A paradigm shift in the way we look at science
Thomas Kuhn was one of the foremost philosophers of science of the twentieth century. In 1962, he came out with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that heralded one of the most important moments in the history of science, and gave us a fresh new perspective on the functioning of the scientific community.
The question that drove Kuhn to write this magnificent book was this. Why are there certain fields of human endeavour where it is very difficult to find a consensus as to what the right answers to the traditional questions posed in that field are? Principal among these fields were the social sciences, and sometimes economics.
Kuhn observed considerable fragmentation and even contradictions in the views held by different social scientists and he realised they hardly ever reached a consensus on the answer to any question, much less on the principles they used to find those answers.
And then, when Kuhn looked at the scientific community, he saw a remarkable contrast. In any given field of science, the scientific community almost always had a consensus on the principles they were following, the kind of questions that they considered legitimate, the nature of the questions they were trying to answer, the kind of answers that were expected and accepted, and even whether certain types of answers could be considered correct or not.
What was the reason? Surely there was something fundamentally different between the so called “exact science” and the “inexact sciences”, terms which, it must be mentioned, he did not actually use.
What follows is an incredibly systematic deconstruction of the scientific edifice, where he starts with a discussion on the nature of science and on what it means to practice science. This leads him to the answer that at any given point of time, most of the scientific community practices science based on a specific, almost universally, accepted foundation that includes a scientific theory believed at that time to be true and as reasonably complete as could be expected, and also the instrumentations and pedagogy associated with that theory, including how the next generation of scientists are familiarised with these aspects. Just to be clear, “theory” is a very restrictive term to characterise the foundation Kuhn is talking about. So, he used another word with far wider implications. Paradigm.
What does the existence of a paradigm entail? How does it come into being and how does it succeed so well at being accepted, albeit gradually but eventually, by a considerable majority of the scientific community? These are some of the questions that he picks up till he is finally confronted by the inevitable question – how do paradigms change? Is it a linear process of accumulation of scientific knowledge, or is it something completely different?
The phrase “paradigm shift”, as understood today, originated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn noted the very crucial differences in the periods and situations in which a science is practiced as a “normal science”, which is a way of “solving puzzles” put forth by the natural conception of the prevalent scientific paradigm, and the moments of crisis that arise, both in terms of the kinds of questions asked, and the kind of anomalous observations made when strictly following the paradigmatic framework, which lead to a search for possible alternate explanations and theories and, ultimately, to a kind of intellectual gestalt switch – where you find a completely new way of looking at the same information. Yours truly, the paradigm shift, has occurred. Kuhn gives the famous example of the duck-rabbit sketch as a ridiculously simplified analogy.
This book was a delight to read and I realised one crucial reason was the vocation of the author.
Many scientists write books, but there is something different about those of them who are astutely aware of the ins and outs of their enterprise. Science isn’t simply a way of documenting, labelling and understanding the world. It is a way of life and the rigor which such scientists, Kuhn in this case, follow in their vocation naturally rubs off on the way they write as well.
With time, the idea of paradigm shift has been applied to other fields as well, fields for which the idea wasn’t originally suited as developed by Kuhn in this book, and towards which he expresses a slight surprise in the Afterword of the book, written seven years after the book was published.
There is beauty, simplicity and profundity in the writing of this book.