The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions Quotes
"What quantum mechanics means to each of them depends upon what courses he has had, what texts he has read, and which journals he studies."
"Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."
"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."
"The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process."
"Scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one."
"The choice between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life."
"Normal science, which is cumulative, owes its success to the ability of scientists regularly to select problems that can be solved with conceptual and instrumental techniques close to those already in existence."
"Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm."
"The act of judgment that leads scientists to reject a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world."
"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?"
"Einstein’s theory can be used to show that predictions from Newton’s equations will be as good as our measuring instruments in all applications that satisfy a small number of restrictive conditions."
"If Einsteinian science seems to make Newtonian dynamics wrong, that is only because some Newtonians were so incautious as to claim that Newtonian theory yielded entirely precise results or that it was valid at very high relative velocities."
"Purged of these merely human extravagances, Newtonian theory has never been challenged and cannot be."
"The much-maligned phlogiston theory, for example, gave order to a large number of physical and chemical phenomena."
"Without commitment to a paradigm there could be no normal science."
"The reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science."
"Science textbooks [...] inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them."
"Paradigms determine large areas of experience at the same time."
"The scientific concepts to which they point gain full significance only when related, within a text or other systematic presentation, to other scientific concepts, to manipulative procedures, and to paradigm applications."
"Verification is like natural selection: it picks out the most viable among the actual alternatives in a particular historical situation."
"Popper emphasizes the importance of falsification, i.e., of the test that necessitates the rejection of an established theory."
"No theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time; nor are the solutions often perfect."
"If any and every failure to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times."
"The transition to a new paradigm had, like the transition to Newton’s, meant a loss not only of a permissible question but of an achieved solution."
"The proponents of competing paradigms are always at least slightly at cross-purposes."
"The inevitable result is what we must call, though the term is not quite right, a misunderstanding between the two competing schools."
"The transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience."
"The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced."
"The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs."
"The nature of the scientific community provides a virtual guarantee that both the list of problems solved by science and the precision of individual problem-solutions will grow and grow."