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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

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Thomas Kuhn
Age: 73 †
Born: 1922
Born: July 18
Died: 1996
Died: June 17
Academic
Analytic Philosopher
Historian
Physicist
University Teacher
Cincinnati
Ohio
Thomas Samuel Kuhn
Thomas S. Kuhn
Different
Progress
Believer
Displays
Position
Scientific
Environments
Environment
Environmental
Solving
Quite
Convinced
Puzzles
Often
Solutions
Applied
Science
Later
Theories
Sense
Ones
Earlier
Better
Theory
Display
Relativist

More quotes by Thomas Kuhn

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The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
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Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists.
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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.
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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.
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Each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent.
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Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.
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Probably, the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that led the old one to a crisis.
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The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask.
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We see the world in terms of our theories.
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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.
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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
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Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.
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Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.
Thomas Kuhn
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Normal science means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.
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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.
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Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
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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.
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The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.
Thomas Kuhn
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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
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