Thomas Kuhn Book

The central thesis of this book is that "habits of mind" underlie the "paradigm shift" that Thomas Kuhn proposed in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" although the exact relationship between the two is left nebulous. Paradigm shifts that change a world view during scientific revolutions would seem to be the extreme case of mind habits. In the same way our brains built up a visual scene through an optimization scheme filling it with objects so we fill out our world view with various interlocking habits of mind. Affecting one affects the others so changing a world view is orders of magnitude more difficult than changing a single habit of mind even though both can affect how we perceive the evidence. Mental barriers exist because will stick with the old mental habit until that habit is actively challenged by some new viewpoint. Uncertainties and contradictions in the viewpoint may be acknowledge but not wanting to change a habit we will tend to assume some future finding will resolve those issues.

My only complaint is that this book could be half its size if the historical examples were better written and organized.