Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
Interpretation
Research within a specific framework can significantly influence shifts in established scientific thought.
Thomas Kuhn's quote emphasizes the importance of conducting research within a theoretical framework or paradigm to effectively bring about changes to that paradigm. By exploring and challenging existing theories through rigorous research, scientists can provoke reconsideration and evolution of scientific beliefs, ultimately fostering advancements in understanding and knowledge in various fields.
In practice
During a scientific conference, a speaker may use this quote to introduce a discussion on how research has led to shifts in scientific consensus.
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.
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.
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.
All significant breakthroughs are break -“withs” old ways of thinking.
Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.
One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage.
...for a long time I wanted to become a theologian... now, however, behold how through my efforts God is being debated in astronomy.
There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.
The greatest explorer of recent decades is not even human.
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
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