Thomas S. Kuhn

For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts' paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of early ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. — Thomas S. Kuhn

idiosyncrasy than — Thomas S. Kuhn

Sometimes doing what's necessary seems crazy but it's the highest form of sanity. — Shane Kuhn

Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time — Thomas S. Kuhn

When I get to Heaven they aren't going to see much of me but my heels, for I'll be hanging over the golden wall keeping an eye on the Lisu Church! — Isobel Miller Kuhn

You are my favorite thing to do. ~ Oliver Sand — Chris Kuhn

Newton's three laws of motion are less a product of novel experiments than of the attempt to reinterpret well-known observations in terms of motions and interactions of primary neutral corpuscles — Thomas S. Kuhn

What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the 'new system of chemical philosophy'), and this proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it. — Thomas Kuhn

When people ask about relationships, they always say, "How did you guys meet?" Not, "OMG, tell me about your third year! And when a relationship is in trouble, the desperate couple is always trying to recapture the magic of when they first met. The real tragedy is that, without time travel or amnesia, it's impossible to ever get back there. Which is why to most people, marriage is about as magical as watching David Copperfield make Claudia Schiffer disappear. — Shane Kuhn

i love good cries,
loud sobs that soak your pillow
that kind that come at the end
of a perfect book

you're gasping for air
as droplets of salt water
trickle down your cheeks
into the corners of your mouth
as your chest rises and falls
and your vision is blurred
by the tears

but your mind is so clear
and your every thought
in that moment
feels so meaningful
and important and right

it feels okay to just
let it all out
it makes you feel like
you are free — Madisen Kuhn

Looking back upon this history, I disagree with Galison's conclusion. I do not see critical opalescence as a decisive factor in Einstein's victory. I see Poincare and Einstein equal in their grasp of contemporary technology, equal in their love of philosophical speculation, unequal only in their receptiveness to new ideas. Ideas were the decisive factor. Einstein made the big jump into the world of relativity because he was eager to throw out old ideas and bring in new ones. Poincare hesitated on the brink and never made the big jump. In this instance at least, Kuhn was right. The scientific revolution of 1905 was driven by ideas and not by tools. — Freeman Dyson

We see the world in terms of our theories. — Thomas Kuhn

They're more interested in their fucking iPhones than doing their jobs. I can see the glow of their phone screens on their faces as they check e-mail, update their Facebook slaveware, dream of living, breathing, and fucking through the anonymity of text and memes. — Shane Kuhn

Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e. with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science. It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the expected. — Thomas Kuhn

Not only did I rise above my drooling-hunchback-in-the-dungeon status, but I also made our meeting seem like a chance encounter, one of the most powerful aphrodisiacs known to man. Thanks to chick flicks, the concept of true love being orchestrated by the rough, construction worker hands of fate is an easy sell. — Shane Kuhn

Examining the work of Dalton and his contemporaries, we shall discover that one and the same operation, when it attaches to nature through a different paradigm, can become an index to a quite different aspect of nature's regularity. In addition, we shall see that occasionally the old manipulation in its new role will yield different concrete results. — Thomas S. Kuhn

the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like 'force,' 'mass,' 'space,' and 'time,' he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That — Thomas S. Kuhn

I think you can photograph a certain sliver of human presence in its absence ... images taken in the empty rooms, the marks left on the walls, disappearing shadows, etc. — Mona Kuhn

Digital [photography] has sped up the process to a point that it's a bit self-destructive. It is like driving by a new neighborhood without stopping for a walk. Special discoveries need time. — Mona Kuhn

We need to look resolutely away from the impossibilities and to the Lord. His help will come ... — Isobel Miller Kuhn

Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."8 — Thomas S. Kuhn

These three classes of problems-determinations of significant fact, matching facts with theory, and articulation of theory-exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical. — Thomas S. Kuhn

People love to talk about themselves, especially white people. — Shane Kuhn

There are six myths about old age: 1. That it's a disease, a disaster. 2. That we are mindless. 3. That we are sexless. 4. That we are useless. 5. That we are powerless. 6. That we are all alike. — Maggie Kuhn

The answers you get depend on the questions you ask. — Thomas S. Kuhn

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

Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong. — Thomas S. Kuhn

I had a lot of self-confidence. — Bowie Kuhn

The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that when we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe it?"28 Then (as Kuhn and Perkins found), we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks. In contrast, when we don't want to believe something, we ask ourselves, "Must I believe it?" Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. — Jonathan Haidt

