Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"

COMM 6330 – Short paper 1 Pranshu Arya 9/21/09 Section A Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an exploration of the body of knowledge, which once accepted comes to be known as science, in its journey to gain endorsement by the seat of authority that is the scientific community. He drafts his analysis around a dichotomy, one side of which is “normal science” and the other “revolutionary science.” By his definition, the former is cumulative in nature and the latter is discontinuous. He expounds on both these “types” of science, describing their traits and how they interface through the breakdown of normal science via anomalies which lead to crises which lead to revolutions and paradigm shifts. Kuhn's view of the progression and evolution of science is that each distinct period in a particular science's life is characterized via a paradigm, which, once in place, paves the way and sets the direction for normal science in which scientists solve “puzzles” – determined by the prevalent paradigm – to enlarge the repository of knowledge pertaining to their field of study. In their activity of normal science, scientists inevitably encounter anomalies which the paradigm fails to predict and/or explain. Through further exploration these anomalies eventually lead to crises within that discipline, the only solutions to which are found via a non-continuous and non-instantaneous change of paradigm. At this point a new perspective and perhaps even language are established in that science, and the process of cumulative discovery begins anew under the tutelage of the new paradigm. In this brief exploration of his theory, I have tried to trace Kuhn's claims and assertions, as much as possible, through his own words.

Kuhn begins – or rather, states that he should have began (Kuhn, 1996, p.176) – his thesis with a definition of the community, because everything in his theory, from the definition of truth to the shift in paradigm, is instituted for and by a community of scientists. The concept of community is as central

Pranshu Arya COMM 6330 2 to his argument as the term paradigm. In the Postscript to his original work, Kuhn gives the circular relationship between these two as “A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm” (p.176). He further states that a paradigm governs “not a subject matter but rather a group of practitioners” (p.180).

In Kuhn's own words, a scientific community consists “of practitioners of a scientific specialty.

To an extent unparalleled in most other fields, they have undergone similar educations and professional initiations; in the process they have absorbed the same technical literature and drawn many of the same lessons from it” (p.177). Kuhn has more to say about textbooks and their function in the methodical perpetuation of normal science. He starts with stating that “the domination of a mature science by such texts significantly differentiates its developmental pattern from that of other fields” (p.137). Given that “the results of scientific research show no obvious dependence upon the historical context of the inquiry” (p.138), why burden students of science with the historical context behind the current state of their discipline, rather than just focusing on its truths arrived at by consensus (of the community they are becoming a part of)? New practitioners of science are being prepared, in good faith, for the practice of normal science, and to achieve that aim and in the interest of time, “textbooks are systematically substituted for the creative scientific literature that made them possible” (p.165). Textbooks, hence, serve to bring new scientists up to speed on the current paradigm of their discipline, along with its accompanying language and problems of study; they may or may not also provide a brief history of past paradigms and their corresponding problems. In the Postscript, Kuhn introduces the term “exemplars” (p.187), defined as the “concrete problem-solutions” through which students learn “how their job is to be done.”

Once a community is established, normal science begins its process of cumulative discovery.

As I have stated earlier, Kuhn considers normal science the phase between any consecutive revolutions

Pranshu Arya COMM 6330 3 of paradigm shift. His definition at the beginning of Chapter 2 is that normal science “means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievement that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (p.10).

Normal science is characterized by: 1.

Absence of interest in achieving novelty – i.e., normal science is cumulative.

2.

Solving of puzzles with foreseeable solutions which are defined by the current paradigm

and agreed on by the community.

These characteristics are not unrelated, for the simple fact that, during normal scientific activity, scientists see what they expect to see. They solve problems they know to a strong degree of certainty will have solutions. Kuhn even states that normal science “often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments” (p.5). Lastly on this matter, I will note that Kuhn considers normal science to be centered around one of three foci: 1. That class of facts that the paradigm has shown to be particularly revealing of the nature of things (p.25).

