23 Quotes by Thomas S. Kuhn

In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.

The man who succeeds proves himself an expert puzzle-solver, and the challenge of the puzzle is an important part of what usually drives him on.

Because scientists are reasonable men, one or another argument will ultimately persuade many of them. But there is no single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances.

These three classes of problems-determinations of significant fact, matching facts with theory, and articulation of theory-exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical.

The depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession, the same profession that places the highest of all values upon factual details of other sorts.