Preface, p VIII
[Paradigms] I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.[see Marx: superstructures]
I Introduction: A Role for History, p 2-3
If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific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 called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today.
Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded.
II The Route to Normal Science, p 18
"Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion" [Bacon]
III The Nature of Normal Science, p 23
Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute.
V The Priority of Paradigms, p 45
For Wittgenstein, in short, games, and chairs, and leaves are natural families, each constituted by a network of overlapping and crisscross resemblances. [Lakoff]
p 47
If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like ‘force’, ‘mass’, ‘space’, and ‘time’, he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution.
VI Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries, p 52
That distinction between discovery and invention or between fact and theory will, however, immediately prove to be exceedingly artificial.
p 55
Ignoring Scheele, we can safely say that oxygen had not been discovered before 1774, and we would probably also say that it had been discovered by 1777 or shortly thereafter. But within those limits or others like them, any attempt to date the discovery must inevitably be arbitrary because discovering a new sort of phenomenon is necessarily a complex event, one which involves recognizing both that something is and what it is.
p 62-63
In a psychological experiment that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts.
Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation.
A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories.
p 64
Let me now point out that, recognizing the process, we can at last begin to see why normal science, a pursuit not directed to novelties and tending at first to suppress them, should nevertheless be so effective at causing them to arise.
p 65
Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm.
VIII The Response to Crisis, p 77-78
[...] once it has achieved the status of a paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place. No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature. [Popper]
The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.
[The reasons for doubt] were [...] themselves counterinstances to a prevalent epistemological theory. [...] By themselves they cannot and will not satisfy that philosophical theory, for its defenders will do what we have already seen scientists doing when confronted by anomaly.
IX The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions, p 92
[...] scientific revolutions are here taken to be non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one.
X Revolutions as Changes of World View, p 120-122
Did these men [Galileo and Aristotle, Lavoisier and Priestley] really see different things while looking at the same sorts of objects? Is there any legitimate sense in which we can say that they pursued their research in different worlds? [...] Many readers will surely want to say that what changes with a paradigm is only the scientist's interpretation of observations that themselves are fixed once and for all by the nature of the environment and of the perceptual apparatus. On this view, Priestley and Lavoisier both saw oxygen, but they interpreted their observations differently; Aristotle and Galileo both saw pendulums, but they differed in their interpretations of what they both had seen.
[This very usual view] is an essential part of a philosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes and developed at the same time as Newtonian dynamics. [...] Today research in parts of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and even art history, all converge to suggest that the traditional paradigm is somehow askew.
What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a reinterpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable. [...] More important, the process by which either the individual or the community makes the transition from constrained fall to the pendulum or from dephlogisticated air to oxygen is not one that resembles interpretation.
XII The Resolution of Revolutions, p 146
Nevertheless, anomalous experiences may not be identified with falsifying ones. Indeed, I doubt that the latter exist.
XIII Progress through Revolutions, p 171-172
But need there be any such goal? [...] All the well-known pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories --those of Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, and the German Naturphilosophen-- had taken evolution to be a goal-directed process.
For many men the abolition of that teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin's suggestions. [...] Even such marvelously adapted organs as the eye and hand of man --organs whose design had previously provided powerful arguments for the existence of a supreme artificer and an advance plan-- were products of a process that moved steadily from primitive beginnings but toward no goal.
What must nature, including man, be like in order that science be possible at all?
Postscript --1969, p 175
[...] in much of the book the term ‘paradigm’ is used in two different senses. On the one hand, it stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community. On the other, it denotes one sort of element in that constellation, the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science.
Subsection 5 [urges] in brief conclusion that men who hold incommensurable viewpoints be thought of as members of different language communities and that their communications problems be analyzed as problems of translation.
1 Paradigms and Community Structure, p 181
[A revolution] need not be a large change, nor need it seem revolutionary to those outside a single community, consisting perhaps of fewer than twenty-five people.
5 Exemplars, Incommensurability, and Revolutions, p 203
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.
6 Revolutions and Relativism, p 205
The proponents of different theories are like the members of different language-culture communities.
7 The Nature of Science, p 208
Historians of literature, of music, of arts, of politic development, and of many other human activities have long described their subjects in the same way. [...] If I have been original with respect to concepts like these, it has mainly been by applying them to the sciences, fields which had been widely thought to develop in a different way.
p 210
Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all.
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