The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

by Thomas S. Kuhn

The book ends with the disconcerting thought that progress in science is not a simple line leading to the truth. It is more progress away from less adequate conceptions of, and interactions with, the world

Unfortunately it was also abused by the wave of skeptical intellectuals who called the very idea of truth in question.

Truth? Sure. There is truth. But there is no fact—only interpretation! Haha

It was Kant who set in place the idea of a scientific revolution.

1. “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents” away from what has been going on. And 2. they are open-ended, with plenty of problems for the “redefined group of practitioners to resolve.” Kuhn concluded: “Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as ‘paradigms’ ” (11, emphasis added).

All is well until the methods legitimated by the paradigm cannot cope with a cluster of anomalies; crisis results and persists until a new achievement redirects research and serves as a new paradigm.

It tends to discover what it expects to discover. Discovery comes not when something goes right but when something is awry, a novelty that runs counter to what was expected.

“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”

There is another phenomenon which one would not have noticed had it not been for Kuhn’s ideas. Large-scale investigations, in for example high-energy physics, usually require collaboration between many specialties which in detail are opaque to each other. How is this possible? They evolve a “trading-zone” analogous to the creoles that emerge when two very different linguistic groups engage in trade.40

Kuhn did reject a simple “correspondence theory” which says true statements correspond to facts about the world.

That Cavell, a philosopher mainly concerned with ethics and aesthetics, should have reached conclusions quite so congruent to my own has been a constant source of stimulation and encouragement to me.

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific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.

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.

Scientific discovery and science in general does not exist in a vacuum i.e. it is not asocial or ahistorical.

Normal science,

Scientific fact and theory are not categorically separable,

‘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.

They were better able to cope with complexity and novelty. These new ideas were better adapted than older ideas/paradigms. It feels like there is a bit of natural selection at work here, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that natural selection comes close to a process that guarantees a better outcome over time. But anyway, for the time being we are fortunate that natural selection (of ideas) has favored ones that are better adapted to accounting for Alternatively, we may have a religious paradigm—Dawkins save us. A religious paradigm provides symbolic meaning. It provides us with meaningful comfort. It assigns purposes to all the gaps—a hallmark of a religious person is their capacity to answer everything with platitudes—, and it fills adherents with meaning (I.e. those willing to sacrifice access to ‘the unknown’ *cough exposure to truth cough*).

Acquisition of a paradigm and of the more esoteric type of research it permits is a sign of maturity in the development of any given scientific field.

Because the crafts are one readily accessible source of facts that could not have been casually discovered, technology has often played a vital role in the emergence of new sciences.

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 the fluid theory of electricity did for the subgroup that held it, the Franklinian paradigm later did for the entire group of electricians. It suggested which experiments would be worth performing and which, because directed to secondary or to overly complex manifestations of electricity, would not.

the confidence that they were on the right track encouraged scientists to undertake more precise, esoteric, and consuming sorts of work.9

Francis Bacon’s acute methodological dictum: “Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.”

The new paradigm implies a new and more rigid definition of the field. Those unwilling or unable to accommodate their work to it must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group.11 Historically, they have often simply stayed in the departments of philosophy from which so many of the special sciences have been spawned.

the formation of specialized journals, the foundation of specialists’ societies, and the claim for a special place in the curriculum have usually been associated with a group’s first reception of a single paradigm.

we must recognize how very limited in both scope and precision a paradigm can be at the time of its first appearance.

There is a special kind of person that can see the potential within a paradigm and then go ahead and explore the products of the paradigm. And there is a potential (economic) benefit to being an early adopter of any sort of new system—should you manage to avoid being bogged down by a contestant re-learning and juggling.

Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself.

Normal science is like a series of little puzzles that maps a paradigm onto reality—that maps reality with a paradigm.

Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers.

This will be a line in my anti-STEM manifesto.

Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others.

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.

This strengthens my idea that a paradigm is a type of lens. The only deceptive thing about using a lens as an analogy is that a lens hints at the fact that you might be able to see a phenomenon in a full spectrum (wholeness). That is not the case with a paradigm. A paradigm is a sort of predictive model. Perhaps this is better: a paradigm is a sort of **contiguously structured predictive model**.

the redetermination of a previously known sort of fact.

often the paradigm theory is implicated directly in the design of apparatus able to solve the problem.

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.

>Be me: a newly discovered paradigm >Cool guy probably an 8/10 >Pretty good at predicting stuff that hasn’t happened yet >Douche scientists at scientific journals won’t publish me because I don’t fit in with any of the other paradigms >Wait a while >Douche scientists who don’t like me all die off >Get published >Scientists use me to predict more and more things. >These things actually happen >More and more scientists joint >They start contributing, and I get even better at predicting shit >Be several years later >Become the dominant scientific paradigm in my field >MFW some new Chad looking paradigm thinks he can explain shit better than me

Because they yielded neither consistent nor simple results, they could not be used to articulate the paradigm from which they derived. Therefore, they remained mere facts, unrelated and unrelatable to the continuing progress of electrical research.

The man who succeeds proves himself an expert puzzle-solver, and the challenge of the puzzle is an important part of what usually drives him on.

I am extremely thankful that other people are not like me: they actually enjoy crossword puzzles, play sudoku, and doing tedious things like changing a few tiny variables and jotting observed changes. The foundation of modern society is tedium and banality

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.

This kind of discovery is simultaneously an act of creation and discovery. *cough* parallel behavior to alchemists searching for the philosopher’s stone *cough* *cough* *wheeze*

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.

‘direct inspection of paradigms’

there is no set of characteristics that is simultaneously applicable to all members of the class and to them alone.

Paradigms may be prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them.

Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start encountered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications. A new theory is always announced together with applications to some concrete range of natural phenomena; without them it would not be even a candidate for acceptance.

Kuhn and Heidegger are smoking the same thing.

the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory.

Ready-to-hand is prior to present-at-hand Or was it the other way around? The idea is that we find ourselves using something well before we can theorize about what it is that we are doing. Yeah. This is essentially what Heidegger is on to.

That ability can, however, be understood without recourse to hypothetical rules of the game.

And now this sounds like Piaget

An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum.7 Presumably both men were talking of the same particle,

Assimilating a new sort of fact demands a more than additive adjustment of theory, and until that adjustment is completed—until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way—the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all.

Only when all the relevant conceptual categories are prepared in advance, in which case the phenomenon would not be of a new sort, can discovering that and discovering what occur effortlessly, together, and in an instant.

that gain was achieved only by discarding some previously standard beliefs or procedures and, simultaneously, by replacing those components of the previous paradigm with others.

Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.

once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place.