THE STRUCTURE OF
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, by Thomas S. Kuhn, pp.10-12, 15,
introduction by Ian Hacking (University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
London: 2012)
“Aristotle's Physica,
Ptolemy's Almagest, Newton's Principia and Opticks,
Franklin's Electricity, Levoisier's Chemistry, and
Lyell's Geology—these and many other works served for a time
implicitly to define the legitimate problems and methods of a
research field for succeeding generations of practitioners. They were
able to do so because they shared two essential characteristics.
Their achievements were sufficiently unprecedented to attract 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 undefined group of practitioners to
resolve....
“Why is the concrete
scientific achievement, as a locus of professional commitment, prior
to the various concepts, laws, theories, and points of view that may
be abstracted from it? In what sense is the shared paradigm a
fundamental unit for the student of scientific development, a unit
that cannot be fully reduced to logically atomic components which
might function in its stead? When we encounter them in section V,
answers to these questions and to others like them will prove basic
to an understanding of normal science and to the associated concept
of paradigms. That more abstraction discussion will depend, however,
upon a previous exposure to examples of normal science or of
paradigms in operation. In particular, both these related concepts
will be clarified by noting that there can be a sort of scientific
research without paradigms, or at least without any so unequivocal
and so binding as the ones named above. Acquisition of a paradigm and
of the more esoteric types of research it permits is the sign of
maturity in the development of any given scientific field...
“In parts of biology—the
study of heredity, for example—the first universally received
paradigms are still more recent; and it remains an open question what
parts of social science have yet acquired have yet acquired such
paradigms at all. History suggests that the road to a firm research
consensus is extraordinarily arduous.”
