THOMAS KUHN’S HANDBOOK for a healthy science makes a rather different set of recommendations. The great Kuhnian insight is that what distinguishes modern science from ancient and medieval science—that is, from “natural philosophy”—is not a superior logical tool kit or advanced technology, but a special form of social organization, the “paradigm.” This all-encompassing methodological framework provides the moral, intellectual, and emotional support that is necessary, as Kuhn wrote, for a scientist to “investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable.”
