Paradigms and Constrained Universes of Expression

A shared paradigm is a shared vision for a scientific community. It guides research, but it also constrains it—in a good way, as scientists become more focused on articulating the paradigm, refining the theories, filling in the blanks; in a bad way, because it makes it difficult to see things not anticipated by the paradigm.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn asks how “normal science” (see the previous posts), which is all about investigating with greater precision the details of the paradigm, still can produce novelty.

To explain this, Kuhn uses as example a psychological experiment, where test subjects were shown a series of playing cards. Some of the cards weren’t normal cards, but cards such as red six of spades or black four of hearts. The anomalous cards were identified as normal cards, until they were exposed more often. Then, Kuhn writes, the “subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. […] Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation.”

Kuhn continues:

Either as a metaphor or because it reflects the nature of the mind, that psychological experiment provides a wonderfully simple and cogent schema for the process of scientific discovery. In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation. Initially, only the anticipated and usual are experienced even under circumstances where anomaly is later to be observed. Further acquaintance, however, does result in awareness of something wrong or does relate the effect to something that has gone wrong before. That awareness of anomaly opens a period in which conceptual categories are adjusted until the initially anomalous has become the anticipated. At this point the discovery has been completed.

It seems that a shared vision is important because it allows us to focus. It might not be a correct vision, but because it enables us to focus on the details, the esoterics, and because we’re inclined to see anomalies only after having been exposed to them for a while, this ensures that we, in time, will find the correct vision.

Perhaps, if we would immediately notice anomalies, we would never be able to focus on something long enough to produce anything persistent. It reminds me of “thrashing,” which in control theory is what happens when a system gets flooded with feedback, when it receives new feedback as soon as it has begun responding to previous feedback.

But I might be interpreting Kuhn incorrectly here.

Anyway, what has this got to do with constrained universes of expression? Well, I’m still confused about the effect of the constraints on any type of universe, but gut feel is that the constraints play an important role in making genres, schools, formats, etc. boom. And in some way, what Kuhn writes seems to acknowledge this.

Here, the constraints set by the paradigm enable practitioners to get to work. In a chapter titled “Normal Science as Puzzle-solving,” Kuhn examines puzzle-solving as a metaphor for scientific discovery:

Puzzles are, in the entirely standard meaning here employed, that special category of problems that can serve to test ingenuity or skill in solution. Dictionary illustrations are “jigsaw puzzle” and “crossword puzzle,” and it is the characteristics that these share with the problems of normal science that we now need to isolate. […] It is no criterion of goodness in a puzzle that its outcome be intrinsically interesting or important. On the contrary, the really pressing problems, e.g., a cure for cancer or the design of a lasting peace, are often not puzzles at all, largely because they may not have any solution.

Here, Kuhn likens this with solving a jigsaw puzzle by randomly picking pieces from two different puzzle boxes. “Though intrinsic value is no criterion for a puzzle,” he writes, “the assured existence of a solution is.” He continues:

[O]ne of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions.

A bit further on, Kuhn mentions rules, which fired my CUE neurons:

If it is to classify as a puzzle, a problem must be characterized by more than an assured solution. There must also be rules that limit both the nature of acceptable solutions and the steps by which they are to be obtained. To solve a jigsaw puzzle is not, for example, merely “to make a picture.” […] To [solve a puzzle] all the pieces must be used, their plain sides must be turned down, and they must be interlocked without forcing until no holes remain. Those are among the rules that govern jigsaw-puzzle solutions.

It is interesting to see how he manages to employ an imperfect metaphor to reveal things about normal science. He points out the parts which match, as wall as those who don’t, and explains why. In the case of rules, he writes that a “broadened use of the term “rule”—one that will occasionally equate it with “established viewpoint” or with “preconception”—then the problems accessible within a given research tradition display something much like this set of puzzle characteristics.” So he also bends the metaphor to suit his needs.

Anyway, rules are constraints, and Kuhn sees as rules preconceptions and established viewpoints; commitments to concepts, theories, instruments, and methodologies. In the final paragraph of the chapter, he writes:

The existence of a strong network of commitments—conceptual, theoretical, instrumental, and methodological—is a principal source of the metaphor that relates normal science to puzzle-solving. Because it provides rules that tell the practitioner of a mature specialty what both the world and his science are like, he can concentrate with assurance upon the esoteric problems that these rules and existing knowledge define for him. What then personally challenges him is how to bring the residual puzzle to a solution. In these and other respects a discussion of puzzles and of rules illuminates the nature of normal scientific practice.

But he also adds that rules aren’t a prerequisite. “[P]aradigms can guide research even in the absence of rules,” he writes and therefore suggests that rules “derive from paradigms.”