The famous opening paragraphs of Structure read as though Kuhn had analyzed a historical time series and extracted a pattern from it inductively as the basis for his model of scientific development. The broadly cyclic nature of this pattern immediately jumps out at dynamical systems theorists. This is unfortunate, since the new developments might have provided valuable tools for articulating his own ideas.
For example, it would appear that, as Kuhnian normal science becomes more robust in the sense of closing gaps, tightening connections, and thereby achieving multiple lines of derivation and hence mutual reinforcement of many results. However, that very fact makes normal science increasingly fragile, less resilient to shocks, and more vulnerable to cascading failure Nickles Kuhn claimed, contrary to the expectations of scientific realists, that there would be no end to scientific revolutions in ongoing, mature sciences, with no reason to believe that such revolutions would gradually diminish in size as these sciences continued to mature.
But it would seem to follow from his model that he could have made a still stronger point. The reason is that just mentioned: as research continues filling gaps and further articulating the paradigm, normal science becomes more tightly integrated but also forges tighter links to relevant neighboring fields.
Taking these developments into account predicts that Kuhnian normal science should evolve toward an ever more critical state in which something that was once an innocuous anomaly can now trigger a cascade of failures Nickles a and b , sometimes rather quickly.
For there will be little slack left to absorb such discrepancies. If so, then we have an important sort of dynamical nonlinearity even in normal science, which means that Kuhnian normal science itself is more dynamic, less static, than he made it out to be.
It seems clear that Kuhnian revolutions are bifurcations in the nonlinear dynamical sense, and it seems plausible to think that Kuhnian revolutions may have a fat-tailed or power-law distribution or worse when their size is plotted over time on an appropriate scale. To elaborate a bit: one intriguing suggestion coming from work in nonlinear dynamics is that scientific changes may be like earthquakes and many other phenomena perhaps including punctuated equilibrium events of the Gould-Eldredge sort as well as mass extinction events in biology in following a power-law distribution in which there are exponentially fewer changes of a given magnitude than the number of changes in the next lower category.
For example, there might be only one magnitude 5 change or above for every ten magnitude 4 changes on average over time , as in the Gutenberg-Richter scale for earthquakes. If so, then scientific revolutions would be scale free, meaning that large revolutions in the future are more probable than a Gaussian normal distribution would predict.
Such a conclusion would have important implications for the issue of scientific realism. To be sure, working out such a timescale of revolutions and their sizes in the history of science would be difficult and controversial, but Nicholas Rescher , has begun the task in terms of ranking scientific discoveries and studying their distribution over time. Derek Price had previously introduced quantitative historical considerations into history of science, pointing out, among many other things, the exponential increase in the number of scientists and quantity of their publications since the Scientific Revolution.
Such an exponential increase, faster than world population increase, obviously cannot continue forever and, in fact, was already beginning to plateau in industrialized nations in the s. Among philosophers, Rescher was probably the first to analyze aggregate data concerning scientific innovation, arguing that, as research progresses, discoveries of a given magnitude become more difficult.
Rescher concludes that we must eventually expect a decrease in the rate of discovery of a given magnitude and hence, presumably, a similar decrease in the rate of scientific revolutions. Although he does not mention Schumpeter in this work, he expresses a similar view:. Since we can regard scientific practices and organization as highly designed technological systems, the work of Charles Perrow and others on technological risk is relevant here.
See Perrow for entry into this approach. Contagion is, of course, necessary for a revolt to succeed as a revolution. Steven Kellert considers and rejects the claim that chaos theory represents a Kuhnian revolution.
Although it does provide a new set of research problems and standards and, to some degree, transforms our worldview, it does not overturn and replace an entrenched theory. Kellert argues that chaos theory does not even constitute the emergence of a new, mature science rather than an extension of standard mechanics, although it may constitute a new style of reasoning.
If a theory is just a toolbox of models, something like an integrated collection of Kuhnian exemplars Giere , Teller , then the claim for a revolutionary theory development of some kind becomes more plausible. For nonlinear dynamics highlights a new set of models and the strange attractors that characterize their behaviors.
