Thomas S. Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

"No. Just no."


"A rebellion against science is running rampant in the West, causing such oddities as the cult of Global Warming."


"BORING! I don't remember whether I even finished it."


"I receieved my lowest mark in my degree for criticising this book. I hold Kuhn personally responsible."


"This book is unbelievably wordy, self contradictory, pompous, and obscure. I absolutely hated it. I am a practicing 'normal' scientist, and I can say that this book has no impact what so ever in science."


"God awful writing. Seriously the most dull and dense thing I've read in years. Actual scientific papers are more akin to 'page-turners' than this."


"Science is hard; that's why so many people fill the skies with supernatural entities in order to have an explanation for why we're here. Kuhn does the same: saying that prevailing views of science change from time to time, then coming up with some blatant kablooie that explains it in accordance with his particular worldview. He pays no attention to the fact that science is a search for the truths of nature, not a search for fresh paradigms, and that paradigms only shift when there's reasonable evidence that theories are moving closer to the truth."

(BOTH IN FACT MAJOR PREMISES OF KUHN'S SYSTEM)


"by an absolute bitch"


"It is difficult to read. His sentences are way too long and complex, making speed-reading difficult."


"I fear Kuhn and his readers have never tried to do a scientific experiment. They are really very difficult to do and producing accurate measurements often seems impossible. This is why it has taken years for science to develop."


"The author prefers lengthy half page paragraphs and sentences that will typically take up multiple lines of text."


"Just WRONG. The world does go around the sun: this is NOT a paradigm, it is what sensible people refer to as TRUE. As for pre-Copernican's; they were WRONG."


"For a much better analysis of truth and epistemology, I'd highly recommend Ayn Rand's 'Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology'."


"Thomas Kuhn's basic idea is not a bad one, and probably not an entirely untrue one. Science progresses with the addition of ideas; nobody would argue with that."


"Kuhn was a scholar, lost in his own little world, and too detached to make a connection with the rest of us."


"The Kuhnian notion of the 'paradigm' as a critique of traditional ideas about science and scientific progress is ironically descriptive of postmodernity's hidden predicament: would left academics/intellectuals be willing to admit that their own 'paradigms' (from Darwinism to multiculturalism to critical race theory) are in fact mere products of power relations, not rooted in a transcendent reality?
Nothing drove this home to me more when the comments of molecular biologist James D. Watson about links between race and intelligence sent a shudder through the left-liberal cognoscenti. He had disturbed the settled 'paradigm' through which we view race in the West."


"Kuhn started down this path by looking at Aristotle's physics and asked why something that was so 'obviously' wrong could have been conceived by such a brilliant man and not be questioned for such a long time. The obvious answer to anyone with a grasp of history would be that Aristotle wasn't all that smart, an incompetent scientist and that his theories were questioned"