Understanding Past Ideas – Quote by Thomas Kuhn

„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.“

Thomas KuhnThomas Kuhn on historical research: understanding past ideas means discovering unfamiliar worlds of thought and their own categories.
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Thomas Kuhn was an American physicist, philosopher of science, and historian of science.

Thomas Kuhn presents historical research as an approach to unfamiliar worlds of thought, emphasizing their own categories and language.


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Thomas Kuhn quote about understanding past ideas and historical perspectives

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922–1996) was one of the influential philosophers of science of the 20th century. In his major work, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” he described the development of science as a sequence of periods of normal science interrupted by scientific revolutions. He is particularly associated with the concept of the paradigm shift and with the idea that different paradigms may be incommensurable.

Thomas Kuhn quote about paradigm shifts and how scientists perceive the worldCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"The historian of science may be tempted to claim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well." Thomas Kuhn
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Quote on the irony of modern paleoanthropology from GEO-Magazin June 2011Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Modern paleoanthropology is a field of research not without irony: it lacks the very objects of study. … It is as if one were trying to write the history of Central Europe on the basis of nothing more than half a Roman coin, the handkerchief of a maid from the Wilhelmine era, and parts of a microphone […] And so the question of humankind’s origins still remains one of the great, unresolved mysteries of the natural sciences." GEO-Magazin, Juni 2011
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Charles Wright Mills quote about experience, reflection, and social scienceCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"To say that you can 'have experience,' means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman" Charles Wright Mills
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