2. Those facts that can be compared directly with predictions from the paradigm theory (p.26).

3. The fact-gathering activities of normal science (p.27).

In the course of normal scientific research, it is inevitable that sooner or later the observant scientist encounters anomalies, which are observations or outcomes to experiments that are contrary to expectations, or even more drastic, refuse to find explanation under the current paradigm – at which point the anomaly becomes a crisis. Kuhn clearly states that “Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm” (p.65), and that “All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research” (p.84). He further states that “every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another viewpoint, as a counter-

Pranshu Arya COMM 6330 4 instance and thus as a source of crisis” (p.79). Crises in science are stubborn, and do not readily lead to paradigm-rejection. Kuhn identifies three possible outcomes to a scientific crisis (p.84): 1. Normal science ultimately proves able to handle the crisis-provoking problem.

2. The problem resists even apparently radical new approaches.

3. The emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance.

The crisis-resolution process is described as: The early attacks upon the resistant problem will have followed the paradigm rules quite closely. But with continuing resistance, more and more of the attacks upon it will have involved some minor or not so minor articulation of the paradigm, no two of them quite alike, each partially successful, but none sufficiently so to be accepted as paradigm by the group. Through this proliferation of divergent articulations...the rules of normal science become increasingly blurred. (p.83) Finally, crisis, he says, “simultaneously loosens the stereotypes and provides the incremental data necessary for a fundamental paradigm shift” (p.89).

In this way the candidate for a new paradigm emerges, which Kuhn defines rather vaguely as an “achievement” that was “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity,” and “sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve” (p.10).

Acceptance of a paradigm, Kuhn says, is initially largely on the basis of faith, which again reinforces his claim that paradigm and community are intertwined in an inextricable way. Prior to its acceptance “The success of a paradigm...[is] largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples” (p.23). Of the pre-paradigm period, Kuhn says that it is “regularly marked by frequent and deep debates over legitimate methods, problems, and standards of solution” (p.48).

How does a new paradigm come to be accepted? Kuhn clearly states that “there is no standard

Pranshu Arya COMM 6330 5 higher than the assent of the relevant community” (p.94). I find his stance unambiguous, then, that truth is determined via consensus, and not the other way around. The acceptance of a new paradigm is not contingent upon its comparison with nature, but rather against a rival paradigm (p.145). It makes sense, Kuhn states, to ask “which of two actual and competing theories fits the facts better” (p.147).

He is clear in his stance yet limited in explanation when he says that “In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds” (p.150). Individuals may accept a new paradigm for any number of reasons – including personal and aesthetic. What concerns the historian is those arguments which eventually win over the community (p.153), for one paradigm has to prevail, which brings us to one of the most important traits of paradigms: only one paradigm may be in effect at any given time, because, as Kuhn says, “there must be a conflict between the paradigm that discloses anomaly and the one that later renders the anomaly law-like” (p.97). On theory-formation he says: if new theories are called forth to resolve anomalies in the relation of an existing theory to nature, then the successful new theory must somewhere permit predictions that are different from those derived from its predecessor. That difference could not occur if the two were logically compatible. In the process of being assimilated, the second must displace the first.

The very definition of a scientific revolutions is “those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one” (p.92).

A change in paradigm is no small thing. Paradigms “are the source of the methods, problemfield, and standards of solution accepted by any mature scientific community at any given time” (p.103), therefore, “the reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science.” In one of his strongest statements Kuhn states that “The normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually

Pranshu Arya COMM 6330 6 incommensurable with that which has gone before.” (italics mine) An an example of this incommensurability, Kuhn cites the difference in meaning of the term mass between Newtonian and Einsteinian dynamics, where in the latter mass is convertible with energy (p.101).

My broader view of Kuhn's theory is that through paradigm shifts, science progressively becomes more accurate in its depiction of nature. Of progress, Kuhn says that the result of any creative work, whether of scientists or non-scientists, is progress (p.162). “No creative school,” he says, “recognizes a category of work that is, on the one hand, a creative success, but is not, on the other, an addition to the collective achievement of the group.” Progress for Kuhn can be defined without necessarily having an end goal toward anything (p.170). He says that we may relinquish the notion “that changes of paradigm carry scientists and who learn from them closer and closer to the truth,” which reaffirms for me Kuhn's take on the definition of truth as that which is accepted by a community of like-minded scientists as the best-yet explanation of the phenomena which it is their life's work to study.

The significance of Kuhn's work is, first and foremost, in that it provides a schematic of the evolution – often through revolution – of science. Whether accurate or not, his depiction is accessible and serves as a starting point for debate and discussion on what constitutes science, truth, progress, and, most importantly, whether and to what degree is the journey of science a rhetorical one.

