Though undoubtedly correct, the sentence, “Oxygen was discovered,” misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single simple act assimilable to our usual (and also questionable) concept of seeing. That is why we so readily assume that discovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributable to an individual and to a moment in time. But the latter attribution is always impossible, and the former often is as well.
— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
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