I don't see how he gets from A to B There is only so much I can do to summarize his argument in an online forum without replicating the entire book. I recogniz

I don't see how he gets from A to B There is only so much I can do to summarize his argument in an online forum without replicating the entire book. I recognize that I'm not doing the full-text justice, but it's hard to go into much more depth without simply recommending that you read the book itself. If I boil this down it sounds to me like he's claiming that a system that takes its past states as one of its inputs (observation of the universe being another) is incapable of refining scientific theories? Which, given the fact that's exactly how scientific discovery has been done so far, seems false. I wouldn't say that paradigm shifts like the Copernican revolution, the discovery of elementary particles, or the uncovering of quantum mechanics are acts of "refining" existing theories -- they largely involved throwing away a significant amount of work and starting from scratch. Scientists since Ptolemy created extraordinarily complex epicycle models to explain the movement of planetary bodies from a geocentric perspective. When the Copernican heliocentric model became accepted, all the work on epicycles became more or less useless. Now, we didn't have to abandon Newtonian mechanics entirely, but quantum mechanics have replaced Newtonian mechanics in most fields dealing with particles and small numbers of atoms. Kuhn's argument is that science has advanced, but not through a simple process of "refining". According to Kuhn, science isn't generally a linear or incremental process -- it is a cyclical one in which our existing models cease being useful and we have to find a better one. I hope that helps! If you're interested, I highly recommend reading the text -- Kuhn was an excellent writer [1]. [1] http://projektintegracija.pravo.hr/_download/repository/Kuhn_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions.pdf http://projektintegracija.pravo.hr/_download/repository/Kuhn...