"Crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen"
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Kuhn is puncturing a comforting myth about how big ideas win: not by calmly out-arguing rivals, but by recruiting belief at the moment old explanations stop working. “Crisis alone is not enough” is a rebuke to the Hollywood version of scientific change where failure automatically ushers in truth. A paradigm can collapse in practice and still linger socially. People don’t abandon a worldview just because it’s leaking; they need somewhere to stand while the floorboards give way.
The provocation is in the phrase “need be neither rational nor ultimately correct.” Kuhn isn’t praising irrationality so much as describing the psychological and communal realities of knowledge-making. When the reigning framework can’t metabolize anomalies, the choice of a “particular candidate” isn’t decided by neutral algorithms. It’s decided by plausibility, charisma, training, institutional incentives, even aesthetic preference - what feels coherent enough to organize labor again. Faith, here, is the bridge between breakdown and a new normal; it’s also the admission that scientists are not disembodied logic machines but members of tribes with careers, mentors, and sunk costs.
Context matters: Kuhn wrote against the then-dominant picture of science as linear accumulation and purely rational selection (think Popperian falsification as the main engine). This line compresses his more unsettling thesis: revolutions in knowledge resemble political revolutions. A crisis creates opportunity, but conviction creates the coalition. The subtext is slightly cynical, and that cynicism is the point: progress needs belief before it earns proof, and sometimes it earns the proof only because belief kept it alive long enough to do the work.
The provocation is in the phrase “need be neither rational nor ultimately correct.” Kuhn isn’t praising irrationality so much as describing the psychological and communal realities of knowledge-making. When the reigning framework can’t metabolize anomalies, the choice of a “particular candidate” isn’t decided by neutral algorithms. It’s decided by plausibility, charisma, training, institutional incentives, even aesthetic preference - what feels coherent enough to organize labor again. Faith, here, is the bridge between breakdown and a new normal; it’s also the admission that scientists are not disembodied logic machines but members of tribes with careers, mentors, and sunk costs.
Context matters: Kuhn wrote against the then-dominant picture of science as linear accumulation and purely rational selection (think Popperian falsification as the main engine). This line compresses his more unsettling thesis: revolutions in knowledge resemble political revolutions. A crisis creates opportunity, but conviction creates the coalition. The subtext is slightly cynical, and that cynicism is the point: progress needs belief before it earns proof, and sometimes it earns the proof only because belief kept it alive long enough to do the work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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