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I found an essay by Thomas Kuhn on paradigm shifts, while wandering
the internet, as well as some good commentary on the essay. One link is this
one:
The conclusion reached:
Indeed, Kuhn ultimately concludes that science depends on the somewhat
erratic decision-making process that favors one paradigm over the other. "In
short, if a new candidate for paradigm had to be judged from the start by
hard-headed people who examined only relative problem-solving ability, the
sciences would experience very few major revolutions." (3).
As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker, "That [Kuhn's] idea was intended to apply only to the natural sciences did not matter. It was so novel, so persuasive, and--upon the monograph's publication as a book, in 1970--so perfectly in the rebellious spirit of the times that it quickly became adopted as a kind of general theory of everything" (1). Kuhn's ideas were indeed truly pervasive. In philosophy, history, sociology, economics, politics, and even religion, Kuhn's theory of paradigms changed the nature of the fields. Perhaps Gladwell summed up Kuhn's legacy best when he wrote, "Kuhn will be remembered because he taught that the process of science was fundamentally human, that discoveries were the product not of some plodding, rational process but of human ingenuity intermingled with politics and personality--that science was, in the end, a social process." -- Imran Javaid Interesting stuff, I think. In a discussion about the new science
journal I'm launching in my father's memory and what the title ought to be, I
think all of this is relevant.
Judith
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