“To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.” A crisis involves a period of extraordinary, rather than normal, research, with a “proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundament

But if the aim of normal science is not major substantive novelties—if failure to come near the anticipated result is usually failure as a scientist—then why are these problems undertaken at all? Part of the answer has already been developed. To scientists, at least, the results gained in normal research are significant because they add to the scop

But within such communities, there are smaller and smaller groups, so that in the end the analysis should apply to “communities of perhaps a hundred members, sometimes significantly fewer.”31 Each will have its own group of commitments, its own models of how to proceed. Moreover, the achievements are not just anything notable. They are 1. “sufficie

Kuhn cannot take seriously that “there is some one full, objective, true account of nature.” Does this mean that he does not take truth seriously? Not at all. As he observed, he said nothing about truth in the book, except when quoting Bacon (169). Wise lovers of facts, who try to determine the truth about something, do not state a “theory of truth

He had a gift for aphorism; and his names have acquired an unusual status, for although they were once arcane, some of them are now part of colloquial English. Here is the sequence: (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) pa

The sciences progress by leaps and bounds. For many people, scientific advance is the very epitome of progress. If only political or moral life could be like that! Scientific knowledge is cumulative, building upon previous benchmarks

“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.”

These three classes of problems—determination of significant fact, matching of facts with theory, and articulation of theory—exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical. They do not, of course, quite exhaust the entire literature of science.

Just as new species are characterized by the fact that they do not interbreed, so new disciplines are to some extent mutually incomprehensible. This is a use of the idea of incommensurability that has real content. It has nothing to do with pseudoquestions about theory choice. Kuhn devoted the end of his career to trying to explain this and other s