"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Quotes

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.

In science, as in the playing of a game, unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, is what provides the excitement.

Novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.

There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like 'really there'; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its 'real' counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle.

Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

It is the established tradition of normal science to see the problem as a deviation from the existing paradigm, to see the problem as a puzzle, and to see the solutions as clarifications.

The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.

Even when paradigms change, their role is never less than that of the recognized standards of scientific achievement.

The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around.

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.