Normal and revolutionary science

Notes on Contributors

Preface Note on the third impression 1. Logic of discovery of psychology of research? T. S. Kuhn 2. Against 'Normal Science' J. W. N. Watkins 3. Does the distinction between normal and revolutionary science hold water? S. E. Toulmin 4. Normal science, scientific revolutions and the history of science L. Pearce Williams 5. Normal science and its dangers K. R. Popper 6. The nature of a paradigm Margaret Masterman 7. Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes I. Lakatos 8. Consolations for the specialist P. K. Feyerabend 9. Reflections on my critics T. S. Kuhn Index.

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1922–96)

To summarize the scientific revolution in one phrase: it was the time when a new way of studying the natural, physical world became widely accepted by a small “community of scholars,” although not necessarily by nonscientists. But the specific status of that “new way” is hotly disputed and the precise historical steps involved in that development are extremely complex. Standard histories are those by Dampier (1966) and Cohen (2001). Cohen stresses the stages involved from initial creative insight to dissemination (orally or in letters, later on in print) and then widespread acceptance. For example, Descartes’ theory of inertia of 1633 was held back when the Inquisition condemned Galileo's theological interpretations and Descartes decided it was not a good time to publish. In the seventeenth century there was a significant qualitative transformation in the approach to the study of natural philosophy and that major change is now often called the “scientific revolution,” but it is clear that small‐scale “revolutions” took place before and have happened since. It was at that time that the transition from undifferentiated “astronomy/astrology” and “alchemy/chemistry” first really got under way. Moreover, great advances were made in mathematics. The story of the rise of modern science begins even earlier, however, with the Arab contacts with Greek science, and modern science eventually led to Enlightenment philosophy (Hellemans & Bunch 1988: 58–188). Different natural philosophies changed at different rates and in different ways. For example, empirical and theoretical progress in astronomy and physics was different from progress in other physical sciences like chemistry (Goodman & Russell 1991: 387–414). However, it was between circa 1500 and1800 that the distinction between true science and proto‐science or pseudo‐science (Shermer 2001: 22–65) became somewhat clearer. Many thinkers have seen the essence of the intellectual revolution as a leap beyond the tradition inherited from Aristotelianism and rationalism. But the notion that simple inductive empiricism, often identified with Francis Bacon's New “Organon” ( Novum organum ) of 1620, is the basis of the scientific method has been rejected. It should be remembered that the introduction of Aristotle's Organon concerning “categories” and “interpretation,” and his physics, astronomy, and biology transferred into Roman Catholic theology by Thomas Aquinas, was considered a radical step and indeed did open a window to the study of the actual order of nature and the universe (Funkenstein 1986). The idea of the importance of nuances of general theoretical assumptions concerning ontology and epistemology has been widely shared ever since the early 1960s, when Kuhn's (1970) history of paradigmatic changes in physical science became widely accepted. Indeed, the social sciences now also regularly use Kuhn's general theory of an oscillation between “normal science” and “paradigmatic revolutions.” The link between Kuhn's theories and earlier views concerning a dialectic of reason – views primarily associated with Hegel's critique of Cartesian dualism (Russon 1991) – should be noted. However, the seventeenth‐century paradigmatic revolution associated with Descartes, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, von Helmont, and many others was extremely important, since it laid the foundation for what was considered to be true science for the next four centuries. Newton's laws of gravitational attraction, motion, and force (i.e., inverse square law) in the Principia Mathematica (1687 manuscript) led to British Newtonianism, which was widely exported throughout Europe (e.g., the Low Countries), but Cartesianism in France was a rival for many years (Russell 1991). In the eighteenth century botany and zoology became more systematic with the use of binomial nomenclature, although Linnaeus's theories of nature and of society were deeply flawed (Koerner 1999). It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that a series of new ideas constituting a general change in worldviews made a radical shift in scientific thinking possible. Einstein's theory of relativity did not reject Newtonian mechanics, but did make it clear that Newton's assumptions about space and time were too limited and that a true explanation of gravity required postulating “space‐time.” Similarly, discoveries in mathematics and statistics, particularly the invention of non‐Euclidean geometry, revolutionized science in the twentieth century in somewhat the same way they had in earlier times (Newman 1956). The same can be said for Boolean and Fregean mathematical and symbolic logic (Bartley in Dodgson 1986: 3–42). Comte (1957) wrote that scientific thinking moves only gradually, but inevitably, from the study of distant objects, such as stars, to that which is closest to human life – society itself. His positivism had a profound impact on logical positivism and the quest for “consilience,” a unified general science of all of the natural world (Wilson 1998). In English the distinction between science and social science is more rigid than in many other languages. In German the term Wissenschaft encompasses not only physical and natural sciences, but also social sciences and other disciplines such as history and jurisprudence.

Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture Paula Findlen (bio) How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about the world! And it is all so novel, too. E. A. Burtt In the half-century since the “Scientific Revolution” became a meaningful description of the transformation of attitudes toward nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it seems to have enjoyed more lives than the Cheshire cat and to have remained as enigmatic. 1 Since its original formulation in the late 1940s, it has been the topic of a lively debate about the origins and character of modern approaches to nature and, more generally, knowledge. The result has been not only increased skepticism that the Scientific Revolution could be reduced to any single narrative, but also a profusion [End Page 243] of narratives about what constituted its fundamental characteristics. As Hayden White observes, “any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways, can bear the weight of being told as any number of different stories.” 2 In the process, the Scientific Revolution, perhaps more than any other area of science studies, has become a testing ground for new approaches to the historical understanding of science and new ways of understanding the process of scientific change. Why should we feel so compelled to tell and retell this particular story in the history of science, when there are so many other episodes worthy of our attention? Surely part of the fascination lies in the sense that the Scientific Revolution is, in many respects, the original story in the history of science. From the sixteenth century onward, humanist natural philosophers—from the anatomist Andreas Vesalius to the astronomer Johannes Kepler—wrote the histories of various sciences in order to publicize the importance of their reformation of knowledge. By the eighteenth century they had become the story, protagonists of a narrative rewritten by new scholarly communities in search of modern ruptures with the past. 3 The crafting of scientific narrative has been a prolonged and self-conscious exercise in which scientists as well as historians have participated over the centuries—all the more so because neither the scientist nor the historian enjoyed distinct intellectual identities until fairly recently (quite often, as the case of the seventeenth-century statesman, historian, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon demonstrates well, they were the same person). Accordingly, we might see the Scientific Revolution as one of the fundamental experiments in narrating the history of science. While the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution has largely been a story of the rise of modern science that takes science in a fairly defined sense as its focal point, cultural approaches to the history of science suggest a variety of other possibilities that explore in greater detail the imagery that early modern Europeans had at their disposal when they attempted to describe nature. Such imagery was [End Page 244] not simply an afterthought to the study of nature; often it was so deeply embedded in the act of seeing and understanding nature that it would be impossible to separate how a particular natural philosopher viewed nature from how he viewed culture. 4 Defining nature and defining culture were complementary activities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If we wish to truly understand what it meant to do early modern science, then we need to think more carefully about what it meant to be early modern. The approach I am suggesting has already had a number of advocates. Several years ago, John Schuster remarked that “the Scientific Revolution consisted of a process of change and displacement among and within competing systems of natural philosophy,” and he recommended that historians look more carefully at the “privileged images, metaphors or models” that defined these different approaches to knowledge. 5 The literature exploring the fundamental cultural themes of the early modern period can be a rich resource for expanding our interpretations of the Scientific Revolution. 6 Since nature was never an isolated subject of study during this period but always part of some larger project, we should examine more closely those features of early modern society that best illuminate the place of...

Scientific revolutions and the problem of understanding deep scientific change became central topics in philosophy of science with Thomas S. Kuhn’s publication in 1962 of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (see Kuhn 1970, cited under General Overviews). Kuhn attacked the received view of the logical empiricists and Popperians that scientific change is cumulative. He claimed that there have been several revolutions since the so-called scientific revolution, including dramatic overturnings in the most mature sciences—with more to be expected in the future. Kuhn’s more dynamic model of scientific development postulated the existence of occasional crises that sometimes trigger full-scale revolutions that overthrow the old “paradigm” and replace it with a new one discontinuous or “incommensurable” with the old one. He rejected the received views of scientific rationality and denied that even the most successful sciences are progressing toward a final, representational truth about the world. By focusing on finished, “textbook” science, defenders of the received view, he argued, presented an inadequate account of how scientific research is done, leaving unexplained the marked difference between the mature natural sciences and the social sciences as well as the difference within a mature science itself between “normal science” and the extraordinary research context of science in crisis. Kuhn and an entire generation of historically oriented philosophers of science believed that philosophical models of science should be more naturalistic (not based on a priori normative claims), more reflective of scientific practice, and thus testable against the history of science. Unlike the logicians of science, Kuhn highlighted cognitive and social psychological factors and the importance of rhetoric in scientific decision making. In reaction, critics questioned whether there have been any genuinely Kuhnian revolutions, accusing Kuhn of debunking modern science by portraying science as subjective, irrational, and relativistic. Kuhn replied that he was not a relativist, that he was attempting to develop a new account of scientific cognition and rationality, and that he was in effect trying to instigate a revolution of his own at the level of metascience and even general epistemology. Virtually no expert fully accepts Kuhn’s model of science, but there is general agreement that he posed some serious problems, including the problem of new theories: How can it be rational for scientists to reject a highly developed and accomplished theory or research program in favor of a radical and undeveloped new approach? Kuhn’s work stimulated a number of later developments in philosophy and in social studies of science more generally.

