The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

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

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

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

The book ends with the disconcerting thought that progress in science is not a simple line leading to the truth. It is more progress away from less adequate conceptions of, and interactions with, the world (§XIII).

Perhaps the most striking feature of the normal research problems we have just encountered is how little they aim to produce major novelties, conceptual or phenomenal. Sometimes, as in a wave-length measurement, everything but the most esoteric detail of the result is known in advance, and the typical latitude of expectation is only somewhat wider.

Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover. Discovery comes not when something goes right but when something is awry, a novelty that runs counter to what was expected. In short, what appears to be an anomaly. The a in anomaly is the a that means ‘not’, as in ‘amoral’ or

To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.

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

As a group they achieved what had been gained by astronomers in antiquity and by students of motion in the Middle Ages, of physical optics in the late seventeenth century, and of historical geology in the early nineteenth. They had, that is, achieved a paradigm that proved able to guide the whole group’s research. Except with the advantage of hinds