Re: Paradigm shifts through the history of science

[John Kineman <***>]

Judith,

Nice article, I'll use it on the seminar page!! Which can be found, by
the way, at
www.nexial.org/life

JK

At 08:25 AM 9/4/2004 -0400, you wrote:
> 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:
> http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~nagiel/99_hsr_webpage/hsr/winter97/kuhn.html
>  
> 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