Does All of Science Really Move In 'Paradigm Shifts'?

ATKeiper writes "Thomas Kuhn's landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions just turned fifty years old. In that book, Kuhn coined the expression 'paradigm shift' to describe revolutionary changes in scientific fields — such as the replacement of the geocentric understanding of the universe with the heliocentric model of the solar system. The book was hotly debated for claiming that different scientific paradigms were 'incommensurable,' which implied (for example) that Newton was no more right about gravity than Aristotle. A new essay in The New Atlantis revisits the controversy and asks whether the fact that Kuhn based his argument almost exclusively on physics means that it does not apply as well to major developments in biology or, for that matter, to the social sciences."

Comments

The Relativity of Wrong

[ShanghaiBill]

The shifts - if they truly exist - have tended to become smaller asymptotically as science progresses.

This was explained very well by Isaac Asimov in his essay The Relativity of Wrong. Aristotle and Newton were both wrong about gravity. But, relatively, Aristotle was much more wrong.

Re:I see the problem

[Samantha Wright]

That's exactly right. In fact the article complains at great length that the social sciences are a mistake: they're really veiled branches of philosophy, trying to fit a complicated universe to a set of paradigms stolen from other fields (including physics and biology) simply because those fields and models are in vogue. When Kuhn described the process of paradigm change, the social scientists interpreted it as a validation of their methodology, which ran directly against his wishes.

The summary is hence very dishonest about the book and article; Kuhn explicitly considered his theories inappropriate for the social sciences, and the article never casts any doubt on the applicability of his model to biology; it merely points out that it was an oversight. (And as a biologist, I feel pretty strongly that paradigm shifting applies equally to physics and biology.)