Synopsis:
- Scientific progress is not linear
- At any point in time a scientific paradigm (a consensus of the scientific community) rules
- New evidence is accomodated in the ruling paradigm
- A paradigm shift occurs when the ruling paradigm collapses
- The truth of a theory does not only depend on the correspondence with reality but also on the language in which it is formulated
- The real history of science is the history of the transformations of language
- Scientific revolutions are, ultimately, linguistic in character
- A paradigm is composed of theoretical hypotheses and a set of techniques for testing them
- A paradigm shift results in a different way of looking at the world, analogous to a religious conversion
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