Is Science a Continuous Progression or a Revolutionary Shift? (Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Paradigm Shifts)

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that scientific progress is driven by abrupt paradigm shifts rather than gradual accumulation. Research based on a particular paradigm is “normal science,” and when the accumulation of anomalies breaks down the existing paradigm, a new paradigm emerges and a scientific revolution occurs.

 

Before the invention of the automobile and its widespread use, transportation was mainly by horse-drawn carriages. Early cars were much slower and more expensive than horse-drawn carriages. However, as rapid technological advances improved their performance and mass production made them more widely available, horse-drawn carriages eventually became obsolete and the age of the automobile was born. What’s important to note here is the difference between the way people viewed the world in the horse-drawn carriage era and the automobile era. The distance, speed, and scheduling that could be expected and anticipated in the days of horse-drawn carriages would be vastly different than in the age of automobiles. It’s not just the difference in distance traveled over time, but the speed and scope of information dissemination, the range of customers that merchants could imagine, and everything else about everyday life would have been different in the horse-drawn carriage era.
Given this, we can expect the world to be very different when other innovative modes of transportation are invented in the future. One scholar has explained that just as the horse-drawn carriage and the automobile each had a range of travel that they could imagine, and everything else was judged within that range, scientists would do science within the specific “paradigm” of their time. This is Thomas Kuhn. In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argued that the process of scientific revolutions is discontinuous and goes through a series of progressive, rapid revolutions.
A paradigm is a set of standards or commitments that define the theories, worldviews, observations, and experiments that prevailed in the age of the horse-drawn carriage and the age of the automobile, respectively. According to Thomas Kuhn, paradigms can also be applied to science, where concepts, experimental methodologies, and values such as worldview, culture, and tradition are all shared within the same paradigm. Until a paradigm becomes a shared standard among scientists, scientific research and experiments are conducted in a chaotic fashion, with each scientist doing things his or her own way. However, once a paradigm is formed through joint consensus among scientists, it becomes the standard for all subsequent scientific activity.
Thomas Kuhn provides examples from the history of science where scientific activity has actually been guided by a particular paradigm. While pre-modern astronomy was based on a god-centered theory of celestial motion, modern astronomy, starting with Copernicus’ theory of geocentric motion, was based on a human-centered theory of geocentric motion. This illustrates that science is not a discipline that seeks immutable truths, but rather relies on a specific paradigm. The idea is that the concepts, laws, thought streams, experimental methodologies, and so on in science are not objective facts, but rather the product of a shared paradigm. This argument challenged the traditional view of science as an objective entity, with a strict separation between the activities of scientists and science itself.
In addition, Thomas Kuhn labeled research activities based on a particular paradigm as “normal science. Research in normal science is like solving a puzzle to find the solution within the paradigm, and most of the research is directed toward clarifying or extending the phenomena and theories proposed by the paradigm. For example, within the paradigm of Newtonian mechanics, many mathematicians and scientists have worked to generalize and refine Newtonian mechanics to make it more widely applicable. However, in the normal course of scientific research, discoveries that contradict the paradigm, or findings that are refutable, are often ignored or blamed on the scientist. Thus, unless the paradigm is changed, normal science makes incremental and cumulative progress.
However, according to Thomas Kuhn, there is no permanent paradigm. When the number of anomalies in normal science research accumulates to the point where it threatens the paradigm, scientists accept a new theory that does not recognize the old paradigm. When a new theory is agreed upon by the scientific community, it replaces the old paradigm, and at that moment, large-scale change occurs. Thomas Kuhn calls this a scientific revolution. Examples include the transition from heliocentrism to geocentrism and from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s theory of relativity. The process of a scientific revolution is not simply gradual, but a discontinuous transition in which belief systems are overturned, much like a religious conversion. Afterward, a new normal science resumes within the new paradigm.
To summarize Thomas Kuhn’s argument, science does not develop in a continuous and cumulative manner, but rather in an iterative process of normal science and paradigm shifts. Furthermore, scientific knowledge cannot be absolutely objective because it is a subjective activity within a particular paradigm, rather than a movement toward immutable truth. Rather than exploring the world, scientists create the world in a way that is shared among scientists. This is the core of Thomas Kuhn’s view of science.
However, there are criticisms of Kuhn’s theory. One argument is that the very concept of “paradigm” is ambiguous in his explanation. Linguist Margaret Masterson has pointed out that the meaning of paradigm is so vague that it can be interpreted in twenty-two different ways. Thomas Kuhn also responded to this criticism, proposing a new matrix of specializations in the 1970 edition of his book. Nevertheless, the lack of a clear definition of a paradigm is the essence of Thomas Kuhn’s theory. Even the specific meaning of language depends on the context of the time and shared thinking, so any attempt to give an absolute definition may be a misunderstanding of the paradigm.
Furthermore, Thomas Kuhn’s discontinuous structure of scientific revolutions is similar in other fields. For example, the division of historical periods is also based on breaks in culture, economic structure, and institutional arrangements. Although Thomas Kuhn’s theory may seem familiar, it was revolutionary in that it denied the continuous development of the history of science and proposed a new view of the history of science.
Kuhn’s revolutionary process can be applied to us today. For example, recent advances in electronic communication technology and hardware have dramatically changed the way we communicate since the advent of smartphones. Increased access to information without the constraints of space and time has put an end to the “library paradigm,” and social networking services (SNS) have changed the concept of the traditional “public square. These innovations in information and communication technologies are becoming another paradigm, revolutionizing the way we think and live.