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

Kuhn Paradigms

[Camel Pilot]

I am suspicious that Kuhn's paradigm shift were valid only during the formative years of science (specifically physics). The shifts - if they truly exist - have tended to become smaller asymptotically as science progresses.

Tools vs. Concepts

[swm]

Thomas Kuhn in his famous book, _The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions_, talked almost exclusively about concepts and hardly at
all about tools. His idea of a scientific revolution is based on a
single example, the revolution in theoretical physics that occurred in
the 1920s with the advent of quantum mechanics. [...]

Kuhn's book was so brilliantly written that it became an
instant classic. It misled a whole generation of students and
historians of science into believing that all scientific revolutions
are concept-driven. [...]

In the last 500 years, in addition to the quantum-mechanical
revolution that Kuhn took as his model, we have had six major
concept-driven revolutions, associated with the names of Copernicus,
Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Freud, and Einstein. During the same period
there have been about twenty tool-driven revolutions [...].

Two prime examples of tool-drive revolutions are the Galilean
revolution resulting from the use of the telescope in astronomy, and
the Crick-Watson revolution resulting from the use of X-ray diffraction
to determine the structure of big molecules in biology.

The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in
new ways. The effect of a tool-drive revolution is to discover new
things that have to be explained.

-- Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds

Re:I see the problem

[lgw]

Not to pile on but: there's a lot of science in social sciences. What there's not is engineering. Core theories are (mostly) about testible premises, and I'm not sure where you'd get the idea that they aren't.

Take for example the oft-maligned field of "communication studies". There's no engineering there yet, but there is practical science: how do you measure "receptivity to information", how do you measure how persuasive a speech is to one group vs another, and so on. Constructing repeatable measures that give repeatable results is where all sciences begin, and even in this somewhat primitive state it's a useful science. How do you make a warning sign that people will actually be warned by? How do you ask patients in a walk-in clininc personal questions in such a way that you maximize your chance of an honest answer?

It may all be squishy, and not the geek-loved black-and-white, but once a science has a repeatable way to measure what they study, hypotheses can make predictions, and these predictions can be falsified and science can happen.