Thomas Kuhn
University of Chicago 1962; paperback 1996
ISBN 0226458083 (paper)
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There aren't many serious (as opposed to popularising) philosophy books that sell a million copies, but this is one.
Even people who've no idea what Kuhn meant by 'Normal Science' use the phrase 'Paradigm Shift', probably in a wildly inappropriate setting.
Kuhn is a historian of science, which might seem a dry, brown and dusty line of work. He managed to set it alight by the simple procedure of looking at what seemed to happen time and again as science progressed. It didn't seem to be, as Karl Popper asserted, a steady, logical growth of knowledge, with theories being proven right or wrong by ruthless experiments dispassionately observed.
Instead, people seemed mostly to plod along writing PhD theses as instructed by their professors, doing Normal Science: small patient additions of detail to existing theories. Then, much more rarely, somebody said to themselves 'this is all nonsense' and set about to prove it. They usually got treated as lunatics, as happened to Wegener and his early 20th century theory of Continental Drift -- he saw that Latin America fitted neatly on the globe up against Africa, and conjectured that the two had drifted apart. He was right but couldn't prove it, or even give a reason why it might have happened, so geologists carried right on with their (now laughable) theories of how continents bounced up and down. It took the evidence of frozen-in magnetism in the rocks either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge, and the new theory of Plate Tectonics to cause a Kuhnian Paradigm Shift: suddenly nobody wanted to go on talking about the old theories, and the red-hot topic of geological research was how the system of plates worked.
In such special situations, proponents of the new theory were not treated as lunatics: almost everyone wanted to join them. Or rather, nearly everyone new to the area: the diehards stayed with their old views, probably until their retirement (or beyond). It wasn't so much a matter of conjecture and refutation (the title of one of Popper's books) but of fashion, human emotion, research funding and other such worldly things. It wasn't a matter of persuading people by argument or proving theories with facts; it was all about what people felt they could believe and work with. Not at all dry and dusty.
It's easy to see why this caused such a storm: as with Darwin's account of evolution, the result was simple and could readily be understood by people outside the field. It was also somewhat shocking: the respectable starchy lady Science turned out to be promiscuous and opportunistic. There was also the spice of a good argument: traditional philosophers of science like Popper didn't agree with Kuhn at all. Further, Kuhn had some pretty dodgy allies: radicals like Paul Feyerabend who believed that all knowledge was relative, all facts subject to revision, all theories subjective -- Kuhn himself never went that far.
Kuhn considered the progress of scientific research, but his theory of how fields of inquiry grow is probably applicable far more widely - even if few people really agree that science is quite as fashion-led as Kuhn argues. Like science, engineering seems quite definite and evidence-based; but also like science, there are widely-held theories of what you should do that get discarded and replaced from time to time. In the 'softer' areas like Requirements and Software Development, Kuhnian paradigms seem to rule; Normal Scientists quietly potter about with Goal Modelling, Formal Methods, Object-Oriented Design and the like. Radicals occasionally come along and propose Extreme Programming or Expert Systems as THE ANSWER (usually to everything). Perhaps Kuhn-ism is alive and well in our domain.
© Ian Alexander, 2004
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