Normal science

Normal science, identified and elaborated on by Thomas Samuel Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , ^[1] is the regular work of scientists theorizing, observing, and experimenting within a settled paradigm or explanatory framework. ^[2] Regarding science as puzzle-solving, ^[3] Kuhn explained normal science as slowly accumulating detail in accord with established broad theory, without questioning or challenging the underlying assumptions of that theory.

Contents

• The route to normal science
• Normal science at work
• The breakdown of consensus
• Criticism
• See also
• References
• Further reading
• External links

The route to normal science

Kuhn stressed that historically, the route to normal science could be a difficult one. Prior to the formation of a shared paradigm or research consensus, would-be scientists were reduced to the accumulation of random facts and unverified observations, in the manner recorded by Pliny the Elder or Francis Bacon, ^[4] while simultaneously beginning the foundations of their field from scratch through a plethora of competing theories.

Arguably at least the social sciences remain at such a pre-paradigmatic level today. ^[5]

Normal science at work

Kuhn considered that the bulk of scientific work was that done by the 'normal' scientist, as they engaged with the threefold task of articulating the paradigm, precisely evaluating key paradigmatic facts, and testing those new points at which the theoretical paradigm is open to empirical appraisal. ^[6]

Paradigms are central to Kuhn's conception of normal science. ^[7] Scientists derive rules from paradigms, which also guide research by providing a framework for action that encompasses all the values, techniques, and theories shared by the members of a scientific community. ^[8] Paradigms gain recognition from more successfully solving acute problems than their competitors. Normal science aims to improve the match between a paradigm's predictions and the facts of interest to a paradigm. ^[9] It does not aim to discover new phenomena.

According to Kuhn, normal science encompasses three classes of scientific problems. ^[10] The first class of scientific problems is the determination of significant fact, such as the position and magnitude of stars in different galaxies. When astronomers use special telescopes to verify Copernican predictions, they engage the second class: the matching of facts with theory, an attempt to demonstrate agreement between the two. Improving the value of the gravitational constant is an example of articulating a paradigm theory, which is the third class of scientific problems.

The breakdown of consensus

The normal scientist presumes that all values, techniques, and theories falling within the expectations of the prevailing paradigm are accurate. ^[11] Anomalies represent challenges to be puzzled out and solved within the prevailing paradigm. Only if an anomaly or series of anomalies resists successful deciphering long enough and for enough members of the scientific community will the paradigm itself gradually come under challenge during what Kuhn deems a crisis of normal science. ^[12] If the paradigm is unsalvageable, it will be subjected to a paradigm shift. ^[13]

Kuhn lays out the progression of normal science that culminates in scientific discovery at the time of a paradigm shift: first, one must become aware of an anomaly in nature that the prevailing paradigm cannot explain. Then, one must conduct an extended exploration of this anomaly. The crisis only ends when one discards the old paradigm and successfully maps the original anomaly onto a new paradigm. The scientific community embraces a new set of expectations and theories that govern the work of normal science. ^[14] Kuhn calls such discoveries scientific revolutions. ^[15] Successive paradigms replace each other and are necessarily incompatible with each other. ^[16]

In this way however, according to Kuhn, normal science possesses a built-in mechanism that ensures the relaxation of the restrictions that previously bound research, whenever the paradigm from which they derive ceases to function effectively. ^[17] Kuhn's framework restricts the permissibility of paradigm falsification to moments of scientific discovery.

Criticism

Kuhn's normal science is characterized by upheaval over cycles of puzzle-solving and scientific revolution, as opposed to cumulative improvement. In Kuhn's historicism, moving from one paradigm to the next completely changes the universe of scientific assumptions. Imre Lakatos has accused Kuhn of falling back on irrationalism to explain scientific progress. Lakatos relates Kuhnian scientific change to a mystical or religious conversion ungoverned by reason. ^[18]

With the aim of presenting scientific revolutions as rational progress, Lakatos provided an alternative framework of scientific inquiry in his paper Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. His model of the research programme preserves cumulative progress in science where Kuhn's model of successive irreconcilable paradigms in normal science does not. Lakatos' basic unit of analysis is not a singular theory or paradigm, but rather the entire research programme that contains the relevant series of testable theories. ^[19] Each theory within a research programme has the same common assumptions and is supposed by a belt of more modest auxiliary hypotheses that serve to explain away potential threats to the theory's core assumptions. ^[20] Lakatos evaluates problem shifts, changes to auxiliary hypotheses, by their ability to produce new facts, better predictions, or additional explanations. Lakatos' conception of a scientific revolution involves the replacement of degenerative research programmes by progressive research programmes. Rival programmes persist as minority views. ^[21]

Lakatos is also concerned that Kuhn's position may result in the controversial position of relativism, for Kuhn accepts multiple conceptions of the world under different paradigms. ^[22] Although the developmental process he describes in science is characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature, Kuhn does not conceive of science as a process of evolution towards any goal or telos. ^[23] He has noted his own sparing use of the word truth in his writing. ^[23]

An additional consequence of Kuhn's relavitism, which poses a problem for the philosophy of science, is his blurred demarcation between science and non-science. Unlike Karl Popper's deductive method of falsification, under Kuhn, scientific discoveries that do not fit the established paradigm do not immediately falsify the paradigm. They are treated as anomalies within the paradigm that warrant further research, until a scientific revolution refutes the entire paradigm.

