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“... heard to blurt out to a woman he had met there: ‘I just want to know what Truth is!’ This was Thomas Kuhn and what he meant was that specific truths such as those of physics mattered less to him than acquiring metaphysical knowledge of the nature of truth. Soon afterwards, he gave up physics, but rather than take up philosophy directly, he approached ...”

“... the way scientists do what they do. I say ‘perhaps’ because the same claim might be made for Thomas Kuhn. However, Kuhn seems to me a perceptive sociologist of science, but a poor philosopher. Also, in so far as he has had an effect on the way scientists behave, it has been pernicious: to be a great ...”

“... upon reading a work of criticism – perhaps because, like the natural scientists described by Thomas Kuhn, we are bound by ‘paradigms of research’ which tend to direct attention to accepted modes of expression and discovery. Some time in 1987 I happened on an issue of a literary magazine left in my house by a visiting friend. My attention was ...”

“... The​ tragedy of Thomas Kuhn’s life was to have written a great book. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, when he was forty, and he spent the rest of his life distressed by its success. It has sold 1.7 million copies, and has been translated into 42 languages. Very few academic books sell in those numbers and scarcely any are still seen as state of the art sixty years after publication ...”

“... of Mercury. How that belief came about, and how Einstein came to demolish it, is the subject of Thomas Levenson’s eye-opening book.Pluto lost its planetary status ten years ago after a group of astronomers, Brown among them, discovered another object of roughly the same size orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune.2 If Pluto was a planet, then so was Eris (as ...”

“... of literature who have presented their doctrines with that kind of cloudy enthusiasm which led Thomas Carlyle to call literature ‘a great foam-froth’. On both groups of authors Descombes is excellent. His account of structuralism with its emphasis on the debt to the mathematics of Bourbaki and to the practice of such anthropologists as Dumézil is a ...”

“... of our most eminent contemporaries, seem to think that’s indeed the best that you can do. So Thomas Kuhn famously maintained that, because concepts are implicitly defined by the theories that endorse them, radically different theories are ipso facto ‘incommensurable’. There is, to that extent, no such thing as a rational choice between ...”

“... debate seems quaint and unpromising, as if he hadn’t heard of recent developments. His target is Thomas Kuhn, and he wants to rebut the claim that the history of science is punctuated by Kuhnian revolutions. Kuhn’s famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions contains a final, worried, chapter, in which he tries to ...”

“... different visions can learn from each other, and one vision grow out of another. Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn between them made famous the idea that competing or successive scientific theories or world views are ‘incommensurable’. That sloganeering word acquired a lot of meanings, but the core idea was that different principles or ways of thinking ...”

“... the works of a number of iconic figures of the time and in several different fields: one thinks of Thomas Kuhn, Norwood Hanson and Paul Feyerabend in philosophy and of the New Look psychology of Jerome Bruner and Mitchell Ash. The art historian Erwin Panofsky made much of it, and the popular press swallowed it whole. The long and short is: one sees what ...”

“... discussion it might seem that really important work in philosophy of science begins with Thomas Kuhn, that serious questioning of both the positivist theory of language and the general notion of truth begins with Derrida, that jurisprudence begins with Critical Legal Studies, that truly profound thought on intention and interpretation in ...”

“... does not turn up very often, but equally, science does not advance by lurching between what Thomas Kuhn (for whom Horgan has no time either) called fresh paradigms. Few scientists seek to operate at that level anyway. The discovery of the structure of DNA was the most important event in biology this century; yet it did not supplant the established ...”

“... and unity in the teeth of the disruption and disaggregation wrought by the struggle between what Thomas Kuhn called ‘incommensurable paradigms’. Watching the fate of Chinese medicine may tell us much about the processes by which, in our own Scientific Revolution, the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian tradition succumbed to ...”

“... by raising the magic wand of “falsifiability”.’ Later he regarded Popper – and even Thomas Kuhn, who taught that scientific doctrines come and go like women’s hair styles – as too conservative in his critique. Meanwhile, Feyerabend got an academic job, and in 1955 ‘began what is technically known as my career’. He was hired by the ...”

“... remained to be done was a series of mopping-up operations or puzzle-solving, what the historian Thomas Kuhn called ‘normal science’. By the 1950s it had become clear that the cellular organelle where proteins were manufactured was the ribosome – given its name by an American microbiologist. The ribosome was known to be an extremely complex ...”