The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Summary

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn challenges traditional views of scientific progress as a linear, cumulative process. Kuhn introduces the concept of paradigm shifts to describe the sudden, sweeping and transformative changes in scientific thought that occur when established frameworks can not hold up to new experimental data anymore and are replaced by new and vastly different ones.

He argues, that scientific insight doesn't grow linearly, but in fits and starts, with periods of normal science punctuated by revolutionary upheavals. Science is based on paradigms and paradigm shifts happen when there is a crisis, when the old paradigms are not enough to explain the new data anymore and a new paradigm needs to be created to explain how the world works.

Therefore scientific progress is split into two distinct phases: "normal" science, and "revolutions". During normal science, anomalies—phenomena that cannot be explained by the current paradigm—accumulate over time. During revolutions these anomalies accumulate to a point where the current paradigm is no longer tenable, and a new paradigm is proposed to explain the data. Examples of this include Einsteins theory of relativity, the Copernican revolution, quantum mechanics, or the theory of evolution.

Paradigms are often not unifiable, meaning that the old science can't be reconciled with the new approach, they are fundamentally different in quality. They replace one another.

The Stages of Scientific Development

Pre-Science: A field is in its infancy, characterized by competing schools of thought without a unified framework.

Normal Science: The field adopts a dominant paradigm, and research focuses on elaborating and applying it.

Crisis: Persistent anomalies undermine confidence in the existing paradigm.

Revolution: A new paradigm emerges, replacing the old framework and redefining the field.

Post-Revolution, back to Normal Science: The new paradigm becomes established, and the cycle begins again.

All of this leads to a few interesting implications:

• Science is a social process, it depends on the community of scientists to accept a new paradigm.
• This means that scientific truth at any given point is relative to the current paradigm.
• And this adherence to paradigms influences the perception of data and interpretation of results, making science less objective than people tend to think. People can't unsee their paradigms.

To me this whole idea reminds me a lot of Planck's Principle. Science progresses one funeral at a time.

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 ... An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth. – Max Planck

Detailed Notes

The answers you get depend on the questions you ask.

The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.

In science [...] novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.

Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.

The depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession, the same profession that places the highest of all values upon factual details of other sorts.

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like.

Novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong.

Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations.

Textbooks, however, being pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them.