Groups do not have experiences except insofar as all their members do. And there are no experiences... that all the members of a scientific community must share in the course of a [scientific] revolution. Revolutions should be described not in terms of group experience but in terms of the varied experiences of individual group members. Indeed, that variety itself turns out to play an essential role in the evolution of scientific knowledge.

Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists.

As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice-there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community... this issue of paradigm choice can never be unequivocally settled by logic and experiment alone.

Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.

Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.

Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.