Kuhn 20: Paradigms, what good are they?
The term "paradigm shift" has made it into the common language as "a fundamental change in the way of seeing or doing something." Of course, many people's threshold for what counts as "fundamental" or "change" is really low, and "paradigm shift" is usually what people want the other guy to undergo so that his ideas will come to match the ones we've already got. But that's not the term's fault, that a lot of people become posturing dumbasses when they employ abstract intellectual terminology. A more damaging problem is that people are interested in paradigm shifts but not in paradigms; that is, the idea of breaking through restrictions is appealing, whereas the idea of creating new restrictions and being supported and nurtured by those restrictions is less appealing. But Kuhn came up with the idea of shifts back in the 1940s, along with the idea that the shifts were between incompatible modes of thought. It wasn't until the late '50s, however, that he developed the notion "paradigm," and he did so not only to understand how shifts occurred, but to understand how it was that the hard sciences were so much better at asking and answering questions and at creating fundamental shifts in thought than were the social sciences, which seemed to continually be reverting to square one.
If Kuhn is right, this is what paradigms do for the sciences:
1. Paradigms organize and focus a science's activity by telling the scientist what questions to ask and how to go about answering them. Which is to say that paradigms restrict and specialize the scientist's attention. And as a science develops and undergoes scientific revolutions it breaks into more and more subsciences that are ever more specialized.
2. Paradigms create expectations that are sufficient enough in their precision that anomalies can occur. And when anomalies can't be explained away as equipment failure or scientist error and can't be worked into the paradigm, then they become impetuses for a scientific revolution, i.e., a paradigm shift, and for the ultimate creation of new restrictions and new specialization.
(I recommend that you look back at Kuhn 8½, which contains excerpts from "The Essential Tension," the 1959 article in which Kuhn first uses the word "paradigm.")
If Kuhn is right, this is what paradigms do for the sciences:
1. Paradigms organize and focus a science's activity by telling the scientist what questions to ask and how to go about answering them. Which is to say that paradigms restrict and specialize the scientist's attention. And as a science develops and undergoes scientific revolutions it breaks into more and more subsciences that are ever more specialized.
2. Paradigms create expectations that are sufficient enough in their precision that anomalies can occur. And when anomalies can't be explained away as equipment failure or scientist error and can't be worked into the paradigm, then they become impetuses for a scientific revolution, i.e., a paradigm shift, and for the ultimate creation of new restrictions and new specialization.
(I recommend that you look back at Kuhn 8½, which contains excerpts from "The Essential Tension," the 1959 article in which Kuhn first uses the word "paradigm.")