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Thomas S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Ch.1 A Role of History
• Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions p.2
• Normal science...is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. p.5
• Normal science...often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. p.5
• They (scientific revolutions) are the tradition-shattering complements to tradition-bound activity of normal science. p.6
• Its (a new theory) assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man and never overnight. p.7 context of discovery
Ch.2 Route of Normal Science
• Early fact-gathering is a far more nearly random activity than the one that subsequent scientific development make familiar. p. 15 Context of discovery
Ch.3 Nature of Normal Science
• Mop-up work = normal science p.24
• Three classes of normal science. "determination of significant fact, matching of facts with theory, and articulation of theory. p.34
• ...to desert the paradigm is to cease practicing the science it defines. We shall shortly discover that such desertions do occur. They are the pivots about which scientific revolutions turn. p.34
Ch.4 Normal science as puzzle-solving. p.42
Ch.5 The Priority of Paradigms
Ch. 6 Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries
•...research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change p.52
• Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly p.52
• ...discovery is a process that must take time p.55
• ...novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong. Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm. p.65
Ch,7 Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories
•..a novel theory emerged only after a pronounced failure in the normal problem-solving activity. p.74
• So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of those tools. The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science - retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. p.76
Ch.8 Response to a Crisis
• They (scientists) will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict. p.78
• To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself. (if a scientists does this) he will be seen by his colleagues as "the Carpenter who blames his tools." p.79
• All crises close in one of three ways:
1. normal science proves able to handle the crisis-provoking problem,
2. problem resists radical new approaches, so scientists conclude that no solution will be forthcoming in the present state of their field.. problem is set aside for a future generation,
3. Emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over it acceptance. p.84
• One perspective historian, viewing a classiic case of a sciences' reorientation by paradigm change, recently described it as "picking up the other end of the stick," a process that involves "handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework." ...similar to a change in visual gestalt p.85
•..the new paradigm, or sufficient hint to permit later articulation, emerges all at once, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the mind of a man deeply immersed in crisis p.89
• Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. p.90
Ch 9 The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions
•...science-as-cumulation is entangled with a dominant epistemology that takes knowledge to be a construction placed directly upon raw sense data by the mind p.96
• Normal research, which IS cumulative, owes its success to the ability of scientists regularly to select problems that can be solved with conceptual and instrumental techniques close to those already in existence. p.96
Ch.10 Revolutions as Changes in World View
Ch.11 The Invisibility of Revolutions
Ch.12 The Resolution of Revolutions
• ...incommensurability of competing paradigms. .... Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. ... Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations to each other. ...it is why, before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. ... the transition cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all. p. 150
• How are scientists brought to make this transposition? Max Plank remarked "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing it opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." p.151
• The transger of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced. p.151
• (Claims for the new paradigm).. are particularly likely to succeed if the new paradigm displays a quantitative precision strikingly better than its older competitor. p.153 i.e. Newton's success
• The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem-solving. He must that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith. p.158
• ( good review of the process of revolution summary on pg.159)
Ch.13 Progress through Revolutions
Prof. Hatch quotes:
All acts of seeing are acts of judgement.
As above, so below. 11-5-98
Science is a social endeavor. 11-19-98
Newton saw science as an expression of God's design. 11-24-98