# The Structure of Scientific Revolutions  ## Metadata - Author: [[Thomas S. Kuhn]] - Full Title: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Category: #books ## Highlights - (1) normal science (§§II–IV—he called these sections, not chapters, for he thought of Structure as more of a book outline than a book); (2) puzzle-solving (§IV); (3) paradigm (§V), a word which, when he used it, was rather uncommon, but which after Kuhn has become banal (not to mention paradigm shift!); (4) anomaly (§VI); (5) crisis (§§VII–VIII); and (6) revolution (§IX), establishing a new paradigm. ([Location 115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=115)) - Yes, textbooks present lots of facts and techniques. But they do not enable anyone to become a scientist. You are inducted not by the laws and the theories but by the problems at the ends of the chapters. You have to learn that a group of these problems, seemingly disparate, can be solved by using similar techniques. In solving those problems you grasp how to carry on using the “right” resemblances. “The student discovers a way to see his problem as like a problem he has already encountered. Once that likeness or analogy has been seen, only manipulative difficulties remain.” ([Location 308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=308)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - The thought that there is one and only one complete true account of everything is deep in the Western tradition. It descends from what Comte, the founder of positivism, called the theological stage of human inquiry.42 In popular versions of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cosmology, there is one true and complete account of everything, namely what God knows. (He knows about the death of the least sparrow.) ([Location 478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=478)) - If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today. Given these alternatives, the historian must choose the latter. ([Location 671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=671)) - The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science. ([Location 727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=727)) - “Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.” ([Location 914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=914)) - They had, that is, achieved a paradigm that proved able to guide the whole group’s research. Except with the advantage of hindsight, it is hard to find another criterion that so clearly proclaims a field a science. ([Location 961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=961)) - Bringing a normal research problem to a conclusion is achieving the anticipated in a new way, and it requires the solution of all sorts of complex instrumental, conceptual, and mathematical puzzles. 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. ([Location 1161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=1161)) - They are not there merely as embroidery or even as documentation. On the contrary, 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. ([Location 1321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=1321)) - science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation. ([Location 1563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=1563)) - Nevertheless, the switch of gestalt, particularly because it is today so familiar, is a useful elementary prototype for what occurs in full-scale paradigm shift. ([Location 1886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=1886)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.15 ([Location 1953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=1953)) - In this case, as in many others during the seventeenth century, the corpuscular paradigm bred both a new problem and a large part of that problem’s solution.6 ([Location 2182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=2182)) - Therefore, at times of revolution, when the normal-scientific tradition changes, the scientist’s perception of his environment must be re-educated—in some familiar situations he must learn to see a new gestalt. ([Location 2279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=2279)) - Textbooks, however, being pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field. ([Location 2662](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=2662)) - The proponents of competing paradigms are always at least slightly at cross-purposes. Neither side will grant all the non-empirical assumptions that the other needs in order to make its case. ([Location 2819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=2819)) - The source of resistance is the assurance that the older paradigm will ultimately solve all its problems, that nature can be shoved into the box the paradigm provides. Inevitably, at times of revolution, that assurance seems stubborn and pigheaded as indeed it sometimes becomes. But it is also something more. That same assurance is what makes normal or puzzle-solving science possible. ([Location 2878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=2878)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - And in this century the striking quantitative success of both Planck’s radiation law and the Bohr atom quickly persuaded many physicists to adopt them even though, viewing physical science as a whole, both these contributions created many more problems than they solved.11 ([Location 2910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=2910)) - will-o’-the-wisp. ([Location 2972](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=2972)) - Though the historian can always find men—Priestley, for instance—who were unreasonable to resist for as long as they did, he will not find a point at which resistance becomes illogical or unscientific. ([Location 2989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=2989)) - If we doubt, as many do, that nonscientific fields make progress, that cannot be because individual schools make none. Rather, it must be because there are always competing schools, each of which constantly questions the very foundations of the others. ([Location 3037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3037)) - The few that do assign supplementary reading in research papers and monographs restrict such assignments to the most advanced courses and to materials that take up more or less where the available texts leave off. Until the very last stages in the education of a scientist, textbooks are systematically substituted for the creative scientific literature that made them possible. Given the confidence in their paradigms, which makes this educational technique possible, few scientists would wish to change it. Why, after all, should the student of physics, for example, read the works of Newton, Faraday, Einstein, or Schrödinger, when everything he needs to know about these works is recapitulated in a far briefer, more precise, and more systematic form in a number of up-to-date textbooks? ([Location 3080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3080)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries. No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes. ([Location 3119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3119)) - First, the new candidate must seem to resolve some outstanding and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way. Second, the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem-solving ability that has accrued to science through its predecessors. Novelty for its own sake is not a desideratum in the sciences as it is in so many other creative fields. ([Location 3142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3142)) - That problem—What must the world be like in order that man may know it?—was not, however, created by this essay. On the contrary, it is as old as science itself, and it remains unanswered. ([Location 3204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3204)) - That example should begin to make clear what I mean by learning from problems to see situations as like each other, as subjects for the application of the same scientific law or law-sketch. ([Location 3472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3472)) - Notice now that two groups, the members of which have systematically different sensations on receipt of the same stimuli, do in some sense live in different worlds. ([Location 3510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3510)) - To understand why science develops as it does, one need not unravel the details of biography and personality that lead each individual to a particular choice, though that topic has vast fascination. What one must understand, however, is the manner in which a particular set of shared values interacts with the particular experiences shared by a community of specialists to ensure that most members of the group will ultimately find one set of arguments rather than another decisive. That process is persuasion, but it presents a deeper problem. Two men who perceive the same situation differently but nevertheless employ the same vocabulary in its discussion must be using words differently. They speak, that is, from what I have called incommensurable viewpoints. ([Location 3615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3615)) - Briefly put, what the participants in a communication breakdown can do is recognize each other as members of different language communities and then become translators. ([Location 3646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3646)) - To persuade someone is, I take it, to convince him that one’s own view is superior and ought therefore supplant his own. ([Location 3659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3659)) - If the new viewpoint endures for a time and continues to be fruitful, the research results verbalizable in this way are likely to grow in number. For some men such results alone will be decisive. They can say: I don’t know how the proponents of the new view succeed, but I must learn; whatever they are doing, it is clearly right. That reaction comes particularly easily to men just entering the profession, for they have not yet acquired the special vocabularies and commitments of either group. ([Location 3663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3663)) - I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. ([Location 3719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3719)) - Tags: [[blue]] - To the extent that the book portrays scientific development as a succession of tradition-bound periods punctuated by non-cumulative breaks, its theses are undoubtedly of wide applicability. But they should be, for they are borrowed from other fields. ([Location 3747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3747)) - Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all. To understand it we shall need to know the special characteristics of the groups that create and use it. ([Location 3769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007USH7J2&location=3769))