The Essential Tension

By Thomas S. Kuhn,

Book cover of The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change

Book description

"Kuhn has the unmistakable address of a man, who, so far from wanting to score points, is anxious above all else to get at the truth of matters."-Sir Peter Medawar, Nature

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Essential Tension as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The book is much better than his famous but often misread The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, because it gets down to detailed cases in physics, in which Kuhn was trained. Though he never accepted the term, it amounts to a “rhetoric” of physics, that is, a study of, in Aristotle’s definition, the available means of persuasion in a science or a court of law.

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