"In his celebrated book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn went a step further and argued that in scientific revolutions the standards (or “paradigms”) by which scientists judge theories change, so that the new theories simply cannot be judged by the prerevolutionary standards. There is much in Kuhn’s book that fits my own experience in science. But in the last chapter Kuhn tentatively attacked the view that science makes progress toward objective truths: “We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.” Kuhn’s book lately seems to have become read (or at least quoted) as a manifesto for a general attack on the presumed objectivity of science."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesJews from the United StatesPhysicists from the United StatesHistorians of science
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (1992), Ch. 7 : Against Philosophy
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science and who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science.
74 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Thomas Kuhn →
Related Quotes
"Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers."
"I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The book…"
"To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my …"
"Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fund…"
"History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in t…"
"Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes …"
"Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the as…"
""Normal science" means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some pa…"
"Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice…"
"If a demarcation criterion exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part …"