Paradigms as Maps

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn writes that “Successive paradigms tell us different things about the population of the universe and about that population’s behavior.” Here’s an example:

By the mid-eighteenth century that interpretation [of gravity being innate, as suggested by Newton’s Principia] had been almost universally accepted, and the result was a genuine reversion (which is not the same as retrogression) to a scholastic standard. Innate attractions and repulsions joined size, shape, position, and motion as physically irreducible primary properties of matter.

The resulting change in standards and problem-field of physical science was once again consequential. By the 1740’s, for example, electricians could speak of the attractive “virtue” of the electric fluid without thereby inviting the ridicule [which was common] a century before. As they did so, electrical phenomena increasingly displayed an order different [my emphasis] from the one they had shown when viewed as the effects of a mechanical effluvium that could act only by contact.

(I began writing this post yesterday, and I can’t remember what I was going to say about the above quote, but I like the highlighted part.)

Later in the same chapter, “The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions,” Kuhn says that the paradigm “functions by telling the scientist about the entities that nature does and does not contain and about the ways in which those entities behave.” It’s a map of sorts, of which he says that “since nature is too complex and varied to be explored at random, [it] is as essential as observation and experiment to science’s continuing development.”

But paradigms are more than maps; they also provide scientists “with some of the directions essential for map-making. In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mixture.” So scientific revolutions involve often complete redefinitions of the practice of a scientific community.

I’m associating this with metaphors for a piece of software under development, and thinking about how the choice of metaphors would allow for different things to be expressed about the problem-field. So far, Kuhn hasn’t talked about the metaphorical aspect of scientific theories—if such a thing exists, or if they only exist during the formation of the theory, such as Einstein’s ride on a light beam or Kepler’s mysticism, or to explain theories after the fact, such as what Brian Greene does in The Elegant Universe, with ants walking on garden hoses, etc.