The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Science develops through shared frameworks, puzzle-solving, anomalies, and occasional changes in what counts as a problem or explanation.
A paradigm supplies a scientific community with exemplary problems, methods, and standards. Normal science works productively within that framework rather than questioning every assumption at once.
Researchers need shared expectations to work at all. Kuhn's point is not that they should question everything every morning, but that productive frameworks can eventually reveal their own limits.
Anomalies are not automatically fatal, but accumulated difficulties can contribute to crisis. Competing frameworks may then reorganise concepts, methods, and the significance of observations.
A scientific revolution changes more than one result; it changes parts of the conceptual world in which results are understood. Incommensurability complicates comparison without necessarily making reasoned evaluation impossible.
The account rejects a purely smooth, cumulative history of discovery. Its claims about community, progress, and comparison remain debated, and it does not imply that scientific theories are arbitrary or independent of evidence.
Normal research can be productive without continuously rejecting its framework.
A change of theory can alter the question as well as the answer. That helps explain difficult transitions without reducing science to fashion or declaring evidence irrelevant.
An anomaly's importance depends partly on shared expectations and methods.
A new paradigm can change the vocabulary used to compare results.
Training transmits examples of competent practice as well as explicit rules.
Revolutionary change does not imply that evidence becomes irrelevant.
Scientific progress need not resemble a simple accumulation of unchanged facts.
Anomalies are not automatically fatal, but accumulated difficulties can contribute to crisis.
When a scientific framework changes, why can the questions and standards change along with the answers?