Paradigms and Scientific Revolutions

I’m reading Thomas S. Kuhn’s outstanding The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and I’m just going to dump the thoughts I’ve had during the first five chapters.

The book defines “paradigms” as “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.” Science, Kuhn writes,

repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.

In other words, new paradigms emerge during scientific revolutions.

“Normal science” is the work that takes place when a scientific community has a paradigm, and it deals with articulating the paradigm, studying esoterics, filling in the blanks pointed out by the paradigm, etc.

In the first chapter, Kuhn writes that science was seen as proceeding in increments of knowledge, linearly.. But historians found it more and more difficult to research the history of science as a development by accumulation. That model didn’t have room for “the community’s rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it.” A new theory, Kuhn writes,

is seldom or never just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man and never overnight. No wonder historians have had difficulty in dating precisely this extended process that their vocabulary impels them to view as an isolated event.

[–––] Competition between segments of the scientific community is the only historical process that ever actually results in the rejection of one previously accepted theory or in the adoption of another.

The image Kuhn gives of the structure of scientific revolutions makes me think of complexity theory, a field which didn’t exist at the time of the book’s writing. Another book from the same time, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities also made me think of complexity theory. The reason for this is that both books talk about what the macro effects are of the interactions of many people as individuals, and as groups—scientists in the case of Kuhn, and city dwellers in the case of Jacobs.

The book gives me ideas about all kinds of things, but mainly about two: what the implications of his findings are for software projects, and for my ideas about constrained universes of expression. I’m going to continue those two threads in separate posts.