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 — Howard Margolis

I'm beginning to get the feeling that confession is what we need in order to forgive ourselves. — Shane Kuhn

The body is a place where our mind resides, and that's what I'm photographing. — Mona Kuhn

They had a game they would play, sitting at a coffeehouse. They would ask: How far away is the nearest strange attractor? Was it that rattling automobile fender? That flag snapping erratically in a steady breeze? A fluttering leaf? "You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it," Shaw said, echoing Thomas S. Kuhn. — James Gleick

Learning and sex until rigor mortis. — Maggie Kuhn

Inevitably those remarks will suggest that the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell's 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be. — Thomas S. Kuhn

No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others. — Thomas Kuhn

Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many. — Maggie Kuhn

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

The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask. — Thomas Kuhn

Sometimes I wish I could sneak a peek into that mind of yours and see what you're thinking. Especially when you smile at me like that. ~ Oliver Sand — Chris Kuhn

Here is Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, describing the way scientists react when their pet theories are unraveling: "What scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies," Kuhn wrote, " ... . [is] renounce the paradigm that led them into crisis." Instead, he concluded, "A scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place." That is, scientific theories very seldom collapse under the weight of their own inadequacy. They topple only when a new and seemingly better belief turns up to replace it. — Kathryn Schulz

Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world ... I am convinced that we must learn to make sense of statements that at least resemble these. What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a re-interpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable. — Thomas Kuhn

A healthy community is one in which the elderly protect, care for, love and assist the younger ones to provide continuity and hope. — Maggie Kuhn

[The most important factor in making a good picture is] to know who or what you are photographing. It is not about photography; it should be about life. — Mona Kuhn

To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers. — Thomas Kuhn

There is not one iota of history as we know it in the entire Bible! — Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Girlie, you don't have to tell us what happened, but I'm telling you this. First thing we're doing is getting you karate lessons. No man or boy will ever put his hands on my baby girl again," my father says. — N. Kuhn

Part of the heartache of all missionary work is the bright promising convert who turns out to be a mere puffball, crumbling like a macaroon under the least pressure. — Isobel Miller Kuhn

You are so much more than I could have ever wished for. ~ Cate Mullen — Chris Kuhn

I once attended a meeting of historians at which the disciples of Kuhn were presenting an extreme and exaggerated version of his views. Kuhn interrupted them by shouting from the back of the hall with overwhelming volume, "One thing you people need to understand: I am not a Kuhnian. — Freeman Dyson

Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all — Thomas Kuhn

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. — Thomas S. 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

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

The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name. — Maggie Kuhn

I believe that in each generation God has called enough men and women to evangelize all the yet unreached tribes of the earth. It is not God who does not call. It is man who will not respond! — Isobel Miller Kuhn

Monsters like us can learn to be human beings from watching movies — Shane Kuhn

Another of the older views, and they are simply read out — Thomas S. Kuhn

The man who succeeds proves himself an expert puzzle-solver, and the challenge of the puzzle is an important part of what usually drives him on. — Thomas S. Kuhn

The transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all. — Thomas Kuhn

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. — Thomas S. Kuhn

Instead of getting my gold retirement watch and landing on my feet with a white picket fence and a satellite dish, I ended up base-jumping from the kettle into the fire. All because of one last job. But what's done is done. If your interested, you can read about the whole hot mess in The Intern's Handbook. You won't find it at Barnes & Noble, but I hear the feds have a few copies lying around, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could download it for free on Russian iTunes. I'm told it's an excellent beach/airplane/bathroom/killing-time-after-a-motel-tryst read. — Shane Kuhn

The question I hoped to answer,was how much mechanics Aristotle had known, how much he had left for people such as Galileo and Newton to discover. Given that formulation, I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all... that conclusion was standard and it might in principle have been right. But I found it bothersome because, as I was reading him, Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation. — T.C. Kuhn

If you take four street corners, and on one they are playing baseball, on another they are playing basketball and on the other, street hockey. On the fourth corner, a fight breaks out. Where does the crowd go? They all go to the fight. Dana White UFC president April 2007, Las Vegas Sun News Interview — Reed Kuhn

