Page "Philosophy of science" Paragraph 27

Thomas Kuhn denied that it is ever possible to isolate the hypothesis being tested from the influence of the theory in which the observations are grounded.

He argued that observations always rely on a specific paradigm, and that it is not possible to evaluate competing paradigms independently.

By " paradigm " he meant, essentially, a logically consistent " portrait " of the world, one that involves no logical contradictions and that is consistent with observations that are made from the point of view of this paradigm.

More than one such logically consistent construct can paint a usable likeness of the world, but there is no common ground from which to pit two against each other, theory against theory.

Neither is a standard by which the other can be judged.

Instead, the question is which " portrait " is judged by some set of people to promise the most useful in terms of scientific " puzzle solving ".