Sunday, December 8, 2013

Anomaly and the emergence of scientific discovery

"Paradigm procedures and applications are as necessary to science as paradigm laws and theories, and they have the same effects. Inevitably they restrict the phenomenological field accessible for scientific investigation at any given time.... But not all theories are paradigm theories. Both during pre-paradigm periods and during the crises that lead to large-scale changes of paradigm, scientists usually develop many speculative and unarticulated theories that can themselves point the way to discovery. Often, however, the discovery is not quite the one anticipated by the speculative and tentative hypothesis. Only as experiment and tentative theory are articulated together to a match does the discovery emerge and the theory become a paradigm." p.61. "Anomaly and the emergence of scientific discovery," THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS," by Thomas S. Kuhn (University of Chicago, Chicago: 1962, 2012)