Frank Kogan

P17:
i: "the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way"

Kuhn continues: "...is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples." So the examples should share this particular characteristic, the characteristic of there being a sorting out and a coming together in a new way; and if we are uncertain just what he means by "sorting out" and "coming together," the examples are to help us understand.

ii: "Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemeal, one step at a time. Instead, it invokes some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux suddenly sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before."

"Flux" is, like "nature," a word that seems to come from some deep sense of just where it is that we're looking or what we're looking at when we see or create a transformation, but actually it's a word that we can safely ignore. A word that we can't safely ignore is "sudden." An overall reconfiguration certainly took place from Aristotle to Newton, but did Galileo and Descartes and Kepler and Newton experience sudden reconfigurations in their ideas about motion? Probably, but the reconfigurations weren't as massive as the one that Kuhn's own understanding of Aristotle underwent in reverse. In The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn - in a chapter entitled "Recasting The Tradition" - talks of a sixth century commentator John Philoponus who challenged Aristotle's concept of motion with his own partial impetus theory (impetus theory being an ancestor of Newton's concept of momentum), which Philoponus assigned to the Hellenistic astronomer Hipparchus; according to Wiki a subsequent version of the impetus theory was developed by Avicenna in the 11th century; and Kuhn discusses in detail the theories of impetus and motion contained in commentaries on Aristotle by Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme - a couple of 14th century Aristotelians - which according to Kuhn amounted to a "substantial modification" of Aristotle's theory. So that's a long stretch on the way to Newton in the late 17th century; this may explain the word "relatively" in the phrase "relatively sudden."

I copied down "Let me now illustrate some of what was involved in my discovery of a way of reading Aristotelian physics." So when Kuhn says that for Aristotle motion is change in general, not just change in position, this illustrates what Kuhn saw that was different from what he'd expected.