Thomas Kuhn Response - the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas Kuhn Response

In Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” the author explains the origins, process and evolution of a scientific concepts and ideas. He begins by explaining the concept of a “normal science” which is research based on one or more past scientific achievements, the accomplishments would have to be endorsed by a scientific community that accepted and acknowledged it, therefore supplying a foundation made by the scientific community that acknowledges it, for other to practice.

Scientific achievements are stored and recounted through books and textbooks, these books pass on the knowledge of an accepted theory endorsed by a scientific community, giving examples, illustration and explanations in order to convince the reader that the specific scientific subject being talked about is valid and reasonable. All the scientific books take their legitimacy from previous works by the likes of Ptolemy, Lavoisier, Franklin and Newton, because these books provided unprecedented knowledge, therefore attracting science practitioners to choose this mode of scientific activity instead of others and at the same time these books were open-ended, making possible for the reader to resolve future problems that have not been thought about by the original authors, these two characteristics are referred to as “paradigms” by Kuhn.

“Paradigms” are explained as a term closely related to that of “normal science”, the only change being that paradigms are able to provide examples that include law, theory, application and instrumentation together, thus providing models for traditions of scientific research. Paradigms then are scientific traditions such as “Ptolemaic Astronomy” and “Aristotelian Dynamics”, these works are used as basis, preparing those who want to delve in the scientific community and to be able to practice in it. This model works by providing a foundation of knowledge that can be scrutinized and studied under a scientific community, the research and understanding of the subject are able to progress and discover new laws, theories and instruments by giving the scientific community a common core upon which they can agree on concepts and build upon them by providing them with the same rules and standards for scientific practice, thus furthering the genesis and continuation of a research tradition.

Paradigms are subject to transformation within time, i.e., our understanding of light is relatively new, around half a century old. Even though there has been a scientific community that was able to create a paradigm about light, before half a century ago the knowledge and understanding about light, however highly accepted the paradigm created by Young and Fresnel was not correct. From this failure of a paradigm is where Kuhn indicates there is a change from “normal science” to “mature science”, which is the successive transition from one paradigm to another via a scientific revolution. This type of scientific revolution was not the case in the field of physical optics until Newton’s paradigm, before that there was a variant of theories to explain how light works, these theories were not able to come with the correct definition of light because they focused on metaphysical qualities that could not be studied or remade, or made out points that hindered the development of the study of light. Although these works did not depict the correct description of what light is they still have made significant impact and helped in the creations of new paradigms such as Newton’s physical optics paradigm. The reason why many different explanations of what is light and for many other paradigms, is that there is no use of a standard set of rules and understandings, this way creating a free space upon which knowledge can be created without having to comply with already established concepts by the scientific community and therefore creating a range of similar but different theories that have no basis or connecting standard rule, creating a great confusion and several diverting views about the same subject. These pattern though not useful in the creation of scientific discourse it is still a technique applied for creative fields that focus on discovery and invention.