The Role of the Paradigm The purpose of this research is t

Kuhn's major purpose in SS is to explain conditions under which new scientific discoveries have emerged in Western civilization. The development of his argument can also be understood as a model for the discussion of conditions under which nonscientific (e.g., political or social) processes and systems can be understood. To see how the transition from purely scientific to nonscientific modes of thought and understanding may come about, it is useful to explore the scientific realm initially.

One such condition for new understanding of scientific discovery 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" (3). In other words, when certain scientific disc

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. What could `evolution,' `development,' and `progress' mean in the absence of a specified goal? To many people, such terms suddenly seemed self-contradictory (Kuhn, pp. 171-2). The random universe that Darwin's theory implied accentuated the sense of intellectual crisis. Wells notes that English universities, which were "primarily clerical in their constitution, resisted the new learning very bitterly," and he describes the consternation that spread through the whole of "ordinary intelligent people in the Western communities." The minds of many resisted the new knowledge instinctively and irrationally. Their whole moral edifice was built upon false history; they were too old and set to rebuild it; they felt the practical truth of their moral convictions, and this new truth seemed to them to be incompatible with that. They believed that to assent to it would be to prepare a moral collapse for the world. And so they produced a moral collapse by not assenting to it. . . . Christian theologians were neither wise enough nor mentally nimble enough to accept the new truth, modify their formulae, and insist upon the living and undiminished vitality of the religious reality those formulae had hitherto sufficed to express. . . . There wa
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Thomas Kuhn's, Origin Species, Elsewhere Wilson, WAIS Controversy, Evolution Society, Social Darwinists, Genesis Darwin's, Herrnstein Murray, Rural Americans, CAT WISC, darwin's theory, origin species, natural selection, differences intelligence, theory evolution, scientific theory, whitworth gibbons 1986, gibbons 1986, social darwinism, kepler newton, sex race, galileo kepler newton, prevailing scientific theory, kline lachar sprague, lachar sprague 1985,
Approximate Word count = 4133
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)