Far From Being Magisterial In Its Objectivity,

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.

The Crises Of Our Time, It Becomes Increasingly Clear, Are The Necessary Impetus For The Revolution Now Under Way. And Once We Understand Nature's Transformative Powers, We See That It Is Our Powerful Ally, Not A Force To Feared Our Subdued.

The Transition Between Competing Paradigms Cannot Be Made A Step At A Time, Forced By Logic And Neutral Experience. Like The Gestalt Switch, It Must Occur All At Once (though Not Necessarily In An Instant) Or Not At All.

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.

Probably, The Single Most Prevalent Claim Advanced By The Proponents Of A New Paradigm Is That They Can Solve The Problems That Led The Old One To A Crisis.