Thomas Kuhn (Thomas Samuel Kuhn) Quotes

The transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.

Thomas Kuhn

• Logic
• Instant
• Competing
• Paradigm
• Gestalt

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Quotes to Explore

• Surreal fiction is a sophisticated art form. Events happen divorced from conventional logic, as events in a dream may happen. But unlike dreams, everything in the story contributes to an overall coherent point, impression or emotion.

  

  Nancy Kress
  • Art
  • May
  • Dream

• I do know that you have to choose between the logic of reconciliation and the logic of justice. Pure justice leads to new civil war. I prefer the negotiable revolution.

  

  Adam Michnik
  • War
  • Justice
  • Revolution

• Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

  

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
  • Mind
  • Logic
  • Insanity

• Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

  

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • Music
  • Art
  • Poetry

• When you come through a business education, a lot of what they teach you is to make decisions through analysis, and logic and rationale, and I'm a big believer in that. But I also believe in the power of instinct. The truth is you're never going to have a perfect answer or view of how it is going to work.

  

  Imran Amed
  • Work
  • Believe
  • Business

• I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.

  

  Kate Bernheimer
  • Long
  • Writing
  • Remember

• Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.

  

  Maimonides
  • Study
  • Logic
  • Perfection

• No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

  

  Samuel Butler
  • Mistake
  • Common
  • Logic

• The human brain works as a binary computer and can only analyze the exact information-based zeros and ones (or black and white). Our heart is more like a chemical computer that uses fuzzy logic to analyze information that can't be easily defined in zeros and ones.

  

  Naveen Jain
  • Heart
  • Black
  • Brain

• We can know that the Christian God cannot exist. If he is all-powerful and all-good, as Christians maintain, there would not have been, for instance, the Holocaust. This is an inherent self-contradiction. So if Christians insist on having a God, they can do so, but if they have any respect for logic they'll have to redefine who he is.

  

  Vincent Bugliosi
  • Good
  • God
  • Respect

• 'Perhaps our reservoir of spiritual faith has run out.''Perhaps it should have run out a long time ago,' I said sternly. 'Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars...pogroms...resistance to logic and science and medicine...not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax.'

  

  Dan Simmons
  • People
  • Time
  • Long

• Rosemary’s reputation was known; he would, by obscure logic, become retrospectively a cuckold.

  

  Anthony Burgess
  • Logic

• All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.

  

  Bertrand Russell
  • Life
  • Heaven
  • Logic

• Logic is logic. That's all I say.

  

  Logic
  • Logic

• Logic is one thing and commonsense another.

  

  Logic
  • Logic

• Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.

  

  Logic
  • Art
  • May
  • Confidence

• When we learned to play in bands, what we were covering was equal part the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead. That would defy the logic that somehow these things don't fit in the same musical well.

  

  Bryce Dessner The National
  • Logic

• Acting isn't something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you're going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.

  

  Lee Strasberg
  • Up
  • Logic
  • Preparation

• 'Bum's Rush' is a piece about timing, and everything that's in the piece needs to be with the piece. If people are missing, or marking, or unable to use their voices, the impulses that prompt the action are lost, and its logic crumbles.

  

  Twyla Tharp
  • People
  • Action
  • Lost

• Florence Farr once said to me, If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, 'this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know,' we could die upon the instant and be united with God.

  

  William Butler Yeats
  • Moments
  • Sincerity
  • Passing

• The thing about villains is that villains always have their own logic, and they don't necessarily see themselves as villains. Richelieu is not a villain, in his own mind. He's doing what he needs to do.

  

  Adrian Hodges
  • Mind
  • Logic
  • Villains

• The religious foundations of America have been completely expurgated from our history textbooks.

  

  D. James Kennedy
  • America
  • History
  • Christian

• You should only go into science if you really have a yearning to make scientific discoveries.

  

  Paul Greengard
  • Science
  • Discoveries
  • Yearning

• The transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.

  

  Thomas Kuhn
  • Logic
  • Instant
  • Competing