Far From Being Magisterial In Its Objectivity,

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.

Probably, The Single Most Prevalent Claim Advanced By The Proponents Of A New Paradigm Is That They Can Solve The Problems That Led The Old One To A Crisis.

The Man Who Is Striving To Solve A Problem Defined By Existing Knowledge And Technique Is Not, However, Just Looking Around. He Knows What He Wants To Achieve, And He Designs His Instruments And Directs His Thoughts Accordingly. Unanticipated Novelty, The New Discovery, Can Emerge Only To The Extent That His Anticipations About Nature And His Instruments Prove Wrong... There Is No Other Effective Way In Which Discoveries Might Be Generated.

The Historian Of Science May Be Tempted To Claim That When Paradigms Change, The World Itself Changes With Them. Led By A New Paradigm, Scientists Adopt New Instruments And Look In New Places. Even More Important, During Revolutions, Scientists See New And Different Things When Looking With Familiar Instruments In Places They Have Looked Before. It Is Rather As If The Professional Community Had Been Suddenly Transported To Another Planet Where Familiar Objects Are Seen In A Different Light And Are Joined By Unfamiliar Ones As Well.

Philosophers Of Science Have Repeatedly Demonstrated That More Than One Theoretical Construction Can Always Be Placed Upon A Given Collection Of Data.