Paradigm Change
I was beginning my second year at university when I first read Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I was reading non-stop at the time, as I had just changed fields from geology to social anthropology. I should have given Kuhn’s book rather more attention than I did, and the only excuse I can offer is that I was facing two varieties of distraction, one as a result of changing academic fields, and the other facing a growing family, with one young child demanding attention and a second on the way! I might not have even read the book were it not for the fact that it could be relevant to one of the issues being talked about in my college tutorials, which was that a massive shift was being debated in my course. By chance, I was a student at the same time as the dominant framework for social anthropology, the ‘structural-functional model’, was facing serious critique. The head of the department was a structural-functionalist; my tutor was one of the new ‘structuralists’.
Tempting though it is to wander off into a discussion on the epistemology of social anthropology, I am going to attempt to keep my focus on paradigms and paradigm change. The attraction of Kuhn’s book to anyone intrigued by the sciences was obvious at the time. Kuhn was upsetting the applecart, and such people are always attractive to undergraduates. However, this was a big applecart. Thomas Kuhn was contrasting periods of ‘normal science’ with occasional moments of paradigm change. Normal science moves forward like a huge complex yet integrated machine, where the techniques, practices and values of science are generally shared and agreed by the members of the scientific community. In particular, there is a dominant paradigm, an agreed body of frameworks, methods and understandings which articulate the basis for the underlying rules that are broadly accepted and followed.
However, science doesn’t stay still. Within that accepted framework, there are continual developments and elaborations taking place. This is ‘normal science’, with a body of steadily growing findings and interpretations adding to the established stock of knowledge. However, Kuhn explained that from time to time, and only occasionally, paradigm change in science took place. He saw the process as going through stages. The process began in what he called ‘normal science’: this is the everyday framework within which science is conducted. At any one time there are sets of theories and ideas shared in the scientific community which define what is possible and rational to do, giving scientists a clear set of tools to approach their research problems. The classic example of this in normal science was Newtonian physics.
When I first read Kuhn’s book, I assumed he was describing a framework that was the same for all scientists. Older and wiser now, I realise the paradigms that define normal science can be particular to particular researchers and specialities. A chemist and a physicist might operate with different frameworks supporting their understanding of a helium atom. Despite such variations, however, some features of science at any one time are generally shared. This is what Kuhn saw as the basis of the underlying paradigm, with rules about the forms of admissible data, the nature of causation, the bases for measurement, and so on.
However, as they work within an accepted paradigm, scientists encounter anomalies that cannot be fully or adequately explained by the prevailing model, despite all the progress that has been made. Some results, some observations, just don’t seem to make sense. The usual reaction to such anomalies is to set them aside, either as something to be addressed at another time, or for further work planned to show how what has been observed can be explained by the framework in place. They are anomalies, and anomalies are there to be set resolved.
However, over time these various inconsistencies tend to increase, and more observations appear to not quite ‘fit’ in the way they should. When more and more significant deviations have been identified and have remained stubbornly resistant to explanation within the current paradigm, Kuhn suggested this is the stage when the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis. To address the resulting uncertainty, scientists push the boundaries of ‘normal science’ in what Kuhn described as “extraordinary research”, which is characterized by its exploratory nature, and a willingness to try out ideas and approaches that formerly had been rejected. Without the structures of a dominant paradigm available to depend on, scientists engaging in this extraordinary research are seeking to develop new theories, considering and learning from thought experiments, and conducting hitherto rejected experiments as they attempt to resolve these anomalies. For Kuhn, the practices of this stage – “the proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals” – represented a rich period, a time when scientists will be exploring concepts and frameworks that were as important to the development of science as was any eventual paradigm shift.