See also

Related Research Articles

Falsifiability is a deductive standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses, introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934). A theory or hypothesis is falsifiable if it can be logically contradicted by an empirical test.

Sir Karl Raimund Popper was an Austrian–British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".

A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. It is a concept in the philosophy of science that was introduced and brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn. Even though Kuhn restricted the use of the term to the natural sciences, the concept of a paradigm shift has also been used in numerous non-scientific contexts to describe a profound change in a fundamental model or perception of events.

Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Amongst its central questions are the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose and meaning of science as a human endeavour. Philosophy of science focuses on metaphysical, epistemic and semantic aspects of scientific practice, and overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, logic, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and the concept of truth. Philosophy of science is both a theoretical and empirical discipline, relying on philosophical theorising as well as meta-studies of scientific practice. Ethical issues such as bioethics and scientific misconduct are often considered ethics or science studies rather than the philosophy of science.

Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its "methodology of proofs and refutations" in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the "research programme" in his methodology of scientific research programmes.

In science and philosophy, a paradigm is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. The word paradigm is Greek in origin, meaning "pattern".

The Latin phrase odium theologicum is the name originally given to the often intense anger and hatred generated by disputes over theology. It has also been adopted to describe non-theological disputes of a rancorous nature.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book about the history of science by the philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in science in which scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of conceptual continuity and cumulative progress, referred to as periods of "normal science", were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. The discovery of "anomalies" during revolutions in science leads to new paradigms. New paradigms then ask new questions of old data, move beyond the mere "puzzle-solving" of the previous paradigm, alter the rules of the game and change the "map" directing new research.

Scientific consensus is the generally held judgment, position, and opinion of the majority or the supermajority of scientists in a particular field of study at any particular time.

In philosophy of science and epistemology, the demarcation problem is the question of how to distinguish between science and non-science. It also examines the boundaries between science, pseudoscience and other products of human activity, like art and literature and beliefs. The debate continues after more than two millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields. The debate has consequences for what can be termed "scientific" in topics such as education and public policy.

Commensurability is a concept in the philosophy of science whereby scientific theories are said to be "commensurable" if scientists can discuss the theories using a shared nomenclature that allows direct comparison of them to determine which one is more valid or useful. On the other hand, theories are incommensurable if they are embedded in starkly contrasting conceptual frameworks whose languages do not overlap sufficiently to permit scientists to directly compare the theories or to cite empirical evidence favoring one theory over the other. Discussed by Ludwik Fleck in the 1930s, and popularized by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, the problem of incommensurability results in scientists talking past each other, as it were, while comparison of theories is muddled by confusions about terms, contexts and consequences.

Postpositivism or postempiricism is a metatheoretical stance that critiques and amends positivism and has impacted theories and practices across philosophy, social sciences, and various models of scientific inquiry. While positivists emphasize independence between the researcher and the researched person, postpositivists argue that theories, hypotheses, background knowledge and values of the researcher can influence what is observed. Postpositivists pursue objectivity by recognizing the possible effects of biases. While positivists emphasize quantitative methods, postpositivists consider both quantitative and qualitative methods to be valid approaches.

The sociology of the history of science—related to sociology and philosophy of science, as well as the entire field of science studies—has in the 20th century been occupied with the question of large-scale patterns and trends in the development of science, and asking questions about how science "works" both in a philosophical and practical sense.

In computer science, the scientific community metaphor is a metaphor used to aid understanding scientific communities. The first publications on the scientific community metaphor in 1981 and 1982 involved the development of a programming language named Ether that invoked procedural plans to process goals and assertions concurrently by dynamically creating new rules during program execution. Ether also addressed issues of conflict and contradiction with multiple sources of knowledge and multiple viewpoints.

Inductivism is the traditional and still commonplace philosophy of scientific method to develop scientific theories. Inductivism aims to neutrally observe a domain, infer laws from examined cases—hence, inductive reasoning—and thus objectively discover the sole naturally true theory of the observed.

A research program is a professional network of scientists conducting basic research. The term was used by philosopher of science Imre Lakatos to blend and revise the normative model of science offered by Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery and the descriptive model of science offered by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Lakatos found falsificationism impractical and often not practiced, and found normal science—where a paradigm of science, mimicking an exemplar, extinguishes differing perspectives—more monopolistic than actual.

Critical reading is a form of language analysis that does not take the given text at face value, but involves a deeper examination of the claims put forth as well as the supporting points and possible counterarguments. The ability to reinterpret and reconstruct for improved clarity and readability is also a component of critical reading. The identification of possible ambiguities and flaws in the author's reasoning, in addition to the ability to address them comprehensively, are essential to this process. Critical reading, much like academic writing, requires the linkage of evidential points to corresponding arguments.

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.

Bold hypothesis or bold conjecture is a concept in the philosophy of science of Karl Popper, first explained in his debut The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935) and subsequently elaborated in writings such as Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963). The concept is nowadays widely used in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of knowledge. It is also used in the social and behavioural sciences.

The Kuhn-Popper debate was a debate surrounding research methods and the advancement of scientific knowledge. In 1965, at the University of London's International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper engaged in a debate that circled around three main areas of disagreement. These areas included the concept of a scientific method, the specific behaviors and practices of scientists, and the differentiation between scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge.

References

Further reading

W. O. Hagstrom, The Scientific Community (1965)

External links

• Paradigms and normal science