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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.
Failure to achieve a solution discredits only the scientist and not the theory.
“It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.”
“handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework.”
Scientists do not see something as something else; instead, they simply see it.
It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.
It is no accident that the emergence of Newtonian physics in the seventeenth century and of relativity and quantum mechanics in the twentieth should have been both preceded and accompanied by fundamental philosophical analyses of the contemporary research tradition.
playable game
Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution?
And, once that polarization has occurred, political recourse fails. Because they differ about the institutional matrix within which political change is to be achieved and evaluated, because they acknowledge no supra-institutional framework for the adjudication of revolutionary difference, the parties to a revolutionary conflict must finally resort to the techniques of mass persuasion, often including force.
the historical study of paradigm change reveals very similar characteristics in the evolution of the sciences.
Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defense.
that cumulative acquisition of novelty is not only rare in fact but improbable in principle.
Only when these attempts at articulation fail do scientists encounter the third type of phenomena, the recognized anomalies whose characteristic feature is their stubborn refusal to be assimilated to existing paradigms. This type alone gives rise to new theories.
What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.
after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked in a different world.
The temptation to write history backward is both omnipresent and perennial. But scientists are more affected by the temptation to rewrite history, partly because the results of scientific research show no obvious dependence upon the historical context of the inquiry, and partly because, except during crisis and revolution, the scientist’s contemporary position seems so secure.
And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”8
The transfer of allegiance fom paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.
Why should the enterprise sketched above move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not? Why is progress a perquisite reserved almost exclusively for the activities we call science?
The man who argues that philosophy, for example, has made no progress emphasizes that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress.
The most esoteric of poets or the most abstract of theologians is far more concerned than the scientist with lay approbation of his creative work, though he may be even less concerned with approbation in general.
he is working only for an audience of colleagues, an audience that shares his own values and beliefs, the scientist can take a single set of standards for granted. He need not worry about what some other group or school will think and can therefore dispose of one problem and get on to the next more quickly than those who work for a more heterodox group.
Of course, it is a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox theology. But for normal-scientific work, for puzzle-solving within the tradition that the textbooks define, the scientist is almost perfectly equipped.
When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist’s perception of his discipline’s past.
The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community.
only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries.
The scientific community is a supremely efficient instrument for maximizing the number and precision of the problem solved through paradigm change.
We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.
It is now time to notice that until the last very few pages the term ‘truth’ had entered this essay only in a quotation from Francis Bacon. And even in those pages it entered only as a source for the scientist’s conviction that incompatible rules for doing science cannot coexist except during revolutions when the profession’s main task is to eliminate all sets but one.
But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything.
For many men the abolition of that teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin’s suggestions.5 The Origin of Species recognized no goal set either by God or nature.
What could ‘evolution,’ ‘development,’ and ‘progress’ mean in the absence of a specified goal? To many people, such terms suddenly seemed self-contradictory.
As currently used in philosophy of science, however, ‘theory’ connotes a structure far more limited in nature and scope than the one required here. Until the term can be freed from its current implications, it will avoid confusion to adopt another. For present purposes I suggest ‘disciplinary matrix’: ‘disciplinary’ because it refers to the common possession of the practitioners of a particular discipline; ‘matrix’ because it is composed of ordered elements of various sorts, each requiring further specification. All or most of the objects of group commitment that my original text makes
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I currently suspect that all revolutions involve, among other things, the abandonment of generalizations the force of which had previously been in some part that of tautologies.
Probably the most deeply held values concern predictions: they should be accurate; quantitative predictions are preferable to qualitative ones; whatever the margin of permissible error, it should be consistently satisfied in a given field;
Men did not all paint alike during the periods when representation was a primary value, but the developmental pattern of the plastic arts changed drastically when that value was abandoned.10 Imagine what would happen in the sciences if consistency ceased to be a primary value.
The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of this book. Exemplars will therefore require more attention than the other sorts of components of the disciplinary matrix.
The student discovers, with or without the assistance of his instructor, a way to see his problem as like a problem he has already encountered. Having seen the resemblance, grasped the analogy between two or more distinct problems, he can interrelate symbols and attach them to nature in the ways that have proved effective before. The law-sketch, say f = ma, has functioned as a tool, informing the student what similarities to look for, signaling the gestalt in which the situation is to be seen.
What I have been opposing in this book is therefore the attempt, traditional since Descartes but not before, to analyze perception as an interpretive process, as an unconscious version of what we do after we have perceived.
It is just because so very few ways of seeing will do that the ones that have withstood the tests of group use are worth transmitting from generation to generation.
In the metaphorical no less than in the literal use of ‘seeing,’ interpretation begins where perception ends.
Since the vocabularies in which they discuss such situations consist, however, predominantly of the same terms, they must be attaching some of those terms to nature differently, and their communication is inevitably only partial. As a result, the superiority of one theory to another is something that cannot be proved in the debate.
Debates over theory-choice cannot be cast in a form that fully resembles logical or mathematical proof.
Objects that were grouped in the same set before are grouped in different ones afterward and vice versa. Think of the sun, moon, Mars, and earth before and after Copernicus; of free fall, pendular, and planetary motion before and after Galileo; or of salts, alloys, and a sulphur–iron filing mix before and after Dalton. Since most objects within even the altered sets continue to be grouped together, the names of the sets are usually preserved.
Each will have learned to translate the other’s theory and its consequences into his own language and simultaneously to describe in his language the world to which that theory applies. That is what the historian of science regularly does (or should) when dealing with out-of-date scientific theories.
For most people translation is a threatening process, and it is entirely foreign to normal science.
They find my viewpoint relativistic, particularly as it is developed in the last section of this book. My remarks about translation highlight the reasons for the charge.
Imagine an evolutionary tree representing the development of the modern scientific specialties from their common origins in, say, primitive natural philosophy and the crafts. A line drawn up that tree, never doubling back, from the trunk to the tip of some branch would trace a succession of theories related by descent. Considering any two such theories, chosen from points not too near their origin, it should be easy to design a list of criteria that would enable an uncommitted observer to distinguish the earlier from the more recent theory time after time.
Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.