We are in our own dark Eden where the snake is not selling the Tree of Knowledge. He is selling love, and if you take a bite of that apple, you will go the way of Abel when this is clearly the land of Cain. — Shane Kuhn

Because scientists are reasonable men, one or another argument will ultimately persuade many of them. But there is no single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances. — Thomas S. Kuhn

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

Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress. — Thomas Kuhn

Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and — Thomas S. Kuhn

By the year 2020, the year of perfect vision, the old will outnumber the young. — Maggie Kuhn

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

There must be a goal at every stage of life! There must be a goal! — Maggie Kuhn

When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. — Maggie Kuhn

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's eugenics studies were initially endowed by Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the head of the Krupp munitions monolith, and James Loeb, of the Kuhn-Loeb banking family. Loeb's relatives, the Warburgs, were banking partners of William Rockefeller, and both families were responsible for setting up the American Harriman family - also movers and shakers in eugenics - in business. — Jim Keith

To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself. — Thomas S. Kuhn

If old age is good for anything it's good for being generous. — William Kuhn

Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind - even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants. — Maggie Kuhn

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 — Thomas S. Kuhn

When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist's perception of his discipline's past. More than the practitioners of other creative fields, he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline's present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field. — Thomas S. Kuhn

So, like the knights of old, I suited up in my trusty intern armor - brownish-green suit, sensible cap-toed oxfords, white button-down, and omnipresent LensCrafters glasses. If I wasn't able to shoot her, I could probably bore her to death. — Shane Kuhn

Unable either to practice science without the Principia or to make that work conform to the corpuscular standards of the seventeenth century, scientists gradually accepted the view that gravity was indeed innate — Thomas S. Kuhn

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. It — Thomas S. Kuhn

Our minds are not interested in truth. They are our private twenty-four hour news cycle putting a constant spin on reality. It's like The Matrix. Everyone is getting plugged into the Bullshit Express. — Shane Kuhn

But it wasn't a sentimental romance. It was more like a battered estate wagon in which they bounced along together, sometimes cheerfully amused by the same joke, other times grimly tolerating one another and determined to get where they were going. — William Kuhn

If the theory accurately predicts what they [scientists] see, it confirms that it's a good theory. If they see something that the theory didn't lead them to believe, that's what Thomas Kuhn calls an anomaly. The anomaly requires a revised theory - and you just keep going through the cycle, making a better theory. — Clayton Christensen

You always remember the things that rub you the right way or the wrong way. The positive and negative are both powerful memory reinforcement tools. Negative is more powerful than positive, which is based on your survival instincts. But you can't remember something that doesn't touch you in a positive or negative way. And this is our ultimate goal. We must learn from the wallflowers, life's most perfect unintentional losers. — Shane 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

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

No language thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on "the given." Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like. — Thomas S. Kuhn

I believe in the Rip Van Winkle theory - that a man from 1910 must be able to wake up after being asleep for seventy years, walk into a ballpark, and understand baseball perfectly. — Bowie Kuhn

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

So it's been a slow process and it's taken some patience. That's why patients are called patients I think - patience is required. — Bowie Kuhn

I felt the blood drain out of my face. The whole thing was a setup-the FBI mole, the mystery client ... I knew the what but the why was what I was trying to Scooby-Doo as we hurtled to an uncertain fate in the back of Zhen's limo. It must have been a play for HR, revenge for our hostile takeover. — Shane Kuhn

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 world 'out there' is an exceedingly complicated mass of sensations, events, and turmoil. With Thomas Kuhn, I do not believe that the human mind is capable of organizing a structure of ideas that can come even close to describing what is really out there. Any attempt to do so contains fundamental faults. Eventually, those faults will become so obvious that the scientific model must be continuously modified and eventually discarded in favor of a more subtle one. We can expect the statistical revolution will eventually run its course and be replaced by something else. — David Salsburg

I wasn't interested in just photographing someone naked, I was interested in representing them as clothed in their own skin, secure in themselves. — Mona Kuhn

Icon Books has a fine series called "Revolutions in Science." These works are succinct, highly readable, and authoritative. The series includes John Henry's Moving Heaven and Earth: Copernicus and the Solar System (Duxford, Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001). Henry's book can be read in an afternoon, and, while not as detailed as Kuhn's classic, it tells the story with verve and lucidity. — Howard Margolis

The depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession, the same profession that places the highest of all values upon factual details of other sorts. — Thomas S. Kuhn