All significant breakthroughs are break -“withs” old ways of thinking.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that meaningful progress requires abandoning outdated perspectives.
Thomas Kuhn's quote suggests that in order to achieve significant breakthroughs, one must challenge and abandon established paradigms or traditional ways of thinking. This highlights the importance of innovation and adaptation in the pursuit of advancement, implying that true progress is often disruptive and requires a willingness to think differently.
In practice
This quote can be used during a team meeting to encourage creative thinking and innovation.
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.
Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.
I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.
Probably the single-most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the lights or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids...we'll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation.
I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care.
Here in Georgia, we continue to grapple with our own vestiges of hate. The image carved into Stone Mountain, like Confederate monuments across this state, stand as constant reminders of racism, intolerance, and division.
Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain embedded in the very fabric of the culture.
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