The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens

Does contemporary science display the paradigmatic structure described by Kuhn, in which a single ideology and methodology guides all scientists working in any given domain? Ask the sociologists. Was there a sudden and unprecedented onset of paradigm-governed groupthink in the Scientific Revolution? Ask the historians. Do scientists fight to preserve the status quo, as Kuhn’s theory would tend to suggest, or to overthrow it, as Popper would have it? For contemporary scientists, ask the sociologists; for the scientists of yore, the historians. Over the past few decades, the answers have come in. They are almost entirely negative. There is little evidence, as you will see, for a dispassionate Popperian critical spirit, but also little evidence for universal subservience to a paradigm. Indeed, in their thinking about the connection between theory and data, scientists seem scarcely to follow any rules at all.