Sources: Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press.

Pranshu Arya COMM 6330 7 Section B2 Stephen Brush, in his paper “Should the History of Science be Rated X?”, asks whether contemporary accounts of the history of science are detrimental to science education. Specifically, he charges that these modern pictures of the history of science “do violence to” (Brush, 1974, p.1164) the ideal and – I would venture to say – sanctified image of scientists as “rational, open-minded investigators.” He is uneasy with Thomas Kuhn's denial of the accumulative nature of scientific knowledge. I posit, however, that Kuhn's denial is not incompatible with the picture of scientists that Brush wants to preserve. Kuhn's account, I will argue, is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and bears no impact on how scientists go about their work or how that work is viewed within their community and the world-at-large. I believe that a defense of Kuhn in light of Brush's allegations requires as much an examination of Brush's argument as of Kuhn's.

When Stephen Brush talks about scientists as “proceeding methodically, grounded incontrovertibly in the outcome of controlled experiments, and seeking objectively for the truth,” he is essentially invoking what Kuhn defines in his theory as “normal science.” We are only concerned with normal science in this analysis because the crux of Kuhn's ground-breaking argument is that revolutions are discontinuous and non-methodical, but also that they are not so much made as they happen, through a process that is intrinsic to science itself (of which methodical normal science is a fundamental part). So what is in fact under the scientist's domain of control is the practice of normal science. It is imperative that the determined nature of normal science be equally stressed in science education as the disruptive character of revolutions.

I begin, admittedly, with a reaching interpretation of Brush. Normal science, Kuhn says, and as I noted in Section A, is characterized by puzzle-solving and not the search for novelty, which, in and of itself, may not seem that exciting. Brush's concern with this might be that if normal science is cast

Pranshu Arya COMM 6330 8 under such an unflattering light, young scientists might be averse to inculcating the discipline that is absolutely necessary to the steady perpetuation of science, and which paves the way for revolutions in science to occur. Kuhn addresses this objection by stating that although the outcomes of normal puzzle-solving are anticipated, “the way to achieve that outcome remains very much in doubt.

Bringing a normal research problem to a conclusion is achieving the anticipated in a new way” (Kuhn, 1996, p.36). This is then, in a narrow sense, a novelty for the small specialized community that is working on a specific scientific problem in a new and unprecedented way. “Normal science,” says Kuhn, “is a highly determined activity, but it need not be entirely determined by rules” (p.42). Normal science, in my view, is a characteristically rational and methodical endeavor that is not immune to the breakthroughs that entice scientists to their craft in the first place.

Brush is concerned about the impressionability of students of science. He quotes Kuhn in his paper, saying that a student “might discover other ways of regarding the problems discussed in his textbook, but … he would also meet problems, concepts, and standards of solution that his future profession has long since discarded and replaced” (p.1165). The student thus might be led, Brush argues, “to waste his time doing work that would not be acceptable for publication in scientific journals.” I have two issues with this: 1. Brush does not clearly specify what level of studentship he is talking about. On the one hand his quotation of Kuhn suggests a young student who is just beginning his study. On the other, he is talking about mature students who are concerned with being published in scientific journals. If he is indeed concerned with the latter – which he should be since that is the level of expertise at which discoveries and anomalies occur – I believe he is underestimating the science student's capability to assimilate historical context into a larger picture in his/her mind of the practice of science.

Pranshu Arya COMM 6330 9 2. I would also invoke Kuhn's emphasis on the community of scientists, without which there is neither revolution nor normal science. That community serves to keep scientists in check as to the propriety of their methods and expectations, because, barring a Newton and Einstein, breakthroughs in science are arrived at only through the frustration and failures that often plague normal scientific research. Even if individual scientific research is guided by selfinterest and even on whim, the need for communal approval and endorsement will sooner or later bring the scientist in line with the accepted practices of his/her craft.

The bottom line is that while keeping young initiates in the dark about the historical context of their field of study serves the interest of time, it is no substitute for the young initiates seeing the larger picture as Kuhn lays it out and arriving at the conclusion for themselves that science is not a haphazard activity but a rational and methodical inquiry into nature that is often pushed forward disproportionately by discoveries arrived at via normal methods of study.

