Kuhn 19: It's possible to specify pretty well the research program
Oliver Morton in the New York Times (Found in Transit): One day, over a lunch mostly devoted to an enthusiastic if only partially successful attempt to turn me on to the isotopic intricacies of the Earth's sulphur cycle, my friend Kevin Zahnle summed up the case for finding out how common complex biospheres are on planets around other stars: "It is simply the most interesting question that we have it in our power to solve."
There are other deep and interesting questions about biology's cosmic setting - How does life get started? How varied can it be? - but it's not clear what sort of research program might answer them. However, it's possible to specify pretty well the research program needed to find out how common planets with life at least a bit like Earth's life are.
I bolded the statement that made me think of paradigms. What a paradigm* does for a science is it tells the science's practitioners how to move forward. It presents them with problems and also with puzzles and solutions the scientists can model their problem-solving on.
*I'm using "paradigm" in both of its intertwined senses, as an exemplar (a concrete puzzle and its solution) and as a disciplinary matrix (the constellation of formulas, laws, procedures, values, etc. of which the exemplars are a part). The key word in the previous sentence is "intertwined," since as I read through Structure I'm more and more getting a feeling for why at that point Kuhn was running his two meanings together.
There are other deep and interesting questions about biology's cosmic setting - How does life get started? How varied can it be? - but it's not clear what sort of research program might answer them. However, it's possible to specify pretty well the research program needed to find out how common planets with life at least a bit like Earth's life are.
I bolded the statement that made me think of paradigms. What a paradigm* does for a science is it tells the science's practitioners how to move forward. It presents them with problems and also with puzzles and solutions the scientists can model their problem-solving on.
*I'm using "paradigm" in both of its intertwined senses, as an exemplar (a concrete puzzle and its solution) and as a disciplinary matrix (the constellation of formulas, laws, procedures, values, etc. of which the exemplars are a part). The key word in the previous sentence is "intertwined," since as I read through Structure I'm more and more getting a feeling for why at that point Kuhn was running his two meanings together.