“The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skillful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well.”

— Thomas Kuhn, book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), IV. Normal Science as Puzzle-solving, p. 38.

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Thomas Kuhn27

American historian, physicist and philosopher 1922–1996

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