Sublime

Thomas Samuel Kuhn, qui a élaboré la notion de paradigme : des découvertes scientifiques universellement reconnues qui, pour un temps, fournissent à la communauté scientifique des problèmes types et des solutions, jusqu’à ce qu’un nouveau paradigme vienne apporter un cadre théorique neuf et des conceptions nouvelles.

He had a gift for aphorism; and his names have acquired an unusual status, for although they were once arcane, some of them are now part of colloquial English. Here is the sequence: (1) normal science (§§II–IV—he called these sections, not chapters, for he thought of Structure as more of a book outline than a book); (2) puzzle-solving (§IV); (3) pa

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

But if the aim of normal science is not major substantive novelties—if failure to come near the anticipated result is usually failure as a scientist—then why are these problems undertaken at all? Part of the answer has already been developed. To scientists, at least, the results gained in normal research are significant because they add to the scop

As Kuhn describes it, science oscillates between “normal” periods, when there is a dominant theory within which scientists seek to resolve problems, and periods of “scientific revolution,” in which the general paradigm is swept away and phenomena are reinterpreted within a new conceptual framework.

Kuhn’s theory suffers from a fatal flaw. It explains the succession from one paradigm to another in sociological or psychological terms, rather than as having primarily to do with the objective merit of the rival explanations. Yet unless one understands science as a quest for explanations, the fact that it does find successive explanations, each ob

Paradigm shifts, in Kuhn’s argument, begin with anomalies in the data, when scientists find that their predictions keep turning out to be wrong.