The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas S. Kuhn

XI - The of .

Because are generally viewed not as but as additions to scientific knowledge, and because the history of the field is represented in the new textbooks that a new , a scientific seems .

The of scientific activity is largely by a field's textbooks. Textbooks are the pedagogic for the perpetuation of science. These become the of the history of science. Both the layman's and the 's knowledge of science is based on textbooks. A field's must be rewritten in the aftermath of a scientific . Once rewritten, they disguise not only the but the existence and of the that produced them. The resulting textbooks truncate the scientist's sense of his discipline's history and supply a for what they . More often than not, they contain very little history at all. In the rewrite, earlier scientists are represented as having worked on the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent and has made seem scientific. Why dignify what science's best and most efforts have made it possible to discard?

The historical of and in scientific textbooks make the history of science look linear or cumulative, a tendency that even scientists looking back at their own . These render . They also work to as a function. Science textbooks present the view that science has reached its present state by a of discoveries and inventions that, when gathered together, the modern body of knowledge - the addition of bricks to a building. This piecemeal-discovered facts of a textbook presentation the pattern of historical mistakes that misleads both students and laymen about the nature of the scientific enterprise. More than any other single of science, the textbook has determined our of the nature of science and of the of discovery and invention in its advance.

(A Synopsis from the orginal by Professor Frank Pajares, Emory University)