The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

by Thomas S. Kuhn

a persistent tendency to make the history of science look linear or cumulative, a tendency that even affects scientists looking back at their own research. For example, all three of Dalton’s incompatible accounts of the development of his chemical atomism make it appear that he was interested from an early date in just those chemical problems of combining proportions that he was later famous for having solved. Actually those problems seem only to have occurred to him with their solutions, and then not until his own creative work was very nearly complete.1 What all of Dalton’s accounts omit are the revolutionary effects of applying to chemistry a set of questions and concepts previously restricted to physics and meteorology. That is what Dalton did, and the result was a reorientation toward the field, a reorientation that taught chemists to ask new questions about and to draw new conclusions from old data.