The merit of Evandro Agazzi’s epistemological reflection can be found in the following proposal: the history of science should be understood and studied as a meeting point between philosophical reflection and scientific research. Science and philosophy are thus closely united. In the words of Kant, science without philosophy is blind and philosophy without science is empty. Not only that: for Agazzi, the philosophy of science helps society as a whole to better understand the cultural (and human) value of science. Conversely, the history of science helps us to understand the perennially progressive nature of our knowledge. Why is this so? Because we can never disregard the intrinsic historicity of scientific knowledge.The historical approach to science also helps us to understand how scientific development always takes place within different choices. Conversely, epistemological reflection also helps historical research to better understand the development of our cognitive and technical heritage. On this basis, Agazzi worked - in collaboration with Ludovico Geymonat - to spread the institutional presence of the philosophy of science and the history of science (as well as mathematical logic) in universities, especially in Italy. Today, all of us are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, since we can better understand the connections between science and philosophy precisely because we can avail ourselves of Evandro Agazzi’s historical contributions.

The view that inquiry can be understood in terms of rhetorical theory can be traced to Thomas Kuhn's influential work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn is often cited by scholars concerned with the discursive strategies by which the natural and social or human sciences justify themselves and their specific claims. Kuhn's legacy is well captured by Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey in the opening essay of The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (1987) where they link him to Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman as instigators of the study of the Rhetoric of Inquiry. In their words, Kuhn's landmark classic challenges philosophy to account for the actual operation of scientific communities their professional devices of communication and socialization, their political structures, their reliance on aesthetics, and their rhetorical dependence on persuasion (Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey 1987, 12). Despite this reaction, however, Kuhn's project was in many ways modest. He was not seeking to develop a sociology of science or a rhetoric of inquiry. He sought only to account for the form of modern science's history, which is not marked by linear progress, but by a succession of dominant frameworks, or what he termed paradigms. As I will argue in this essay, Kuhn's conception of paradigms is incompatible with rhetoric, except during scientific revolutions or under conditions of incommensurability. Incommensurability is a problematic category, however, for the opening it affords rhetoric ultimately undermines the very idea of paradigms. Consequently, locating rhetoric within normal science either undermines the very category distinctions that provide science with its specificity, or reduces rhetoric from a particular genre of discourse directed toward human agency to rhetoricality, an aspect of all discourse. As we shall see, such blurring of genre distinctions is itself fun-

Abstract: Thomas Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolution has a historical role in the science of constructing the emergence of new science. It has the characteristics thinking and new philosophical model in the birth history of science and philosophy. The History of science is a basic science that is always marked by the strong paradigm and followed by the scientific revolution and is the starting point in studying fundamental issues in scientific epistemology for Thomas Kuhn. Thomas Kuhn termed this phase as a new science birth history phase, beginning with normal science, then emerged anomaly and crisis, and ended with the scientific revolution as a birth form of new science or new paradigm. Thomas Kuhn's paradigm can be contextualized in the science of education or donated to the world of education. The World of Education needs to design a teaching-learning process that can stimulate or provide anomalous data to learners, so as to transform their knowledge scheme toward a better scheme. Problem Based Learning and Discovery Learning became one of the methods of troubleshooting educational problems through experimental ways that make learners become the subject of education. This method is realized in line with has been formulated by Thomas S. Kuhn. Keywords: scientific revolution, education approach, problem based learning, and discovery learning

This article seeks to show that Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm-shift can be used as a methodological tool in the study of religious conversion. The same way that the scientist is limited to work within a scientific paradigm, the believer can be said to exercise religion within a theological paradigm. And as anomaly can lead to science crises and a change of worldview, anomaly within the horizon of the believer can lead to existential crisis and religious reorientation. A reservation towards the application of Kuhn's theory on religious conversion is, however, proposed by the author who does not see that different worldviews necessarily are incommensurable. Religious conversion is more often than not a reorientation that combines (what Kuhn's theory would consider as) incompatible differences.

