Thomas Samuel Kuhn citations

Thomas Samuel Kuhn

✵ 18. juillet 1922 – 17. juin 1996
Thomas Samuel Kuhn photo
Thomas Samuel Kuhn: 27   citations 0   J'aime

Thomas Samuel Kuhn: Citations en anglais

“In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.”

Thomas Kuhn livre The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), VI. Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries, p. 64 (2012 ed.)

“Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense… 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.”

Thomas Kuhn livre The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), VII. Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories, p. 91 (2012 ed.)

“Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.”

Thomas Kuhn livre The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), I. Introduction: A Role of History

“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.”

Thomas Kuhn livre The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), I. Introduction: A Role of History

“Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature science realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution.”

Thomas Kuhn livre The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), III. The Nature of Normal Science, p. 24 (2012 ed.)

“I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all. … How could his characteristic talents have deserted him so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? … I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle's Physics open in front of me… Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I'd never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he'd said, and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes, now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. That sort of experience -- the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way -- is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples. Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemenal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before.”

Source: The Road Since Structure (2002), p. 16-17; from "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" (1982)

“Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.”

Thomas Kuhn (1970) in Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?, edited by [Imre Lakatos, Alan Musgrave, Criticism and the growth of knowledge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, 0521096235, 7]

“By now it may be clear that the position I'm developing is a sort of post-Darwinian Kantianism.”

Source: The Road Since Structure (2002), p. 104; from "The Road since Structure" (1990)

“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”

Thomas Kuhn livre The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), XIII. Progress Through Revolutions, p. 170

“A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.””

Thomas Kuhn livre The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. 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. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Postscript (1969)

“If a demarcation criterion exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part of science which Sir Karl ignores.”

"Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970)

Auteurs similaires

Hannah Arendt photo
Hannah Arendt 27
philosophe américaine d'origine allemande
Richard Feynman photo
Richard Feynman 5
physicien américain
Martin Heidegger photo
Martin Heidegger 16
philosophe allemand
Albert Einstein photo
Albert Einstein 67
physicien allemand
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein 28
philosophe et logicien autrichien, puis britannique
Simone Weil photo
Simone Weil 77
philosophe française
Paul Valéry photo
Paul Valéry 97
écrivain, poète et philosophe français
Simone de Beauvoir photo
Simone de Beauvoir 76
philosophe, romancière, épistolière, mémorialiste et essayi…
Friedrich Hayek photo
Friedrich Hayek 24
philosophe et économiste autrichien
Bertrand Russell photo
Bertrand Russell 20
mathématicien, logicien, philosophe, épistémologue, homme p…