Posted by Chris on December 17, 1998 at 12:41:46:
Hey, there folks. Has anyone read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn? This is the book that started everybody talking about paradigms. I kept running into it in the bibliographies of other books I read, so I decided to check it out myself. Kuhn's viewpoint is challenging and controversial, and probably the most thought-provoking thing I have ever read. And I seem to remember Stephen J. Gould saying that it was the most important book he had ever read.
Kuhn basically says that science takes place in two forms, normal science and revolutionary science. Normal science is the filling-in of details, and is the only kind of activity that most scientists are familiar with. Revolutionary science takes over when old models don't work anymore. And he says something really shocking, and kind of Darwinian: science doesn't really evolve as better and closer approximations to the Truth--successful scientific ideas are accepted by the community for more mundane reasons: because they allow further puzzles to be solved. To me, it sounds similar to dispelling the illusion that biological evolution produces organisms that are progressing towards some kind of superior form--they are just adapting to changing conditions.
Also, Kuhn says that people working under different paradigms cannot fully communicate because they have different standards of evidence, expect different things to be questioned, and mean different things while using the same words. I think this is very apparent on this board, and explains why blue is so aggravating. He's not insane ;) he just has a different paradigm.