Book Review – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Can we define a paradigm as a single meaning?)

I read the book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ by Thomas Kuhn and wrote a book review. Let’s find out what a paradigm is.

 

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions occupies an important place in the history of the philosophy of science, and his theories have sparked much debate. People in each camp of the debate have such different interpretations that it’s hard to believe that they all read the same book, and one of the reasons why there is so much debate about the book is because of the flexibility of interpretation that it offers. This flexibility is responsible for the introduction of the term ‘paradigm’. This diversity of interpretations has led critics to attack Kuhn’s theory from different directions.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn uses many examples from science to illustrate paradigm shifts, often by comparing two different paradigms that explain the same phenomenon. However, on the one hand, he argues for the incommensurability of paradigms through incommensurability, but on the other hand, he seems to compare paradigms when making the necessary explanations in his theory. This seems inconsistent. In addition to the ambiguity of Kuhn’s categorization of paradigms, we will examine the contradictions that emerge in his use of incompatibility, incommensurability, and translatability to explain his theory of paradigms.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn describes how science develops. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn explains how science develops: a normal science is established, but anomalies keep appearing, and more and more of them cannot be explained by the existing normal science. This raises questions about the existing paradigm and creates a crisis in normal science. To resolve this crisis, new theoretical frameworks are proposed, and through further research, the new theoretical frameworks replace the old paradigm, leading to a scientific revolution and a new normal science.
Kuhn’s definition of “normal science” is research that is firmly grounded in one or more scientific achievements. These achievements are those that are recognized by a group of scientists over a period of time as the basis for future research. Today, these achievements are listed in primary or secondary science textbooks, although not in their original form. Textbooks describe a set of orthodoxies, illustrate them with examples of successful applications, and compare examples of applications with observations and experiments. For example, a college physics book based on Newton’s classical mechanics is organized as follows: the basic theory is explained, examples and experiments are presented to verify the theory, and then well-illustrated examples and application problems are presented.
Many books, such as Aristotle’s Natural Science, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Newton’s Principia and Optics, Franklin’s Electricity, Lavoisier’s Chemistry, Lyell’s Principia of Geology, and many others, served for a time to define the legitimate problems and methodologies of scientists’ fields of study. On the one hand, their achievements were unprecedented enough to continue to attract a group of followers who stayed away from competing modes of scientific research. At the same time, their work was open enough to present a range of problems to newly formed researchers. Achievements with these two characteristics are what Kuhn calls “paradigms,” and the term is closely related to “normal science.
Scientific revolutions are characterized by three qualities They are incompatibility, incommitment, and untranslatability. The first is incommensurability, in which a number of previously non-existent or seemingly trivial problems can become the prototype for a significant scientific achievement with the emergence of a new paradigm. As the problems change, it is not uncommon for the criteria for distinguishing a true scientific answer from mere metaphysical speculation, increased terminology, or mathematical manipulation to change. The normal scientific tradition emerging from the Scientific Revolution is not only incompatible with what has gone before, it is actually incomparable by the same standard. Incompatibility is the incompatibility of theories that emerge before and after a scientific revolution, even if they are interpretations of the same natural phenomenon. Finally, untranslatability means that if the theories of a paradigm are incompatible and incommensurable, then translation between them is naturally impossible. For example, Ptolemy’s epicycles and Copernicus’ heliocentrism can both explain the natural phenomenon of the Earth’s night and day, but they imply fundamentally different things.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn discusses incommensurability, saying that the two paradigms are not only incompatible but also incomparable because they have different worldviews and different tools used. However, in Commitment, Comparability, and Communicability, Kuhn seems to give himself some room for maneuver, suggesting that the incommitment he speaks of is local rather than global.
This localized incommitment relates to one part of the whole, and is used as a metaphor for the lack of a common language. It means that most of the common terms in both paradigms preserve their meaning, and only a few terms change their meaning, causing difficulties in translation. In other words, incommensurability means that there is no neutral language that can be translated into both theories, which are conceived of as sets of sentences, without losing meaning. This evasive interpretation is a softening of Kuhn’s earlier incommitment, where he wrote that “the normal scientific tradition emerging from the scientific revolution is not only incompatible with what has gone before, but is in fact incommensurable by the same standard.”
Kuhn also responded to the criticism that “incommitment is untranslatable” by comparing the process of translation and language acquisition, and argued that it is language acquisition, not translation, that makes sense of the incommitment paradigm. The difference between translation and language acquisition is that it is possible to understand one paradigm without understanding the other by arguing that it is possible to understand the other without understanding both paradigms, thus rejecting the extreme discontinuity between the two paradigms, i.e., global incommitment, in favor of local incommitment that is partially translatable. This seems inconsistent with Kuhn’s claim of incompatibility as well as incommensurability in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Among Kuhn’s other critics, Sheffier and Scheffler criticize Kuhn as follows. Schaeffer criticizes Kuhn’s view that various biases interfere with the objective scientific judgments that scientists are supposed to make, and that it is the role of sociology to draw attention to these biases, which Kuhn considers essential and important to science. Schaeffler also criticized Kuhn for not providing any reasons, asking, “What compelling reasons have been given to deny the objectivity” of the process by which scientific theories are critically evaluated? Kuhn seems to conclude by reintroducing a concept that he has worked hard to deny in the main stream of his discussion. These conditions of evaluation contradict the main thesis to which we have been devoting attention in our appeal to the history of science, namely that paradigm shifts in science are generally not driven by reflection and critical evaluation.
The main commonality of their criticisms of Kuhn is that they understand paradigms as conceptual frameworks of science that differ from reality, and that Kuhn fails to provide adequate explanations or creates contradictions in the relationships between these conceptual frameworks. However, Kuhn’s definition of paradigm, as modified since The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is slightly different. If paradigms functioned only as formal frameworks for recognizing a certain kind of science, they would be a little different from what actually happens. The statement in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the only access scientists have to the world they study is through what they see and do does not imply that science can only perceive the world through a formal framework. There are two uses of the word paradigm that have a dual meaning. One sense of “paradigm” is holistic, encompassing all the commitments shared by a group of scientists. The other sense is that it isolates one particularly important kind of commitment, and is therefore a subset of the first. It would be unreasonable to use the term paradigm in such a dual sense, changing its meaning as needed for the development of science.
Furthermore, in Kuhn’s theory, the question arises as to how far the paradigm should be viewed as a category that includes past theories and the next stage of theories. It is difficult to apply the paradigm theory to a large number of scientific theories, with different explanations for each case. In the general idea that theories that explain phenomena with simple theories are closer to the truth, Kuhn’s paradigm theory of the development of science is not suitable.
In describing this process of paradigm change, Kuhn evades direct attack by comparing incommensurable and incomparable paradigms and by using the contradictory word local holism. This use of ambiguity and double entendres invalidates the attacks of multiple counter-examples and counter-examples by invalidating the verifiability of the theory, and Karl Popper’s principle of disprovability, which states that the better a scientific theory is, the more likely it is to be disproved, raises the question of whether Kuhn’s vague theory, which requires a lot of explanation using paradigms, is unscientific. Finally, using the principle of benevolence, Kuhn’s theory could explain many theories if it were valid to advance science by choosing the better theory through a comparison between two incommensurable theories. However, modern science has limitations that Kuhn’s theory does not explain well, such as taxonomy of organisms, which develops by discovering new organisms that cannot be explained by Kuhn’s discontinuous theory, and geology, which develops by discovering new rocks. Therefore, Kuhn’s theory is thought to be an inefficient theory.