The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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Summary: Philosophical Look at Scientific Exploration
Review: How do we know what we know and what assumptions do we make in the process that might be inaccurate? Kuhn looks philosophically at the process of discovering phenonena, labeling it, and going forward to further inquiry. In other words, he looks at the process of science itself from the point of an outside observer. Scientists operate in a marketplace of ideas like other segments of the culture. Kuhn writes, "Competition between segments of the scientific community is the only historical process that ever actually results in the rejection of one previously accepted theory or in the adoption of another." That is, facts do not speak for themselves, they need interpretation. From here he goes on to describe paradigm building.

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.

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Summary: THE best book on change managment...
Review: I read this book completely by accident; I found Kuhn's name and this book as a reference while looking for something completely different. When I checked out the reference a little further, I discovered that this book is generally considered a classic (anything written a half a century ago that's still cited probably has -some- staying power). So I decided to take a look at it.

The book is relatively small, which means you might think it's an easy and quick read. You'd be wrong. Kuhn's book is dense with information and thoughtful presentation, which makes it challenging to sail through quickly. However, I felt that was also one of its strong points; it forced me to work through the book and really think about what I was reading. If you're looking for fluff and pablum; look elsewhere.

So, what's the book about? As has been stated elsewhere, Kuhn's premise is that scientific progress isn't what it's typically made out to be. Generally, such as in most of my high school presentations, science is portrayed as a steadily moving river; progressing inevitably from one port of discovery to the next. Kuhn's book set that perspective on it's ear, by stating that science progresses relatively seamlessly until it gets near the edges of understanding, where it then begins fragmenting into a variety of perspectives and viewpoints. Eventually, a fundmental [paradigm] shift occurs which completely changes the world-view of that science (and which often creates an academic war to go with it). Once the dust has settled, revisionist history takes over, and we romanticize the struggle that our understanding went through in that period of growth and change.

Kuhn presents all this in a logical fashion, strengthing his argument via both a well-thought-out approach and a variety of supporting anecdotes. In particular, he doesn't rely too heavily on the Copernican revolution, which seems to be the only argument that others can present on scientific revolution. That alone contributes perhaps most heavily to the value of the argument.

So what has this got to do with change management? I worked as a management consultant for a few years, all before I read this book. Upon reading it, I was hit with the most blinding flash of the obvious; a lot of what I saw empirically in the business world echoed the issues of scientific paradigm shift that Kuhn so eloquently presented in this text. If your work involves any change to an organization; you -have- to read this book. It communicates, better than any book I've read on the subject, what's happening and why in the midst of change. The title may say "Scientific Revolutions," but the applicability is across the board. Buy it and read it.

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Summary: A Dogmatic Work of Postmodernism.
Review: Like most "-isms" Postmodernism covers a variety of sins. A few things need to be made front and center in reviewing this book.

1) Kuhn himself recanted all of his radical theses that he takes in this book. For those of you who are looking to find great understanding of the world from this book, you won't find it here because even the author didn't.

2) Kuhn throws the word "Paradigm" around like it was penny candy, yet entirely fails to define it in any way that is philosophically useful. He makes "paradigm' so broad and vague that you couldn't help but have one, yet makes unsubstantiated broad claims about the mutual exclusivity of paradigms. This ought to make you suspicious.

3) Kuhn is committed to a radically anti-realist position on Science. Like all Metaphysical positions, the debate between scientific Realism and Anti-Realism is an unsolvable problem. If you're not inclined to be an anti-realist, then you probably won't agree with Kuhn as his essential metaphysical commitments differ from yours.

4) As a result of being founded on metaphysics, of all things, this book is not the truth. Regardless of what anyone tells you, this book is not the truth. At best, we can be instrumentalists on Kuhn and determine that his book is a useful fiction, and really does it need to be more?

5) This book is an important work in the Philosophy of Science, but has opened the door for no end of crackpots. Read it with a grain of salt, and if you're in the mood for some better philosophy along the same lines, read Quine instead. Quine is dense, but at least doesn't come across with a chip on his shoulder.

