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February 25, 2006
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, which I think of as being five years after the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik encouraged the US to react by pushing science in schools over some other subjects. A few years later when I was going to school, history had been almost left out of the curriculum. We no longer studied Latin either.
Kuhn examines the history of science, in particular what we thought of in school as physics and chemistry, to disclose how science evolves from one paradigm to another, passing through periods of relative calm "normal science" punctuated by crises provoking revolutions, when scientists' consensus worldview moves from an older, well-explored paradigm to a newer paradigm, one which does a better job of resolving the problems that led to crisis. It is, according to Kuhn, the rigidity of the scientific approach that forces scientists from paradigm to crisis. The trained scientist notices interesting anomalies when the current paradigm is well understood, and the methods of measurement it suggests turn up data that do not fit the paradigm. In a way the best creativity arises when the most rote and disciplined application of the current consensus is accompanied by a capacity to drop the current way of looking at the problem and try other approaches.
This book was not for me a page turner. I had to force myself to read it. Yet it is worth reading. I wonder about its implications for the study of history. I wonder how it applies to things I do. It ends with Kuhn comparing his explanation to Darwinian evolution in biology, which is to say that science does not progress towards a goal, but instead evolves to more and more complete and specialized explanations of observable facts. For some reason that's a calming thought.
Posted by Mark at February 25, 2006 09:45 AM
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