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a paradigm is rarely an object for replication. Instead, like an accepted judicial decision in the common law, it is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions.
The success of a paradigm—whether
is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples.
Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science.
normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.
By focusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems, the paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable.
And normal science possesses a built-in mechanism that ensures the relaxation of the restrictions that bound research whenever the paradigm from which they derive ceases to function effectively.
three normal foci for factual scientific investigation,
First is that class of facts that the paradigm has shown to be particularly revealing of the nature of things.
A second usual but smaller class of factual determinations is directed to those facts that, though often without much intrinsic interest, can be compared directly with predictions from the paradigm theory.
these pieces of special apparatus and many others like them illustrate the immense effort and ingenuity that have been required to bring nature and theory into closer and closer agreement.
the paradigm theory is implicated directly in the design of apparatus able to solve the problem.
A third class of experiments and observations exhausts, I think, the fact-gathering activities of normal science. It consists of empirical work undertaken to articulate the paradigm theory, resolving some of its residual ambiguities and permitting the solution of problems to which it had previously only drawn attention.
In fact, so general and close is the relation between qualitative paradigm and quantitative law that, since Galileo, such laws have often been correctly guessed with the aid of a paradigm years before apparatus could be designed for their experimental determination.
Articulate paradigm
1. Determine constants
2. Theories
3. Alternative way to apply paradigm
Then experiments are necessary to choose among the alternative ways of applying the paradigm to the new area of interest.
A part of normal theoretical work, though only a small part, consists simply in the use of existing theory to predict factual information of intrinsic value.
Their purpose is to display a new application of the paradigm or to increase the precision of an application that has already been made.
The need for work of this sort arises from the immense difficulties often encountered in developing points of contact between a theory and nature.
aimed to improve the match between Newton’s paradigm and observation of the heavens.
Even in the mathematical sciences there are also theoretical problems of paradigm articulation;
in both the more quantitative and more qualitative sciences, aim simply at clarification by reformulation.
They wished, that is, to exhibit the explicit and implicit lessons of the Principia and of Continental mechanics in a logically more coherent version, one that would be at once more uniform and less equivocal in its application to the newly elaborated problems of mechanics.
the problems of paradigm articulation are simultaneously theoretical and experimental;
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.
Even the project whose goal is paradigm articulation does not aim at the unexpected novelty.
To scientists, at least, the results gained in normal research are significant because they add to the scope and precision with which the paradigm can be applied.
Though its outcome can be anticipated, often in detail so great that what remains to be known is itself uninteresting, the way to achieve that outcome remains very much in doubt. Bringing a normal research problem to a conclusion is achieving the anticipated in a new way, and it requires the solution of all sorts of complex instrumental, conceptual, and mathematical puzzles.
Though intrinsic value is no criterion for a puzzle, the assured existence of a solution is.
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.
There must also be rules that limit both the nature of acceptable solutions and the steps by which they are to be obtained.
If we can accept a considerably broadened use of the term ‘rule’—one that will occasionally equate it with ‘established viewpoint’ or with ‘preconception’—then the problems accessible within a given research tradition display something much like this set of puzzle characteristics.
Similar sorts of restrictions bound the admissible solutions to theoretical problems.
The study of normal-scientific traditions discloses many additional rules, and these provide much information about the commitments that scientists derive from their paradigms.
explicit statements of scientific law and about scientific concepts and theories.
At a level lower or more concrete than that of laws and theories, there is, for example, a multitude of commitments to preferred types of instrumentation and to the ways in which accepted instruments may legitimately be employed.
higher level, quasi-metaphysical commitments that historical study so regularly displays.
still higher level, there is another set of commitments without which no man is a scientist. The scientist must, for example, be concerned to understand the world and to extend the precision and scope with which it has been ordered.
The existence of this strong network of commitments—conceptual, theoretical, instrumental, and methodological—is a principal source of the metaphor that relates normal science to puzzle-solving. Because it provides rules that tell the practitioner of a mature specialty what both the world and his science are like, he can concentrate with assurance upon the esoteric problems that these rules and existing knowledge define for him.
Rules, I suggest, derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide research even in the absence of rules.
The determination of shared paradigms is not, however, the determination of shared rules.
if the coherence of the research tradition is to be understood in terms of rules, some specification of common ground in the corresponding area is needed.
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.
Indeed, the existence of a paradigm need not even imply that any full set of rules exists.1
Though a discussion of some of the attributes shared by a number of games or chairs or leaves often helps us learn how to employ the corresponding term, there is no set of characteristics that is simultaneously applicable to all members of the class and to them alone.
Only if the families we named overlapped and merged gradually into one another—only, that is, if there were no natural families—would our success in identifying and naming provide evidence for a set of common characteristics corresponding to each of the class names we employ.
relate by resemblance and by modeling to one or another part of the scientific corpus which the community in question
already recognizes as among its established achievements.
paradigms could determine normal science without the intervention of discoverable rules.
severe difficulty of discovering the rules that have guided particular normal-scientific traditions.
