Although some paradigms were later, proven to be built on incorrect assumptions, cumulatively in the process of science they led to the discovery of new understandings. They served a purpose, although the purpose wasn't what it was assumed to be initially.
If this review goes covers too much, it might as well just be an interpretation of Kuhn's work, which would not accomplish the job of a reviewer. This initial discussion gives you a flavor of the type of issues he addresses. It causes you to ask, why you think you know what you know.
I struggled to read this book. I struggled to understand it. I struggled to read it again! Let's not kid around. No matter how exciting, innovative, enlightening, and relevant his ideas were, this was the most poorly written book I had ever been subjected to. I started looking around for help because I was drowning in the language. I was trying to grasp the concepts but flailing abuot in a sea of unfamiliar and jumbled words. As I asked around, I discovered something. Just about everyone in a science field has read his book eventually. Physicists, mathematicians, friend of a friend in a biotech lab, a friend in computer science and his wife who teaches it in a drug abuse psychology class... Everyone read this book. Everyone appreciated the revelation in this book once they understood it. Everyone found it relevant to their scientific careers.
Science doesn't take baby steps upward toward 'truth' but a series of ideas that come into consensus that are thrown out for new ones. Doing scientific projects using the same formula as everyone in your field is normal science. When the number of things the consensus can't explain pile up, someone comes up with a new idea to handle those anomaloes. There is a struggle and a new consensus forms. This is very simplified. The book was so difficult for me, as it was for just about anyone I talked to, that I don't claim to understand the ideas fully. But what I did see was relevant.
I had done a thesis in undergrad, and I realized how normal it was. I tested different treatments on plots of land. I might have learned a little tidbit but didn't change our understanding of the world. I didn't realize how insignificant my study had been.
There's so much more to his thoughts that I can not do them justice here. I think back to this book at least every quarter. If this book were not so essential, I'd give it a 1. But until Kuhn is repackaged into something more readable, all scientists are going to have to read this book for themselves. I pity eveyrone who must trudge through this book, but it is essential.
Of course, as most everyone knows, Kuhn's account of the history of the sciences revolves around the notion of a scientific paradigm. A paradigm, in the most important sense, is a set of standards, practices, and theories shared by a group of scientists. So a paradigm includes all the following things: the central theories of the relevant science, important experimental results and techniques, guidelines concerning which problems are and are not important, standards of evidence against which theories are to be judged, etc. Through the reading of textbooks, studying with proponents of the paradigm, and doing labwork of certain sorts, individual scientists come to accept the elements of the paradigm.
When there is a regnant paradigm in a particular science, what Kuhn calls 'normal science' occurs. Normal science primarily involves puzzle-solving, which is a matter of attempting to solve the problems the current paradigm tells us are important and solving them in ways consistent with the methods and theories of that paradigm. Normal science is not a wholly stable enterprise, though, for it is always the case that anomalies, problems the paradigm seems unable to solve, develop as the paradigm is applied to new phenomena. Isolated anomalies are usually ignored, on the assumption that further development of the paradigm will lead to their solution. But not all are solved even in the long run, and eventually there are enough of them that working scientists begin to take notice. This is when the science enters a crisis period, when the once-obvious truth of regnant paradigm begins to seem less obvious to many scientists. Now scientists begin to propose new paradigms, and some win converts. When one of the new paradigms proves able to solve many of the glaring anomalies that plagued the previous one, most scientists will switch over to the new paradigm and those who do not will eventually die off. Following this revolutionary paradigm switch, there is another period of normal science as working scientists begin applying the new paradigm. This process, according to Kuhn, is probably an endless one.
And it is the details of Kuhn's account of paradigm change that appears to result in certain problems for the objectivity of science. In particular, the nature of scientific revolutions seems to preclude a gradual progress of the sciences towards the truth about the world; or, at least, it does not allow us to guarantee that such progress will occur. Why? Because it seems paradigm change cannot be based on an objective consideration of the evidence for and against particular paradigms.
The central worry about the objectivity of science arises from what Kuhn calls the 'incommensurability' of different paradigms. There are at least two distinct worries here. First, there is what we might call 'standard incommensurability'. When the accepted paradigms change, the accepted standards of a good scientific theory change--different experiments are conducted, different evidence is taken to be conclusive, and old problems are ignored. So accepting up a new paradigm means you're bound to see that paradigm as better justified than its competitors; indeed, it means you're bound to have real trouble seeing what competitors take to be evidence for their preferred paradigms.
But, one might wonder, isn't the objectivity of science assured through reliance on observations that can be shared by different scientists and on experiments that can be repeated? Not so, Kuhn argues, because the theory-ladenness of observation undermines the possibility of such a theory-neutral set of empirical data. We don't test theories against raw observations; we test them against observations that are interpreted in light of the theories we hold. What theory you hold partially determines what you see, and so it partially determines what you take to be observational evidence. So proponents of different paradigms will see different things in the same experiments and observations, and thus there isn't any theory-neutral body of empirical evidence to which we can appeal in determining which of the competing paradigms should be adopted.
There is a second form of incommensurability, viz. meaning incommensurability, and it leads to similar problems. Kuhn accepts a holistic semantics of scientific terms according to which the terms used by scientists acquire their meaning from the network of theory in which they are used. The meaning of a scientific terms--like, say, 'gravity'--is determined by the paradigm in which it is being used. Consequently, when paradigms change, so do the meanings of the terms employed by scientists. So, for instance, the word 'gravity' has a different meaning in Newtonian physics than it has in current relativity theory. This has a significant result for the nature of debate between proponents of different paradigms: namely, that proponents of different paradigms are talking past one another. There is a misleading appearance of agreement and disagreement here, but proponents of different theories really can't argue with one another about the same phenomena since their words have different meanings.
The consequences of these different forms of incommensurability can seem pretty radical. First, standard incommensurability seems to show that paradigm change cannot be based on a consideration of evidence; and second, meaning incommensurability seems to show that a proponent of one paradigm cannot even understand the theories involved in another paradigm. The process of paradigm change, then, comes to seem necessarily non-rational. Scientists come to hold the paradigms they do for psychological or sociological reasons, and not because of a careful consideration of the evidence for and against the various available paradigms. And if this is the case, it's not at all clear why we should think that the history of science involves a trend towards a discovery of the truth about the nature of the world around us.
