“What were ducks in the world before the revolution are rabbits after it.”
— Thomas KuhnThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), chapter X, Revolutions as Changes of World View
Commentary
This image, drawn from the chapter on revolutions as changes of world view, is among the most cited passages in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and it expresses Kuhn's claim that scientists working under different paradigms perceive the same objects differently. The duck-rabbit figure is introduced to illustrate how a single stimulus can be organised in two incompatible ways, and Kuhn uses it to argue that a paradigm shift alters what scientists see rather than merely what they believe. Ian Hacking, in his introduction to the 1996 edition of Kuhn's book, reads the passage as central to the work's wider challenge to cumulative models of scientific progress. Paul Hoyningen-Huene, in Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions (1993), examines Kuhn's use of perceptual examples and argues that the claim should be understood as a thesis about the conceptual organisation of experience, not a dismissal of empirical evidence. Steve Fuller, in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000), notes that critics from Imre Lakatos onward have pressed the question of how far incommensurability goes. The sentence is therefore best read as an expository image within a larger argument, and its exact wording should be checked against the 1962 text before quotation.
Commentary
This image, drawn from the chapter on revolutions as changes of world view, is among the most cited passages in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and it expresses Kuhn's claim that scientists working under different paradigms perceive the same objects differently. The duck-rabbit figure is introduced to illustrate how a single stimulus can be organised in two incompatible ways, and Kuhn uses it to argue that a paradigm shift alters what scientists see rather than merely what they believe. Ian Hacking, in his introduction to the 1996 edition of Kuhn's book, reads the passage as central to the work's wider challenge to cumulative models of scientific progress. Paul Hoyningen-Huene, in Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions (1993), examines Kuhn's use of perceptual examples and argues that the claim should be understood as a thesis about the conceptual organisation of experience, not a dismissal of empirical evidence. Steve Fuller, in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000), notes that critics from Imre Lakatos onward have pressed the question of how far incommensurability goes. The sentence is therefore best read as an expository image within a larger argument, and its exact wording should be checked against the 1962 text before quotation.