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kuhn-1962.html

Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

not including the post-script in this edition

General comments:

A paradigm is how problems are approached and studied by a community of scientists, and a community of scientists are those that use this paradigm.

These paradigms are useful in supporting rapid progress within a discipline.

Kuhn addresses that question of whether there is a general accretion of knowledge or whether there are revolutions in how we see.

New students are exposed to paradigms through text books and the assumptions built into the models.

Kuhn - in science, previous paradigms have to be shown to be wrong. In the humanities or arts there is a constant reference back to the creative works.

Compared to Primack and Abrams (2006) - previous paradigms are subsumed by new, more powerful theories that explain the boundaries of where the previous theories operate. This is disputed by Kuhn - see page **

Crisis is an important component of the transition from one paradigm to the next.

page by page:

pg 2 - out-of-date beliefs are still scientific, not myths, because they were generated by a scientific process

pg 5 - "the peculiar efficiency of the normal research activity and for the direction in which it proceeds at any given time."

pg 7 - "For these men the new theory implies a change in the rules governing the prior practice of normal science. ... It's assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evalutation of prior fact, ..." <--! i.e. new paradigm doesn't just subsume the old -->

pg 10 - "Their achievment was sufficiently unprecedented to atttract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practioners to resolve."

pg 11 - "That commitment and the apparent consensus it producess are prerequiestes for normal science.."

pg 16 - "No natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief."

pg 18 - quoting Francis Bacon "Truth emerges more readily from error than confusion" --

pg 37 - "One of the reasons why normal science seems to progress so rapidly is that ist practioners concentrate on problems that only their own lack of ingenuity should keep them from solving."

pg 42 - "The existence of this strong network of commitments - conceptual, theoretical, instrumental, and methodological - is a principal source of the metaphor that relates normal science to puzzle solving."

"Rules, I suggest, derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide research even in the absence of rules."

pg 43 - "These are the community's paradigms, revealed in its textbooks, lectures, and laboratory exercises."

pg 46 - models are related to paradigms, "Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knoing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms. And because the do so, they need no full set of rules."

theoretically "paradigms could determine normal science without the intervention of discoverable rules."

but do they actually operate in this manner?

pg 52 - "the scientific enterprise has developed a uniquely powerful technique for producing surprises of this sort."

i.e. new, unsuspected phenomena and radical new theories

"Produced inadvertently by a game played under one set of rules, their assimilation requires the elaboration of another set."

pg 64 - "novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, agains a background provided by expectation."

pg 65 - "novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, as able that something has gone wrong." this is an anomaly

pg 67 - crisis "demands large-scale paradigm destruction and major shifts in the problems and techniques of normal science"

pg 75 - not just science that's needed for progress, It is said thatGreek science was very deductive and dogmatic, which may have delayed the helicentric view for 18 centuries. But that leaves out the historical, social context

pg 80 - Science pedagogy generally uses examples that reinforce the dominant paradigm. The inter-woven nature of the examples as application of theory makes it efficient to learn.

"The applications given in texts are not there as evidence but because learning them is part of learning the paradigm at the base of the current practice."

pg 84 - crises close in one of three ways

normal science proves able to handle the problem
the problem is noted for addressing later, when the discipline has more power
emergence of a candidate for a new paradigm

pg 92 - "scientific revolutions are here take to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes ..."

pg 99 - Newtonian dynamics are still useful for most applications. "Newtonian theory seems to be derivable from Einsteinian, of which it is therefore a special case." -- but this is wrong, according to Kuhn

pg 101 - Newton's Laws are not a special case, "they are not unless those laws are reinterpreted in a way that would have been impossible until after Einstein's work."

113 - paradigms may get entrenched because even perception seems to work on a mental model, and if that mental model is taught by the paradigm, then the observations will represent that

136 - textbooks as authorities need to be recognized and analyzed

137 - "Textbooks, however, being pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewreitten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change."

pg 139 - write history backwards - from current important findings to percursors -

"The result is a persistent tendency to make the history of science look linear or cumulative, a tendency that even affects scientists looking back at their own research."

pg 146 - refers to Popper saying he "denies the existence of any verification procedures at all. Instead, he emphasizes the importance of falsification .."

pg 149 - new paradigms come from old and may use the same vocabular, concepts and experiements in different ways

pg 151 - Max Plank said that the way science changes is the the old scientists die off and leave the next generation

pg 155 - old paradigms can also be rejected based on

"appeal to the individual's sense of the appropriate or the aesthetic - the new theory is said to be "neater," "more suitable," of "simpler" than the old."

pg 159 - "men - Priestley, for example - who were unreasonable to resist for as long as they did ... becomes unscientific."

pg 162 - "Does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?"

pg 170 - hasn't been discussing truth in this book until now, discussing a developmental process from primitive beginnings

"But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything. Inevitably that lacuna will have disturbed many readers. We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance."

Darwin's own evolutionary theory. the big problem with accepting this was that it described a powerful, but not goal directed process.

pg 173 - "It is not only the scientific community that must be special. The world of which that community is a part must also possess quite special characteristics, and we are no closer that we were at the start to knowing what these must be."