Puzzling over Aristotle’s theory of physics, which “seemed to me full of egregious errors,” Kuhn looked out the window and had an epiphany: Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I’d never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he’d said. Kuhn did not, of course, come to believe Aristotle’s physical theory, but he did come to see it as a system that, by its own lights, constituted a coherent and powerful explanatory
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