Thomas Kuhn's somewhat controversial book; an attempt to humanize science.
"If science is the constellation of facts, theories, and methods collected in current texts.... Scientific development becomes the piecemeal process by which these items have been added...to the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientific technique and knowledge." (1-2)
As a historian of science, Kuhn saw problems accumulating with the previous view of science as a process of development by accumulation. When, as a historian, he tried to answer some relatively simple questions (like, "Who discovered Oxygen?"), he found that the more he studied, the harder it was to definitively answer. If science is an incremental process, questions like that should be relatively easy to solve.
He also noticed that, while studying branches of historical science which were later proven wrong, it became hard to distinguish the types of things done under historical, but wrong, science from the types of things done under modern science.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, then, is two books in one. Every other paragraph is philosophical interpretation in the philosophy of science. The rest are a historical catalogue of events in the history of science that correspond with his view of revolutionary science.
The majority of the book leads towards an investigation of the cycle of scientific revolutions. According to Kuhn, all sciences start as a collection of 'incommensurable' (meaning incomprehensible to one another) worldviews, which then synthesize together to form a coherent paradigm. The ushering in of the paradigm starts a period of normal science. He notes that, in the historical record, scientists doing 'normal' research almost never attempt to test the long-accepted presuppositions of their particular paradigm.
Normal research conscripts scientists to work three different types of problems within the paradigm:
- Discovering facts; measuring constants, formulating experiments
- Matching theory with fact; verifying theories, predicting results
- Fully articulating the theories within the paradigm
In the course of these events, crises will occur where the paradigm fails to solve a problem. For some time scientists can reject the crisis as a non-issue: after all, the paradigm itself comes bundled with a heuristic for discovering puzzles -- but eventually some of the younger scientists will break off and found a new paradigm. This starts a period of revolutionary science, in which the two paradigms fight for the hearts and minds of the professional scientific community.
This period of revolutionary science is arguably the most 'scientific' thing that happens in Kuhn's interpretation of the scientific method. This is the only time that paradigms are actively tested for the purpose of being falsified. If the novel paradigm seems to be better than its predecessors, it will become a mature paradigm. Those who belonged to the old paradigm, the 'old guard', will continue to hold to the old paradigm, but will eventually die off.
After enough of the old guard have left, the revolutionary paradigm will establish itself as a normal science, and the cycle starts over again.
"Throughout the eighteenth century those scientists who tried to derive the observed motion of the moon from Newton's laws of motion and gravitation consistently failed to do so. As a result, some of them suggested replacing the inverse square law with a law that deviated from it at small distances. To do that, however, would have been to change the paradigm, to define a new puzzle, and not to solve the old one." (39)
Kuhn is often criticized for his imprecise definition of paradigm. One definition describes it as the patterns of scientific methodology. Another contains all the imprecise intuitions scientists use to begin to formulate hypotheses: metaphysical assumptions, abstract nonsense, etc. Someone went through the thin, two-hundred page paperback and counted up twenty-two different uses of the word 'paradigm', not including its superset, 'worldview'.
No doubt this is why paradigm is such a buzzword in today's business world -- it can mean almost anything you want it to mean!
Ugh, I never want to see that word again.