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.
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.
Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.
My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought that and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
The fundamental factor of self-deception is this constant desire to be something in this world and in the world hereafter.
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