In addition, complex systems theorists often stress the holistic, anti-reductive, emergent nature of the systems they study, by contrast with the linear, Newtonian paradigm. Kellert also questions whether traditional dynamics was really in a special state of crisis prior to the recent emphasis on nonlinear dynamics, for difficulties in dealing with nonlinear phenomena have been apparent almost from the beginning.
Since Kuhn himself emphasized, against Popper, that all theories face anomalies at all times, it is unfortunately all too easy, after an apparently revolutionary development, to point back and claim crisis.
While he initially claimed that his model applied only to mature natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, and parts of biology, he believed that the essential tension point applies, in varying degrees, to all enterprises that place a premium on creative innovation.
His work thereby raises interesting questions, such as which kinds of social structures make revolution necessary by contrast with more continuous varieties of transformative change and whether those that do experience revolutions tend to be more progressive by some standard. We have already met several alternative conceptions of transformative change in the sciences. Kuhn believed that innovation in the arts was often too divergent fully to express the essential tension. By contrast, the sciences, he claimed, do not seek innovation for its own sake, at least normal scientists do not.
But what about technological innovation which is often closely related to mature science and what about business enterprise more generally? And in the sciences as well as economic life there would seem to be other forms of displacement than the logical and epistemological forms commonly recognized by philosophers of science. Consider the familiar economic phenomenon of obsolescence, including cases that lead to major social reorganization as technological systems are improved.
Think of algorithmic data mining and statistical computation, robotics, and the automation to be found in any modern biological laboratory. Such companies can sometimes scale up their more efficient processes to displace the major players, as did Japanese steel makers to the big U. There would seem to be parallels in the history of science. Speaking of technological developments, philosophers, including Kuhn, have undervalued a major source of transformative developments, namely, material culture, specifically the development of new instruments.
There is, however, a growing literature in history and sociology of science and technology. But a similar point extends to smaller-scale material practices as documented by much recent research, as in Baird , discussed above. Such work takes place on all scales. In Structure and later writings, Kuhn locates revolutionary change both at the logico-semantical and methodological level incompatibility between successor and predecessor paradigm and at the level of form of community life and practice.
But does the latter always require the former? As we know from the history of economics and business, one form of life can replace another in various ways without being based directly upon a logical or semantic incompatibility.
The old ways may be not wrong but simply obsolete, inefficient, out of fashion—destroyed by a process that requires more resources than simple logical relations to understand it. There can be massive displacement by non-logical means. Retrospectively, as many commentators have noted, we can view Kuhn on scientific revolutions as a transitional figure, more indebted to logical empiricist conceptions of logic, language, and meaning than he could have recognized at the time, while departing sharply from the logical empiricists and Popper in other respects.
The Problems of Revolution and Innovative Change 2. History of the Concept of Scientific Revolution 2. Other Revolution Claims and Examples 6. The Problems of Revolution and Innovative Change The difficulties in identifying and conceptualizing scientific revolutions involve many of the most challenging issues in epistemology, methodology, ontology, philosophy of language, and even value theory.
Decades ago, the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter characterized economic innovation as the process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within , incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.
This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. Previously it had been an astronomical and astrological term limited to the revolution of the heavens, or to any complete circular motion.
In the Introduction he famously or notoriously stated that the Scientific Revolution outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. Although the three influential college course texts that he co-authored with June Goodfield recounted the major changes that resulted in the development of several modern sciences Toulmin and Goodfield , , , these authors could write, already about the so-called Copernican Revolution: We must now look past the half-truths of this caricature, to what Copernicus attempted and what he in fact achieved.
In the development of science, as we shall see, thorough-going revolutions are just about out of the question. In his retrospective autobiographical lecture at Cambridge in , Popper did refer to the dramatic political and intellectual events of his youth as revolutionary: [T]he air was full of revolutionary slogans and ideas, and new and often wild theories.
As he later wrote: Even those who have followed me this far will want to know how a value-based enterprise of the sort I have described can develop as a science does, repeatedly producing powerful new techniques for prediction and control.