Science can’t thrive in an environment of continuing uncertainty, however, and in time a new paradigm emerges, the result of a developing consensus about the alternative sets of theories, one which gradually attracts an increasing number of followers. Kuhn realised this proves to be a contentious phase, with some scientists determinedly resistant to the developing new paradigm, and others opposing them and offering reasons for why individual scientists should adopt this new basis for the discipline. Kuhn quoted Max Planck, who he reported as saying “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” (from page 150 of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
Unsurprisingly, this is often a period of trenchant criticism and angry rebuttals. Many scientists at a time of paradigm change have built their careers within the existing framework and are committed to the dominant paradigm. To accept a paradigm shift involves gestalt-like changes, and this was a major reason why Kuhn saw paradigms as difficult to change. In effect, practitioners are being told ‘you got that all wrong’! However, it often proves to be an unequal battle, as a new paradigm gains acceptance by explaining or predicting phenomena much better than the previous approach had been able to, as was the case when Bohr offered a new and helpful model of the atom. It’s not just explanatory power, however, as new paradigms are often seen as being more subjectively pleasing, by being aesthetically elegant.
In the end, the replacement of one paradigm by another is a function of answering two key questions. Does the new paradigm offer a more comprehensive explanation of what has been observed, especially by addressing those annoying anomalies. Second, and in some ways more important, does the new paradigm get to the heart of the scientific enterprise by offering a good guide for future research and emerging problems. This is an important characteristic, because a proposed new paradigm must offer a path to address currently unsolved problems that the previously dominant paradigm had been incapable of resolving. Inevitably, and in the long run, the new paradigm will advance understanding on what had been stumbling blocks in the past, and in so doing becomes institutionalized as the new dominant framework.
Paradigm change isn’t just about research practice, of course. It involves the whole scientific enterprise. New textbooks are written, and in the process, these slowly obscure the fact that revolutionary change had been taking place. Before too long, science is the new paradigm.
In publishing his critique, Kuhn understood the crucial role of the infrastructure of science. When his book appeared, few university scientists, many of whom were themselves engaged in creating the new curricula, took offense at Kuhn’s strident commentary on science textbooks. They understood the need for change in the training of scientists. When Kuhn attacked a list of the people who propagate falsehoods about science, among whom were textbook authors, science popularizers, and philosophers, he didn’t want to include scientists (though of course many scientists engage all these areas of work). Despite this, over time and especially some years after 1962, the situation had changed. By the 1970s, while many scientists had found Kuhn’s model of scientific change useful, they now bristled at his characterization of the broader scientific community. No-one was happy about being identified alongside those textbook writers advocating what was now a ‘mistaken’ paradigm.
Kuhn claimed, both in 1962 and for the rest of his career, that he had not intended any of this as an attack on the scientific enterprise itself. For Kuhn, the entire point of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was to make clear and promote what he and many scientists of his generation saw as science’s distinctive ability to build cumulative knowledge. “Why,” as Kuhn wrote, “is progress a perquisite reserved almost exclusively for the activities we call science?” Part of the answer flows from the practices of normal science, which free scientists up to focus on routine problem-solving. But Kuhn argued that even the disruption of paradigm shifts generally strengthens, rather than weakens, scientists’ ability to solve new problems, for the straightforward reason that scientific communities prefer practices that “ensure the continuing growth of the assembled data that [they] can treat with precision and detail.” As they read his book, however, not all scientists grasped this point.
It seems likely that Kuhn believed his definition of scientific progress, with its dedication to routine problem-solving and fidelity to the actual history of science, represented a major step forward from pedagogical fairy tales about science as a process of constant discovery. But he acknowledged there was one critical way in which his account of scientific progress diverged from common understanding: it had nothing to do with ‘truth’. Instead of thinking of science as a process that inevitably draws closer to actual reality, Kuhn suggested that we treat scientific change as an evolutionary process, similar to natural selection, in which various paradigms compete for advantage, survival of the fittest in the scientific community.
