A quotation from Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn

1922 CE – 1996 CE

He showed that science does not advance by accumulation but by revolution, and that insight was itself a revolution.

Kuhn was trained as a physicist and turned to the history of science. What he found disturbed him: the textbook story of continuous progress was false. Scientists in different historical periods did not merely have less information than their successors; they were working in entirely different frameworks, asking different questions, seeing different things. He called these frameworks paradigms and the transitions between them scientific revolutions. Normal science, puzzle-solving within an accepted framework, eventually accumulates anomalies that the framework cannot absorb. The result is a crisis, then a revolution, then a new normal science. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962 and became one of the most cited academic books of the 20th century. It was widely misread: Kuhn did not say science was irrational. He said it was more human than its official story admitted, and that the official story was itself a kind of normal science.