To that question, unfortunately, I have no answer at all…. The process described in Section XII as the resolution of revolutions is the selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science.
The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge. Successive stages in that developmental process are marked by an increase in articulation and specialization. And the entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal….
Gould and Eldredge end their later review article on punctuated equilibrium by remarking: [C]ontemporary science has massively substituted notions of indeterminacy, historical contingency, chaos and punctuation for previous convictions about gradual, progressive, predictable determinism. With much reluctance I have increasingly come to feel that this process of specialization, with its consequent limitation on communication and community, is inescapable, a consequence of first principles.
Specialization and the narrowing of the range of expertise now look to me like the necessary price of increasingly powerful cognitive tools. Since deep conceptual revolutions or paradigm-shifts are a fact of scientific life and, I would argue, a necessity , we are never in a position to make our present constitutive principles as truly universal principles of human reason—as fixed once and for all throughout the evolution of science.
In recent work, Friedman devotes more attention to the social dimension, and he notes that even the standards of rationality may continue to change historically. See also DiSalle Writes Hacking: Foucault used the French world connaissance to stand for such items of surface knowledge while savoir meant more than science; it was a frame, postulated by Foucault, within which surface hypotheses got their sense.
Savoir is not knowledge in the sense of a bunch of solid propositions. The kinds of things to be said about the brain in are not the kinds of things to be said a quarter-century later.
Writes Hacking, Many of the recent but already classical philosophical discussions of such topics as incommensurability, indeterminacy of translation, and conceptual schemes seem to discuss truth where they ought to be considering truth-or-falsehood.
Hacking , 76 makes this point with reference to the French context: There are two extremes in French historiography. He posits sharp discontinuities in the history of knowledge.
Kuhn states that the relativity revolution might serve as a prototype for revolutionary reorientation in the sciences. Just because it did not involve the introduction of additional objects or concepts, the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics illustrates with particular clarity the scientific revolution as a displacement of the conceptual network through which scientists view the world.
There is little doubt that analytical chemistry has undergone a radical change. The practice of the analyst, who now deals with large, expensive equipment, is different than it was in Modern instrumental methods are by and large more sensitive and accurate, have lower limits of detection, and require smaller samples; different kinds of analyses can be performed.
Analytical chemistry is much less a science of chemical separations and much more a science of determining and deploying the physical properties of substances.
There was no such crisis in analytical chemistry. While one might imagine that analytical chemistry underwent a change of paradigm, there was no crisis that provoked this change. Pre analytical chemists did not bemoan the inability of their chemistry to solve certain problems.
These changes in analytical chemistry do not suffer from any kind of incommensurability: today, one can easily enough understand what analytical chemists were doing in —although the idea that the analytical chemist is one who can quantitatively manufacture pure chemicals is startling on first encounter.
Less than two decades after Watson and Crick, Gunther Stent could already write in his textbook: How times have changed! Molecular genetics has … grown from the esoteric specialty of a small, tightly knit vanguard into an elephantine academic discipline whose basic doctrines today form part of the primary school science curriculum.
Carroll, for example, holds precisely the complement view—complementary yet revolutionary: Evo-Devo constitutes the third major act in a continuing evolutionary synthesis. Evo-Devo has not just provided a critical missing piece of the Modern Synthesis—embryology—and integrated it with molecular genetics and traditional elements such as paleontology.
The wholly unexpected nature of some of its key discoveries and the unprecedented quality and depth of evidence it has provided toward settling previously unresolved questions bestow it with a revolutionary character. It was in his review of their book that Godfrey-Smith suggested that recent biological progress is a deluge rather than a Kuhnian revolution.
Although he does not mention Schumpeter in this work, he expresses a similar view: Scientific progress in large measure annihilates rather than enlarges what has gone before—it builds the new on the foundations of the ruins of the old. Scientific theorizing generally moves ahead not by addition and enlargement but by demolition and replacement. Bibliography Agazzi, E.