Let me briefly turn from experimental science and address theoretical science, which again, in my interpretation, is a rational venture under Kuhn's normal science. Once a paradigm is accepted, says Kuhn, the scientist seeks to solve those problems to which current theories can provide answers.

Indeed, the function of theoretical work in normal science is to find new applications of the paradigm or to increase precision in current applications (p.30). Kuhn flatly states that normal science is not concerned with novelty of theory (p.52). In regards to teaching and learning, he says that theory is learned through the study of applications (p.47). I infer from these statements that normal science can be characterized as the time for theory refinement; theory-formation, according to Kuhn, occurs in preparadigm times and in the face of crises (p.61). For Brush's allegations to be relevant, it would have to be assumed that the articulation and refinement of theory involves something other than procedural science, but that is clearly not the case. Therefore, scientists need not be worried about lack of method

Pranshu Arya COMM 6330 10 during periods of normal science – in regard to both experimental as well as theoretical science.

In claiming that Kuhn's account is descriptive rather than prescriptive, I mean to suggest that Kuhn is talking about how scientific activity should be viewed, not how it is conducted, and where concerns normal science, I find Kuhn to view it as a methodical practice. One place where I find this clearly implied is in Kuhn's emphasis, in Subsection 3 of the Postscript to his work, on students learning by recognizing resemblance between problems. “Scientists solve puzzles,” says Kuhn, “by modeling them on previous puzzle-solutions, often with only minimal recourse to symbolic generalizations.” So while not an overt endorsement of the methodical, learning-from-example nature of normal science, Kuhn is clearly in acknowledgment of it.

Nowhere in his work do I find Kuhn claiming that scientists should work in such and such a way, or that science ought to evolve and progress in a certain way. For young students of the impressionable kind, it should be emphasized that what they are reading is one man's picture of science, and not something that even remotely suggests how their work daily work ought to be done; it needs to be emphasized that revolutions do not happen unaided, but only occur on the heels of earnest normal science. Furthermore, I find that Thomas Kuhn's relativistic, community-endorsed view of scientific truth has no bearing on the conduct of scientific inquiry. Brush states that the acceptance of a new paradigm is based “at least partially on subjective grounds” (p.1167), but then he proceeds to quote Harvard scholar Israel Schaeffer: The notion of a fixed observational given, of a constant descriptive language, of a shared methodology of investigation, of a rational community advancing its knowledge of the real world – all have been subjected to severe and mounting criticism from a variety of directions.

The overall tendency of such criticism has been to call into question the very conception of scientific thought as a responsible enterprise of reasonable men.

It is unclear to me on what basis Brush makes the jump from some subjectivity to the loss of all

Pranshu Arya COMM 6330 11 objectivity.

In a nutshell, I agree that science in Kuhn's world, in its broadest definition as a description of nature, is non-cumulative. Paradigms shatter perspectives; they introduce new terms, render others obsolete, and redefine yet others. However, the daily scientific activity which initially legitimizes paradigms and later leads to their demise, cannot be anything but methodical. This is partly due to the nature of science itself, and partly due to it being a communal discipline. Science is built on hypotheses, experiments, and observations, none of which can be conducted fruitfully without some rational process guiding the scientist performing them. Secondly, the need to communicate scientific findings with others of the community necessitates that scientific work be procedural and not random or haphazard.

I will close by reiterating that Brush's argument is weakened by his ambiguous usage of the term “student”, as well as an overestimation of the impressionability of the advanced student of science. And even if a mature student is naïve about the practice of his/her craft, the fact is that, again, unless he/she is a Newton or an Einstein, he/she has a sufficient network of constraints – from an advisor that is well-versed with the precepts of the scientific community to the conditions and expectations of the grant(s) funding his/her research – that he/she cannot but observe the procedures applicable to his/her work in order to be a successful scientist. While Brush cites convincing examples of the “improper behavior” (p.1170) of scientists, the impartial reader will not, in my opinion, find in Kuhn's work a condoning or justification of that kind of practice.

Sources: Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press.

Brush, S. G. (1974). "Should the history of science be rated X?: The way scientists behave (according to historians) might not be a good model for students." Science 143(4130): 1164-1172.