Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.
Interpretation
Effective communication between different paradigms is limited and often incomplete.
Thomas Kuhn's quote highlights the challenges of communication between differing revolutionary ideas or paradigms. It suggests that when people operate from fundamentally different frameworks of understanding, their ability to fully grasp each other's perspectives is inherently restricted, leading to partial insights and potential misunderstandings.
In practice
This quote can open a discussion on the importance of finding common ground in interdisciplinary collaborations.
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.
Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?
God tries his votaries through and through but never beyond endurance. He gives them strength enough to go through the ordeal he prescribes for them.
Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one's own situation so as not to be overcome by them.
If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
I will begin with this confession: whatever I have done in the course of my life, whether it be good or evil, has been done freely; I am a free agent.
Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe is a dungeon.
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