Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift | Simply Psychology - 0 views
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Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not evolve gradually towards truth.
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Science has a paradigm which remains constant before going through a paradigm shift when current theories can’t explain some phenomenon, and someone proposes a new theory.
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A scientific revolution occurs when: (i) the new paradigm better explains the observations, and offers a model that is closer to the objective, external reality; and (ii) the new paradigm is incommensurate with the old.
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Kuhn looked at the history of science and argued that science does not simply progress by stages based upon neutral observations
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For Kuhn, the history of science is characterized by revolutions in scientific outlook. Scientists have a worldview or "paradigm"
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A paradigm is a universally recognizable scientific achievement that, for a time, provides model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.
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Scientists accept the dominant paradigm until anomalies are thrown up. Scientists then begin to question the basis of the paradigm itself, new theories emerge which challenge the dominant paradigm and eventually one of these new theories becomes accepted as the new paradigm.
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A particular work may “define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.”
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A paradigm is established which lays the foundations for legitimate work within the discipline. Scientific work then consists in articulation of the paradigm, in solving puzzles that it throws up.
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It is necessary for normal science to be uncritical. If all scientists were critical of a theory and spent time trying to falsify it, no detailed work would ever get done.
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"Normal Science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all of their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like
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Anomalies become serious, and a crisis develops if the anomalies undermine the basic assumptions of the paradigm and attempts to remove them consistently fail
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If the anomalies can be resolved, the crisis is over and normal science resumes. If not, there is a scientific revolution which involves a change of paradigm.
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Eventually a new paradigm will be established, but not as a result of any logically compelling justification.
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The enormous impact of Thomas Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning.
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For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained by, but not ultimately determined by, logical processes.
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Successive paradigms are incommensurable. Kuhn says that a later paradigm may be a better instrument for solving puzzles than an earlier one. But if each paradigm defines its own puzzles, what is a puzzle for one paradigm may be no puzzle at all for another