Andersen, H. Barker, and X. Arthur, W. Bachelard, G. Goldhammer trans. Baird, D. Baltas, A. Gavroglu, and V. Barnes, B. Bijker, W.
Hughes, and T. Pinch eds. Beinhocker, E. Bellone, E. Bird, A. Bitbol, M. Bowler, P. Brannigan, A. Brush, S. Buchanan, M. New York: Norton. Burtt, E. Butterfield, H. Carnap, R. Carroll, S. Christensen, C. Cohen, H. Cohen, I. Cohen, M. Cowan, G. Pines, and D. Meltzer eds. Crombie, A. De Langhe, R. Dear, P. Dijksterhuis, E. Original Dutch edition, DiSalle, R.
Domski, M. Dickson eds. Doppelt, G. Zinnser eds. Duhem, P. Feyerabend, P. Feigl and G. Maxwell eds. Fleck, L. Foucault, M. Frank, P. Friedman, M. Fuller, S. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Galison, P. Gattei, S. Giere, R. Gillispie, C. Gladwell, M. Gleick, J. Godfrey-Smith, P.
Jablonka and M. Goodwin, B. Gould, S. Schopf ed. Gutting, G. Hacking, I. Harris, R. Holmes, O. Hooker, C. Hoyningen-Huene, P.
Sankey eds. Hull, D. Jablonka, E. Kant, I. Louden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Kauffman, S. Kellert, S. Hull, M. Forbes, and K. Okruhlik eds. Keynes, J. Kindi, V. Arabatzis eds. Klein, M. Krajewski, W. Kuhn, T. Page references are to the 2nd edition. Lakatos and A. Musgrave eds. Reprinted in Kuhn a , pp. Horwich ed. Conant and J. Haugeland eds. Kusch, M.
Kuukkanen, J-M. Lakatos, I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laudan, L. Nickles ed. Lewis, C. Marcum, J. Margolis, H. Nagel, E. Nersessian, N. Newman, M. Nickles, T. Sarkar and J. Pfeifer eds. Meheus and T. Nickles eds. Soler, E. Trizio, T. Nickles, and W. Wimsatt eds. Nowak, L. Olby, R. Pepper, S. Perrow, C. Pickering, A. Polanyi, M. Popper, K. Mace ed. Expanded translation of Logik der Forschung , Porter, T. Post, H. Preston, J.
Price, D. Psillos, S. Sees scientific revolution as a major philosophical shift in Western intellectual tradition from medieval to modern caused by appeal to mathematical elegance of Neoplatonic ideals. Originally published in Butterfield, Herbert. The Origins of Modern Science. New York: Simon and Schuster, Popularized the view of the scientific revolution as the beginning of modernity brought about by specific forward-looking individuals. Dear, Peter.
DOI: For general audiences. Covers material chronologically from to Greater emphasis on mathematics and physical sciences over life sciences and medicine. Good for classroom use. Debus, Allen G. Man and Nature in the Renaissance. Part of Cambridge History of Science series for general audiences; intellectual history. Combines the idea of the progress of the exact sciences with the occult disciplines of the period. Duhem, Pierre.
Edited and translated by Roger Ariew. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Paris: A. Hermann, — Looks at medieval thinkers and shows that their cosmological thinking was often more sophisticated than given credit for. Suggests that the scientific revolution was not so revolutionary. Gal, Ofer, and Raz Chen-Morris. A new view of nature emerged during the Scientific Revolution, replacing the Greek view that had dominated science for almost 2, years.
Science became an autonomous discipline, distinct from both philosophy and technology, and it came to be regarded as having utilitarian goals. By the end of this period, it may not be too much to say that science had replaced Christianity as the focal point of European civilization. Continue reading from Encyclopedia Britannica. The Scientific Revolution began in astronomy. Relying on virtually the same data as Ptolemy had possessed, Copernicus turned the world inside out, putting the Sun at the center and setting Earth into motion around it.
The scientific revolution laid the foundations for the Age of Enlightenment, which centered on reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and emphasized the importance of the scientific method.
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