Kuhn, T. S. (1994). The structure of scientific revolutions (2. ed., enlarged, 21. print). Univ. of Chicago Press.
- Role-of-history-in-Kuhn-account-of-science
- Kuhn-on-paradigms
- Kuhn-on-normal-science
- Kuhn-on-crisis-and-scientific-revolutions
Essay-social-dimension-of-kuhn-account
question: what would Kuhn account for the disciplinary specializations that are common nowadays? A a paradigm splitting into different sub-paradigms?
Kuhn’s account of science
Kuhn’s philosophy of science is based on detailed historical study. If we want to understand how to do good science, we should start by closely examining clear cases of good science.
Kuhn is predominantly a historian of science and his view emphasizes the arbitrary, personal nature of factors often influencing scientific decisions, the rigidity of scientific indoctrination of students, the “conceptual boxes” that nature gets forced into by scientists. He suggests that these features are actually the key to science’s success.
His account of science challenges the traditional view of linear scientific progress of steadily accumulating knowledge over time. Instead, he argues that science does not progress in this smooth, linear fashion, but instead has a cyclic nature, where long periods of stability are interrupted by revolutionary science, in which the dominant paradigm is replaced partially or completely.
Science, as we know it, is most often operating within a paradigm. During these periods of “normal-science”, scientists are not questioning the paradigm itself, instead they are solving smaller problems (“puzzle-solving”) and refining the details of the theory.
Overtime, scientists start encountering anomalies that don’t fit the paradigm’s predictions. Once these anomalies can no longer be ignored, it leads to a crisis. When a scientific field is in crisis, a radical paradigm shift occurs where a new paradigm that can explain the anomalies better replace the old one. Kuhn calls this a scientific-revolution.
An central idea to Kuhn’s overall picture is that science is a social mechanism that combines two capacities. One is capacity for sustained, cooperative work. The other is science’s capacity to break down and reconstitute itself from time to time 1
An overview of Kuhn’s account of scientific progress =
- STAGE 1 = Pre-paradigm
- STAGE 2 = Normal Science (scientific activity governed by a particular paradigm)
- STAGE 3 = Crisis
- STAGE 4 = Revolution
- STAGE 5 = Normal Science (scientific activity governed by a different paradigm than stage 2)
- STAGE 6 = Crisis … etc.
Example: Light (Kuhn, p. 12) =
- in the 18th century, the paradigm was provided by Newton’s Opticks which taught that light was material corpuscles
- That paradigm was replaced with a new paradigm that light was transverse wave motion
- It was then replaced with the paradigm that light is photons (quantum-mechanical entities that have wave-particle duality) developed by Planck, Einstein and others
Rough Notes
Chapter 1
“If science is the constellation of facts, theories, and methods collected in current texts, then scientists are the men who, successfully or not, have striven to contribute one or another element to that particular constellation. Scientific development becomes the piecemeal process by which these items have been added, singly and in combination, to the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientific technique and knowledge. And history of science becomes the discipline that chronicles both these successive increments and the obstacles that have inhibited their accumulation.”
“historian then appears to have two main tasks. On one hand, he must determine by what man and at what point in time each contemporary scientific fact, law, and theory was discovered or invented. On the other, he must describe and explain the congeries of error, myth and superstition that have inhibited the more rapid accumulation of the constituents of the modern science text.”
pre-science / pre-paradigm
Pre-science is the period of activity that precedes the first period of normal science in a particular field of study, e.g. the period before Newton’s Opticks
- there is no general agreement about what problems or evidence is important, or what methods of investigation are legitimate
- there would be many schools of thought “doing science”, but according to Kuhn, the net result is something less than science
- the early stages of the development of any science involves different people describing and interpreting the same range of phenomena in different ways (p. 17)
- The end of the early stages is the triumph of one pre-paradigm schools as the first paradigm.
Evaluation of Kuhn
| Strength | Weakness |
|---|---|
| scientists are people not just processors of observers | Kuhn describes the attitude of normal scientists in very strong terms, that science education is a kind of “indoctrination” which results in scientists having a deep “faith” in their paradigm |
| scientific community plays an important role (e.g. consensus) | it could be seen that Kuhn is limited to social factors solely within the scientific community |
| discoveries are not a linear procerss and there is a two-stage historical evolution (periods of stability punctuated by radical change) = seems to be a better description of actual discoveries | Kuhn insists that a scientific field has one paradigm per field at one time. In general, a single paradigm will dominate its field, and two or three separate and competing paradigms could not normally coexist |
| Normal science allows for stability which Kuhn thinks is necessary for progress, but can still make radical changes when necessary (revolution) | Kuhn’s idea of incommensurability prevent us from recognizing progress that is made across paradigm shifts. Incommensurability of meaning has been challenged by both philosophers and historians (Later, Kuhn writes that there are theoretical commitments and standard that are constitutive of science and transcend individual paradigms, such as observational evidence, simplicity) |
| does Kuhn solve the holism about testing refutation that Popper and Empiricism faced? Kuhn agrees that we need to accept holism but it has more radical consequences in Kuhn’s theory= holism about meaning in Kuhn’s reason for thinking incommensurability of meaning holds across paradigm | there are historical examples of important changes that do not fit idea of a paradigm shift (e.g. computers, AI = technologies change how science is done without introducing new content) / interaction between fields not taken into account (sub-fields and inter-disciplinary) |
Footnotes
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Theory and Reality, Godfrey-Smith, p. 90 ↩