📖 Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, 1962
Book summary on a historical and sociological point of view of scientific progress.
Happy new year! I hope you spent high-quality holidays 🥶
On my side, I put aside work to better connect with my family and close friends, as well as to take some time to read 🤓
And what a trove! Besides the heart-warming discussions and stomach-challenging meals, I discovered The structure of scientific revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. I wish to briefly share it with you as it helped me to shed a new light on questions like:
Why does science looks so out of tune with the world sometimes?
What are researchers actually looking for?
Do scientists have a cold and calculating mind, or are they also moved by gut-feelings and acts of faith?
Obviously, the whole book is much more than the brief extract below. But, here goes nothing!
Kuhn observes that, through history, scientific progress is done by:
The adoption of a paradigm that helps to focus on a set of problems and solve them quite fast;
The accumulations of discrepancies between a given theory and the facts that lead to a crisis;
A scientific revolution, aka the establishment of a new paradigm that changes qualitatively the nature of the research done.
And repeat!
This non-linear process allows to advance in a given direction at an incredible pace. More importantly, the system also allows an “update” when the limits of a paradigm have been reached, so it is able to progress further in another direction.
Is your curiosity picked? Here we go!
What is a scientific paradigm? 🌏👀
The scientific paradigm, a way to conceptualise the world, possesses two essential characteristics: the achievements are sufficiently remarkable to take away a coherent group of followers from other competing forms of scientific activity; it opens up sufficiently broad perspectives with all kinds of enigmas to solve to this new group of researchers.
More accurately, the adoption of a paradigm promises the scientific group that a given set of problems accepts a solution. One of the reasons why normal science seems to progress so rapidly is that specialists focus on puzzles that only their lack of ingenuity should prevent them from solving.
When an individual researcher can take a paradigm for granted, they no longer have to build up every concept from scratch. Thus, the researcher can start their research where the textbook ends.
Business as usual: what is normal science? 👩🏽🔬
Scientific progress is not inherently different from progress in other fields, but in most cases the absence of competing schools of thought, each questioning the aims and standards of the others, makes the progress of a group devoted to normal science much easier to see.
This is why, the desire to tackle down useful problems at all costs, without considering their relationship to existing knowledge and techniques, can so easily inhibit scientific development.
Hence, most scientists spend their entire careers engaged in clean-up operations. The research of normal science is directed towards the articulation of phenomena and theories that the paradigm already provides. Normal science never aims to bring to light new kinds of phenomena; those that do not fit into the box often go unnoticed. Instead, the failure to attain a result close to the one expected is typically considered a failure for a scientist.
As long as the tools provided by a paradigm prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science develops swifter and penetrates deeper into the facts by using these tools with confidence.
A parallel can be drawn with industry: the renewal of tools (here, theories and models) is a luxury that must be reserved for the circumstances that require it. But what are those circumstances?
Discovering anomalies 🔎🤯
Discovery begins with the awareness of an anomaly, i.e. the impression that nature in some way contradicts the results expected within the paradigm that governs normal science. When an irregularity seems to be more than an enigma of normal science, the transition to crisis, the transition to extraordinary science has begun.
On this occasion, there is an exploration of the realm of the inconsistency. This part is only closed when the paradigm theory is readjusted so that the anomalous phenomenon becomes an expected phenomenon.
But, the assimilation of a new type of fact is much more than a mere addition to the theory. Until the readjustment it requires is completed, i.e. until the researcher has learned to see nature in a different way, the novel truth is not a scientific fact yet.
To do so, the initial paradigm cannot be thrown away without any alternative to switch with. To reject a paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to abandon science itself. It is an act that discredits not the paradigm, but the researchers themselves.
Scientific revolution 💥💥
A scientific revolution is then when the paradigm used changes. Guided by a different paradigm, researchers adopt different instruments and their gaze turn in a novel direction. What had been a duck to the scientist before the revolution becomes a rabbit.
However, it is actually more than that. It’s seeing neither a rabbit, nor a duck, but a drawing representing them both. Another example: looking at the Moon, the scientist who has just converted to the Copernican theory does not say: “Before I saw a planet, but now I see a satellite”. This implies the old system was correct at one time. On the contrary, they will say, "I used to think the Moon was a planet (I saw the Moon as a planet), but I was wrong." In that sense, it can be said that there is a progress and not only a change.
This is also why, scientists that adopted competing paradigms are literally in separate dimensions and cannot comprehend and logically interact with each other.
And what about those who adopt a new paradigm at its early stage? The experimental paradigm must be trusted to resolve a myriad of significant problems that are posed, knowing only the inability of the old one to clear up some of them. This is a leap of faith!
Takeaways 🎁
A fragment of Kuhn’s ideas, but enough to shine at your next fund-raising cocktail party 🍸
The process described above is not an evolution towards anything. It is always an evolution from a former stage. Likewise, applied to one’s growth, it might be interesting to envision not a process to reach a set objective, but instead to thrive for an improvement from yesterday. For instance, instead of looking to do 100 push ups, you can set yourself to do more than the week before. 💪🏼
Another thought-challenging idea for personal growth: Kuhn’s book can answer Nietzsche’s quote “idols are costly but destroying them costs more”. Throwing away a paradigm is only possible by adopting a new one. Likewise, to fight back illusions that create too many discrepancies with the wold, how about replacing them for more fitting ones?
Lastly, there is some perspective: historically, scientific revolutionaries are young or new to the scientific area. Long timers are unable to look at the world in an alternative way. This is convergent with Adiga’s novel, The white tiger: “Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay”, not those who follow the rules. What do you think about this?
That was long enough, right?
So, “la bise” and see you next month!
😘