The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens

That is the Kuhnian answer to the motivation problem: mold scientists’ minds so that they fail to see that their research might be based on an error, on a false presupposition. If the validity of the paradigm is accepted without question, then the value of long and arduous empirical toil is also beyond question. The purpose of narrowing scientists’ horizons is to encourage them to work harder, to dig deeper, to go further than they would go if they could see their destination in perspective, if they had an accurate sense of their project’s proportion. Ultimately, it is only because scientists’ faith in the paradigm guarantees the importance of their research that they feel secure enough to work the paradigm to death—to experiment in such detail, with such precision, as to expose the paradigm’s shortcomings, to drive science to a crisis, and so to establish the preconditions for revolution. This is Kuhn’s marvelous paradox: A paradigm can change only because the scientists working within it cannot imagine it changing. It is their certainty of its success that secures its destruction.