At the time, critics emerged who charged his approach as reeking of relativism. Surely, they noted, if science had no inherent orientation toward revealing the truth, then facts could be whatever a scientific community agreed them to be. Kuhn tried to deflect this response by pointing to the supposedly distinctive characteristics of the scientific communities that he hadn’t actually taken the trouble to emphasise. In his later work, he placed more emphasis of the study of scientific communities as self-correcting networks. If scientists worked within an agreed paradigm, they were also guardians and critics, reviewing and assessing research, and subjecting findings to rigorous analysis. He suggested science operated within an aware community, but he couldn’t have imagined where this was to lead in the next few decades.
Kuhn had galvanised a community of people researching the scientific process. By the mid-1980s, a new generation of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science emerged, bringing a wealth of critical studies of the scientific enterprise. Now the scope of critiques grew. These new studies assessed the influence of ideas about race, sex, gender, national and historical context, and, most importantly, power, as they developed their analyses of what drove scientific communities to embrace some theories and reject others. Wolfe has reported defenders of science took to calling this approach “Kuhnian,” to Kuhn’s everlasting chagrin.
Sixty years later, Kuhn’s analysis reads oddly antiquated. Back then, the dissection of a ‘scientific paradigm’ and the notion of paradigm change were helpful. The identification of the role of anomalies, the way they could be ignored for a time, and then eventually created the momentum for rethinking was illuminating. However, his analysis was academic, narrow, and limited. We now have a much better understanding of science as a social enterprise, and the relevance of various aspects of the practitioners’ contexts. His work represents a key stage in opening our eyes to how an endeavour like science is shaped and progressed. As we battle our way out of the sometimes-absurd elements of postmodernist critiques, we are better able to make sense of the world around us, and understand how our perceptions, models and explanations are structured, and are limiting as a result.
Is there an end to this process? Perhaps science will always develop by replacing one set of ideas with another, each offering a step forward, a step sideways, or a step in a new direction. For certain, we can look back at 20th Century science and see how deeply it was shaped by European thinking, itself an inheritance from a male, oppressive and controlling ethos more than two thousand years old. For a long time, science has been a conservative endeavour. We might see some new and revealing perspectives emerge in the 21st Century.
In a different way, we can also recognise something else important about Kuhn’s perspective. He didn’t trust scientists to tell their own stories. At the beginning of the 20th Century, scientists and historians of science shared their view of development and of the nature of science. It was a nice, tidy and apparently objective account of progress, each new finding building a stronger basis for understanding that this was the ways things were. Kuhn successfully blew that up that simplistic story and demonstrated that it was social scientists who could offer us important insights into the story of scientific progress. It was true most science moved along step by step, but it was as a social phenomenon, as well as an intellectual one. Today we read accounts of scientists, in fiction as well as non-fiction, which can help us understand how humans think and share ideas. No wonder he faced so much resistance when The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published: it was about people!
How is the inheritance seen today? It seems to be two-fold. First, the story of science is a story of progress, of increased understanding in the physical realm. We can understand so much more about the world around us, the natural sciences, all the way from physics to botany. We are even getting some insights into the universe, but, today, they seem as fanciful as did the ideas of natural scientists studying materials and animals two centuries ago.
On the other hand, Kuhn gave us an important lesson in humility. Science has progressed through ideas and models, persuasion and ridicule. Kuhn’s work was a key step in helping us realise we ‘make sense’ through the models and an underlying logic that prevail at one point in time, and we know, or should know, that our views will be superseded. He also initiated a better understanding that we shouldn’t working within just one paradigm, but recognise there are several complex frameworks involved, sometimes consistent, sometimes contradictory, often revealing as much about the enquirers as they do about the models they are proposing. Perhaps his most important contribution has been to introduce the idea of ‘paradigm change’ into our thinking (as well as an encouragement for us to keep on thinking ‘outside the box’). As we see continuing battles over sources of authority, Kuhn enabled a shift in scientific narrative, in the history of science. The result has been some new questions to consider: Who gets to tell the story of a field? How ‘truthful’ can these stories be? Above all, in the 21st C his approach suggests we should acknowledge some modesty might be appropriate.
