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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn
xii, 210 pages.
ISBN 0-226-45808-3
101-SSR ... $19.00



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DESCRIPTION:
    Written by the man who coined the term "paradigm shift" this book describes the process and the end result. In essence paradigm shift is a relatively abrupt, fundamental change in the way that a specific conceptual world view is defined. The revisions tend to supplant earlier views that have served the needs of workers in specific fields, but have eventually proven to be inadequate. The replacement of Ptolemy's geocentric system by the heliocentric system of Copernicus and the discovery of oxygen are two historical examples used to shed light on the nature of its workings.
 


EXCERPT:
From Chapter VI. Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries

Our final example of scientific discovery, that of the Leyden jar, belongs to a class that may be described as theory-induced. Initially, the term may seem paradoxical. Much that has been said so far suggests that discoveries predicted by theory in advance are parts of normal science and result in no new sort of fact.  I have, for example, previously referred to the discoveries of new chemical elements during the second half of the nineteenth century as proceeding from normal science in that way.  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, that discovery is not quite the one anticipated by the speculative and tentative hypothesis.  Only as experiment and tentative theory are together articulated to a match does the discovery emerge and the theory become a paradigm.

The discovery of the Leyden jar displays all these features as well as the others we have observed before.  When it began, there was no single paradigm for electrical research.  Instead, a number of theories, all derived from relatively accessible phenomena, were in competition.  None of them succeeded in ordering the whole variety of electrical phenomena very well.  That failure is the source of several of the anomalies that provide background for the discovery of the Leyden jar.  One of the competing schools of electricians took electricity to be a fluid, and that conception led a number of men to attempt bottling the fluid by holding a water-filled glass vial in their hands and touching the water to a conductor suspended from an active electrostatic generator.  On removing the jar from the machine and touching the water (or a conductor connected to it) with his free hand, each of these investigators experienced a severe shock.  Those first experiments did not, however, provide electricians with the Leyden jar.  That device emerged more slowly, and it is again impossible to say just when its discovery was completed, The initial attempts to store electrical fluid worked only because investigators held the vial in their hands while standing upon the ground.  Electricians had still to learn that the jar required an outer as well as an inner conducting coating and that the fluid is not really stored in the jar at all.  Somewhere in the course of the investigations that showed them this, and which introduced them to several other anomalous effects, the device that we call the Leyden jar emerged.  Furthermore, the experiments that led to its emergence, many of them performed by Franklin, were also the ones that necessitated the drastic revision of the fluid theory and thus provided the first full paradigm of electricity.11

To a greater or lesser extent (corresponding to the continuum from the shocking to the anticipated result), the characteristics common to the three examples above are characteristic of all discoveries from which new sorts of phenomena emerge.  Those characteristics include, the previous awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance.  There is even evidence that these same characteristics are built into the nature of the perceptual process itself. In a psychological experiment that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards.  Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, eg., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts.  Each experimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to a single subject in a series of gradually increased exposures.  After each exposure the subject was asked what he had seen, and the run was terminated by two successive correct identifications.12

Even on the shortest exposures many subjects identified most of the cards, and after a small increase all the subjects identified them all.  For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal.  The black four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades or hearts.  Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience.  One would not even like to say that the subjects had seen something different from what they identified.  With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly.  Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say: That's the six of spades, but there's something wrong with it—the black has a red border.  Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation.  Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others.  A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories.  Even at forty times the average exposure required to recognize normal cards for what they were, more than 10 percent of the anomalous cards were not correctly identified.  And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress.  One of them exclaimed: "I can't make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn't even look like a card that time.  I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or a heart.  I'm not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!"13  In the next section we shall occasionally see scientists behaving this way too.

Either as a metaphor or because it reflects the nature of the mind, that psychological experiment provides a wonderfully simple and cogent schema for the process of scientific discovery.  In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation. Initially, only the anticipated and usual are experienced even under circumstances where anomaly is later to be observed.  Further acquaintance, however, does result in awareness of something wrong or does relate the effect to something that has gone wrong before. That awareness of anomaly opens a period in which conceptual categories are adjusted until the initially anomalous has become the anticipated.  At this point the discovery has been completed. I have already urged that that process or one very much like it is involved in the emergence of all fundamental scientific novelties.  Let me now point out that, recognizing the process, we can at last begin to see why normal science, a pursuit not directed to novelties and tending at first to suppress them, should nevertheless be so effective in causing them to arise.

In the development of any science, the first received paradigm is usually felt to account quite successfully for most of the observations and experiments easily accessible to that science's practitioners.  Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes.  That professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist's vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change.  The science has become increasingly rigid.  On the other hand, within those areas to which the paradigm directs the attention of the group, normal science leads to a detail of information and to a precision of the observation—theory match that could be achieved in no other way.  Furthermore, that detail and precision-of-match have a value that transcends their not always very high intrinsic interest.  Without the special apparatus that is constructed mainly for anticipated functions, the results that lead ultimately to novelty could not occur.  And even when the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong.  Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm.  The more precise and far-reaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator it provides of anomaly and hence of an occasion for paradigm change.  In the normal mode of discovery, even resistance to change has a use that will be explored more fully in the next section.  By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core.  The very fact that a significant scientific novelty so often emerges simultaneously from several laboratories is an index both to the strongly traditional nature of normal science and to the completeness with which that traditional pursuit prepares the way for its own change.

11 For various stages of the Leyden jar's evolution see I. B. Cohen, Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin's Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof (Philadelphia, 1956), pp. 385-88, 400-406, 452-67, 506-7. The last stage is described by Whittaker, op, cit., pp. 50-52.

12 J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman, "On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm," Journal of Personality, XVIII (1949), 206-23.

13 Ibid., p. 218. My colleague Postman tells me that, though knowing all about the apparatus and display in advance, he nevertheless found looking at the incongruous cards acutely uncomfortable.


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