Theories of Thomas Kuhn

When in the early 1960s Kuhn elaborated his view of the conditions under which new scientific discoveries have emerged in Western civilization, he created a model for giving an account of the interplay of scientific and nonscientific (e.g., political, social, cultural) processes and systems that inform the construction of an expert scientific consensus. His purpose was to examine conditions under which scientific change occurs. One such condition is that prevailing scientific theory will exhibit an "insufficiency of methodological directives, by themselves, to dictate a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts of scientific questions" (Kuhn, 1962, p. 3). In other words, when events overtake theory or when a new theory seems to have better explanatory power than an existing one. Kuhn's theory of paradigms cites "universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners" (Kuhn, 1962, p. viii). Paradigms are challenged by an anomaly, such as Darwin's observation of animal behavio

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isconnected from reality as Pollock and as free from bothersome detail as Rothko, and as likely as either to contribute to civilized values" (Franklin, 2000). Against Kuhn, Franklin (who knows what he knows) maintains that science is not a paradigmatic consensus or a relativistic problem but a cumulative, accretional artifact of logic and experimentation. He complains that for logic and philosophy in science Kuhn replaces history and sociology, declaring that Copernicus was accepted, not because the mix of patrons and politics shifted but because better evidence validated his ideas (evidence for example from the house-arrested Galileo). The article deplores social and cultural relativism as much as the notion of scientific consensus as a bad thing, and it blames Kuhn for supplying c coherent theory that can help make relativistic analysis of history plausible. But some post-Kuhnian analysts of science praxis present a different view of how scientific communities operate. Longino, for example (1990), observes that so-called rational science for decades did research using subjects of only one sex, thus using that sex as the normal psychophysical standard and either extrapolating to all human beings or fundamentally assuming that fem
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