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.
Are we not all shipwrecked,...condemned to death?... However impatient our neighbours make us, however much indignation our race arouses, we are all bound together, and the companions of a chain-gang have everything to lose by mutual insults.
Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
The only absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths.
It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly. I wish to question freely and to answer freely without any sort of adulation. That well becomes any who are sincere in the search for truth.
To admit one's own presuppositions and to point out the presuppositions of others is therefore to maintain that all reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning. The starting-point, the method, and the conclusion are always involved in one another.
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