Crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen.
Interpretation
Crisis can drive decision-making, but a foundational belief in a chosen option is essential, regardless of its rationality.
In this quote, Thomas Kuhn emphasizes that while encountering a crisis can prompt individuals to seek solutions or candidates for leadership, what truly enables acceptance or support for any candidate is not just the crisis itself but also the underlying faith or belief in that candidate. This faith does not necessarily have to be based on logical reasoning or correctness; instead, it can stem from a personal conviction or emotional attachment, highlighting the complex interplay between rational thought and human belief during critical situations.
In practice
This quote would be fitting in a political debate to highlight the importance of belief in a candidate.
To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.
All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. .. Or finally, the case that will most concern us here, a crisis may end with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance.
The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.
Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
All significant breakthroughs are break -βwithsβ old ways of thinking.
Choice of evils debates always produce extremism - people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize - to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.
As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking. Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another ruler with trumpetings again. Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle. Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.
Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.
There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.