In the first part of this essay, the "common wisdom" about Putnam and Merritt's contributions to the treatment of epilepsy was summarized (Rowland, 1982). Based on the history that has been presented here, how true are these "wisdoms"? Putnam and Merritt did devise "a simple and reliable method to test drugs of anticonvulsant effect" and they did show "that anticonvulsant effects in cats accurately predicted effects in humans," but others before them had done these same things. Dilantin, contrary to common wisdom, was not the first anticonvulsant drug to be tested in animals before it was given to human subjects; at least a year before, Cobb and his co-workers had done the same thing using vital dyes. However, Dilantin did represent the first time an anticonvulsant tested in animals was subsequently studied in a large series of patients. Nor were Putnam and Merritt the first to show that "anticonvulsant and sedative effects of drugs could be separated." Potassium borotartrate, ketogenic diet, ketone bodies, and vital dyes were anticonvulsive without necessarily being sedative. However, Putnam and Merritt were probably the first to make so explicit a statement to this effect. It may well have been this particular statement--and the fact that it was so well heard by other researchers--that represented their greatest achievement. In Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, the great step forward may not be so much the accumulation of evidence that the existing paradigm is not a feasible one, but rather the use of this evidence to form a new model or paradigm which is then accepted by normal science in such a fashion that the results prove to be productive. This, it would seem, is what Putnam and Merritt did. From it came their own major discovery, Dilantin, which, in Rowland's words, remains "a mainstay of treatment" for epilepsy up to the present time, and which "opened the way to the development of other anticonvulsant drugs."

The Historiography of the geophysical sciences is far from developed. This is due in part to the relatively small number of historians of science and to the growth rate of science itself. There are perhaps only several dozen persons today whose professional interests touch on the history of geophysics, or the earth sciences, expeditions and exploration, and the historical connections of these fields with other areas of scientific activity. These persons study a world scientific literature that has been growing since the late seventeenth century at a rate that has produced a doubling about every 10 to 15 years. Within the history of science, the literature of the geophysical sciences has simply not received the degree of attention given some other areas, such as the ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the paucity of secondary materials concerning the history of geophysics reflects this. It may therefore come as no surprise to discover that at present there is no real consensus within the profession as to the major problems in the history of the geophysical sciences in their historical relationships to general physics and ther other physical sciences.

I. Bernard Cohen (1914-2003), the first American to receive a Ph.D. in history of science, was a Harvard undergraduate ('37) and then a Ph.D. student and protégé of George Sarton, founder of Isis and the History of Science Society. He went on to succeed Sarton as editor of Isis (1952-1958) and, later, president of the Society (1961-1962); he was also a president of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science. Cohen was an internationally recognized Newton scholar; his interests were encyclopedic, ranging from science and public policy to the history of computers, with several decades as a special consultant for history of computing with IBM. Among his hundreds of publications were such major books as Franklin and Newton (1956), The Birth of a New Physics (1959; rpt., 1985), The Newtonian Revolution (1980), Revolution in Science (1985), Science and the Founding Fathers (1995), Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (1999), and his last book, The Triumph of Numbers (2005), not to mention two jointly authored contributions, the variorum edition and new English translation of Newton's Principia, which will surely still be read a century from now.

This reflection on the history and future of developmental resilience science (DRS) highlights its co-emergence with developmental psychopathology (DP), as well as the roles of this journal and its founding editor, Dante Cicchetti, in the evolution of these intertwined domains of scholarship. A remarkable constellation of scholars at the University of Minnesota shaped the course of both conceptual frameworks and their dissemination. I describe fundamental assumptions common to DP and DRS frameworks that reflect their common roots and the pervasive influence of systems theory on developmental science. I describe four waves of DRS and key principles of DRS at the present time. In conclusion, I consider the possibility that a fifth wave of DRS is emerging with a focus on understanding patterns of multisystem, multilevel processes of resilience and their implications for interventions in the context of interacting, interdependent, and complex adaptive systems. I close this commentary with questions for future research and a hopeful outlook on the future of human resilience.

Cumulation, Revolution, and Progress