Thomas S. Kuhn
American historian and philosopher of science, a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of science in the 1960s. Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received a doctorate in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1949. But he later shifted his interest to the history and philosophy of science, which he taught at Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which depicted the development of the basic natural sciences in an innovative way. According to Kuhn, the sciences do not uniformly progress strictly by scientific method. Rather, there are two fundamentally different phases of scientific development in the sciences. In the first phase, scientists work within a paradigm (set of accepted beliefs). When the foundation of the paradigm weakens and new theories and scientific methods begin to replace it, the next phase of scientific discovery takes place. Kuhn believes that scientific progress—that is, progress from one paradigm to another—has no logical reasoning. Kuhn's theory has triggered widespread, controversial discussion across many scientific disciplines.
“Unable either to practice science without the Principia or to make that work conform to the corpuscular standards of the seventeenth century, scientists gradually accepted the view that gravity was indeed innate”
“Gravity, interpreted as an innate attraction between every pair of particles of matter, was an occult quality in the same sense as the scholastics' "tendency to fall" had been”
“Newton's three laws of motion are less a product of novel experiments than of the attempt to reinterpret well-known observations in terms of motions and interactions of primary neutral corpuscles”
“Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed a single man and never overnight”
“Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time”
“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like”
“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”
“Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions”
“And even when the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong.”