The famous “paradigm shifts” that occur during scientific revolutions reflect this cover-up situation, since they betray the fact that the so-called data of science are constructed observations that are designed with a point of view in mind…. It has been a curious habit of Western thought since the Greeks to assume that the world is rational and that true knowledge about the world will always take the form of logical or scientific propositions that will be amenable to explanation. It was thought until quite recently that theories, made up of such propositions, would be found to be true or false by virtue of whether they corresponded to that world. Nowadays we quite properly ask how it is that we can never know what the world is actually like, save by the odd process of constructing theories and making observations once in a while to check how our theories are hanging together – not how the world is hanging together, but our theories…. [A]s every historian of science in the last hundred years has pointed out, scientists use all sorts of aids and intuitions and stories and metaphors to help them in the quest of getting their speculative model to fit “nature” (or getting “nature” to fit their model by redefining what counts as “nature”). They will use any metaphor or any suggestive figure or fable or foible that may luckily come to hand.

Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education