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Because it demands large-scale paradigm destruction and major shifts in the problems and techniques of normal science, the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity.
da Novara, held that no system so cumbersome and inaccurate as the Ptolemaic had become could possibly be true of nature. And Copernicus himself wrote in the Preface to the De Revolutionibus that the astronomical tradition he inherited had finally created only a monster.
His famous preface still provides one of the classic descriptions of a crisis state.6
That proliferation of versions of a theory is a very usual symptom of crisis.
The novel theory seems a direct response to crisis.
It is often said that if Greek science had been less deductive and less ridden by dogma, heliocentric astronomy might have begun its development eighteen centuries earlier than it did.
Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.
So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of those tools.
The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science—retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it.
Once a first paradigm through which to view nature has been found, there is no such thing as research in the absence of any paradigm.
by proliferating versions of the paradigm, crisis loosens the rules of normal puzzle-solving in ways that ultimately permit a new paradigm to emerge.
Given the slightest reason for doing so, the man who reads a science text can easily take the applications to be the evidence for the theory, the reasons why it ought to be believed.
The scientist who pauses to examine every anomaly he notes will seldom get significant work done.
And in the latter effort, more than in any other part of the post-paradigm development of science, he will look almost like our most prevalent image of the scientist. He will, in the first place, often seem a man searching at random, trying experiments just to see what will happen,
Simultaneously, since no experiment can be conceived without some sort of theory, the scientist in crisis will constantly try to generate speculative theories that, if successful, may disclose the road to a new paradigm and, if unsuccessful, can be surrendered with relative ease.
But that is not to say that the search for assumptions (even for non-existent ones) cannot be an effective way to weaken the grip of a tradition upon the mind and to suggest the basis for a new one. It
the analytical thought experimentation that bulks so large in the writings of Galileo, Einstein, Bohr, and others is perfectly calculated to expose the old paradigm to existing knowledge in ways that isolate the root of crisis with a clarity unattainable in the laboratory.12
Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.
The proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals, all these are symptoms of a transition from normal to extraordinary research.
In both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution.
As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community.
In the evolution of science new knowledge would replace ignorance rather than replace knowledge of another and incompatible sort. Of course, science (or some other enterprise, perhaps less effective) might have developed in that fully cumulative manner.
despite the immense plausibility of that ideal image, there is increasing reason to wonder whether it can possibly be an image of science.
The man who takes historic fact seriously must suspect that science does not tend toward the ideal that our image of its cumulativeness has suggested. Perhaps it is another sort of enterprise.
Paradigms provide all phenomena except anomalies with a theory-determined place in the scientist’s field of vision.
Though logical inclusiveness remains a permissible view of the relation between successive scientific theories, it is a historical implausibility. A century ago it would, I think, have been possible to let the case for the necessity of revolutions rest at this point. But today, unfortunately, that cannot be done because the view of the subject developed above cannot be maintained if the most prevalent contemporary interpretation of the nature and function of scientific theory is accepted. That interpretation, closely associated with early logical positivism and not categorically rejected by
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such a limitation prohibits the scientist from claiming to speak “scientifically” about any phenomenon not already observed. Even in its present form the restriction forbids the scientist to rely upon a theory in his own research whenever that research enters an area or seeks a degree of precision for which past practice with the theory offers no precedent.
that point too is virtually a tautology. Without commitment to a paradigm there could be no normal science.
Furthermore, that commitment must extend to areas and to degrees of precision for which there is no full precedent. If it did not, the paradigm could provide no puzzles that had not already been solved.
Is it really any wonder that the price of significant scientific advance is a commitment that runs the risk of being wrong?
But paradigms differ in more than substance, for they are directed not only to nature but also back upon the science that produced them.
They are the source of the methods, problem-field, and standards of solution accepted by any mature scientific community at any given time. As a result, the reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science.
The normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.
Changes in the standards governing permissible problems, concepts, and explanations can transform a science.
No wonder that some historians have argued that the history of science records a continuing increase in the maturity and refinement of man’s conception of the nature of science.11 Yet the case for cumulative development of science’s problems and standards is even harder to make than the case for cumulation of theories.
Previously, we had principally examined the paradigm’s role as a vehicle for scientific theory. In that role it functions by telling the scientist about the entities that nature does and does not contain and about the ways in which those entities behave. That information provides a map whose details are elucidated by mature scientific research. And since nature is too complex and varied to be explored at random, that map is as essential as observation and experiment to science’s continuing development.
Like the issue of competing standards, that question of values can be answered only in terms of criteria that lie outside of normal science altogether, and it is that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary.
Surveying the rich experimental literature from which these examples are drawn makes one suspect that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself.
With scientific observation, however, the situation is exactly reversed. The scientist can have no recourse above or beyond what he sees with his eyes and instruments. If there were some higher authority by recourse to which his vision might be shown to have shifted, then that authority would itself become the source of his data, and the behavior of his vision would become a source of problems (as that of the experimental subject is for the psychologist). The same sorts of problems would arise if the scientist could switch back and forth like the subject of the gestalt experiments.
The very ease and rapidity with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with old instruments may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world.
though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.
Scientists then often speak of the “scales falling from the eyes” or of the “lightning flash” that “inundates” a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution. On other occasions the
But is sensory experience fixed and neutral? Are theories simply man-made interpretations of given data? The epistemological viewpoint that has most often guided Western philosophy for three centuries dictates an immediate and unequivocal, Yes! In the absence of a developed alternative, I find it impossible to relinquish entirely that viewpoint. Yet it no longer functions effectively, and the attempts to make it do so through the introduction of a neutral language of observations now seem to me hopeless.
But it is hard to make nature fit a paradigm. That is why the puzzles of normal science are so challenging and also why measurements undertaken without a paradigm so seldom lead to any conclusions at all.
But clearly, most of them, which were deliberately selected for their familiarity, have customarily been viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge.
one of the aspects of scientific work that most clearly distinguishes it from every other creative pursuit except perhaps theology.
Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field.
Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed.
Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific.
tends to see its discipline’s past developing linearly toward its present vantage.
