The Nature of Scientific Activity

"The importance of this backward or self-critical reference of scientific questioning is very obvious when we study the history of science, which in all its great stages of advance has entailed radical revision of its premisses and methods. Advances can be made only through new ways of looking at things, through asking daring new questions, but new questions require corresponding changes in language and representation; they require changes in the framework of our concepts and in the logical structure of science itself. They may even call for a new meaning of the word 'understanding'. But all that is part of the pain and awe and excitement of radically new knowledge. The refusal to be bound by the rigid framework of our previous attainments, the capacity to wonder and be open for the radically new, the courage to adapt ourselves to the frighteningly novel, are all involved in the forward leap of scientific research, but in the heart of it lies the readiness to revise the canons of our inquiry, to renounce cherished ideas, to change our mind, to be wide open to question, to repent." (p. 122)