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Combined, relativity and quantum physics overthrew not only old science but basic metaphysics.
“The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other” (78).
“To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.”
Theories should be accurate in their predictions, consistent, broad in scope, present phenomena in an orderly and coherent way, and be fruitful in suggesting new phenomena or relationships between phenomena.
Moreover, “an individual’s transfer of allegiance from theory to theory is often better described as conversion than as choice”
For a while people talked about the book as being one of the most cited works about anything—right up there with the usual suspects, namely the Bible and Freud.
recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.
If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today. Given these alternatives, the historian must choose the latter.
Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.
Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.
Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions?
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much
Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.
‘normal science’ means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.
Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.
Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as ‘paradigms,’ a term that relates closely to ‘normal science.’
That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i.e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition. Because
what sense is the shared paradigm a fundamental unit for the student of scientific development, a unit that cannot be fully reduced
History suggests that the road to a firm research consensus is extraordinarily arduous.
To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted. What
“Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
century and a half ago, when the institutional pattern of scientific specialization first developed
that enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies.
No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others.
But those restrictions, born from confidence in a paradigm, turn out to be essential to the development of science.
a paradigm assures them that the facts they seek are important.
The existence of the paradigm sets the problem to be solved; often the paradigm theory is implicated directly in the design of apparatus able to solve the problem. Without the Principia, for example, measurements made with the Atwood machine would have meant nothing at all.
Perhaps it is not apparent that a paradigm is prerequisite to the discovery of laws like these. We often hear that they are found by examining measurements undertaken for their own sake and without theoretical commitment. But history offers no support for so excessively Baconian a method.
Or again, the men who designed the experiments that were to distinguish between the various theories of heating by compression were generally the same men who had made up the versions being compared. They were working both with fact and with theory, and their work produced not simply new information but a more precise paradigm, obtained by the elimination of ambiguities that the original from which they worked had retained. In many sciences, most normal work is of this sort.
These three classes of problems—determination of significant fact, matching of facts with theory, and articulation of theory—exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical.
Work under the paradigm can be conducted in no other way, and to desert the paradigm is to cease practicing the science it defines.
Yet even in cases like these the range of anticipated, and thus of assimilable, results is always small compared with the range that imagination can conceive.
And the project whose outcome does not fall in that narrower range is usually just a research failure, one which reflects not on nature but on the scientist.
Therefore, they remained mere facts, unrelated and unrelatable to the continuing progress of electrical research.
One of the reasons why normal science seems to progress so rapidly is that its practitioners concentrate on problems that only their own lack of ingenuity should keep them from solving. If,
The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things.
The scientist must, for example, be concerned to understand the world and to extend the precision and scope with which it has been ordered.
Rules, I suggest, derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide research even in the absence of rules.
They can, that is, agree in their identification of a paradigm without agreeing on, or even attempting to produce, a full interpretation or rationalization of it.
Paradigms may be prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them.
Normal science can proceed without rules only so long as the relevant scientific community accepts without question the particular problem-solutions already achieved.
While paradigms remain secure, however, they can function without agreement over rationalization or without any attempted rationalization at all.
by studying many of the same books and achievements may acquire rather different paradigms in the course of professional specialization.
Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science. It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the expected.
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.
the fact that a major paradigm revision was needed to see what Lavoisier saw must be the principal reason why Priestley was, to the end of his long life, unable to see it. Two
In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation. Initially,
The more precise and far-reaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator it provides of anomaly and hence of an occasion for paradigm change.
The very fact that a significant scientific novelty so often emerges simultaneously from several laboratories is an index both to the strongly traditional nature of normal science and to the completeness with which that traditional pursuit prepares the way for its own change.