This book really isn't awful. I don't agree with Kuhn at all, but he's made some important arguments. What merits this book receiving a one star rating is the tremendous bugaboo people have made about this book when the author himself has recanted a lot of the positions. For those of you who have a bone to pick with Science, can't you just be happy with Empirical Adequacy and computers, skyscrapers, and MRIs?

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Summary: The Beginning of the End of Modernism
Review: Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922. He taught physics at Harvard, the history of science at Berkeley, and the philosophy and history of science at Princeton and MIT. His best-known book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, introduced the term "paradigm shift" into the modern vocabulary when it was first published in 1962. Kuhn's study of paradigm shifts in science makes it hard to view science as an objective discipline that steadily advances towards the truth. Instead, Kuhn shows science to be a very human enterprise where truth is as likely to be resisted as it is to be embraced.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn defines a "paradigm" as a set of assumptions, rules, or model problems that define what the important questions are and how to go about answering them. Without a paradigm, would-be researchers are overwhelmed by the sheer mass of data. A "paradigm shift" occurs when a group of scientists reject all or part of their existing paradigm to adopt a new one. This process not only means changing assumptions: it also means reevaluating previous conclusions to see if the old facts still fit within the new paradigm.

Kuhn uses the term "normal science" to describe the work that scientists do as they work within a given paradigm. Their shared set of assumptions, rules, and model problems fairly makes it easy to see what research remains to be done. Occasionally, anomalies will appear. These are events that cannot be explained within the existing paradigm. Normal science tends to ignore anomalies. Instead, by concentrating attention on a small range very specific questions, "the paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable."

As more and more research is done within a given paradigm, anomalies tend to crop up. This is because the existing paradigm makes very exact predictions about the expected results, and normal science tests those predictions in ever-finer detail. At first, when the results do not match the predictions, those results are discounted. Some researchers assume the equipment was faulty and so they don't publish results that would only seem to embarrass them. Others try to account for the results by some refinement of the existing paradigm. (The classic case of this involved the medieval astronomers, who kept adding more and more "epicycles" to their Earth-centered model of the universe to explain the results they observed.) Finally, researchers are human, and have been known to simply "fudge" the data to match what the paradigm predicts. Thus, even if every experiment produced exactly the same results, the published research in that field might show a range of results.

Eventually, as the anomalies accumulate, scientists begin to acknowledge a crisis. The results no longer fit the paradigm. According to Kuhn, however, simply abandoning the paradigm is not an option. A scientist can get so frustrated with the paradigm that he abandons it to become a priest or open a bicycle shop, but in doing so, he quits being a scientist. A scientist is not a scientist without a paradigm. The only way a scientist can abandon a paradigm and still be a scientist is to adopt a new one. Kuhn calls this a "scientific revolution."
Kuhn blamed textbooks for creating a false impression of the nature of science and of the role of discovery and invention in its advance. When Kuhn first published his book, science was generally presented as an objective advance towards truth.

According to Kuhn, textbook publishers downplayed the "revolutionary" changes that had taken place in their fields. In 1962, if a textbook covered the history of science at all, it tended to make the advances look inevitable. Kuhn argued that science textbooks present an inaccurate view of the nature of science: they make it look as if science had reached its present state by a steady process, like adding bricks to a building.

The revolution is over when one paradigm displaces another, after a period of paradigm testing. According to Kuhn, however, this is not the result proving one paradigm true and another false, however. To some degree, each paradigm is able to account for all the observations that fit within its set of assumptions and rules. The great German physicist Max Planck used to say that old scientists never change their minds: they just die. Kuhn claims this goes a little too far: instead, scientists slowly convert to the new paradigm, for a number of different reasons. Eventually, if a new paradigm is successful, only a handful of hold-outs support the earlier worldview.

Kuhn's book set off a scientific revolution in its own right. People routinely speak of "paradigm shifts" now, and historians of science (and textbook writers) are much more likely to report on the kinds of controversies that were invisible before The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published.

Kuhn concludes with a startling claim. He argues that scientific revolutions take place in a blind evolutionary process. Paradigms compete for survival, not for truth. This contradicts the "modern" assumption that mankind is steadily advancing towards the truth through science. Given Kuhn's revolutionary impact on our view of science, this book may mark the beginning of the end of the "modernism."

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Summary: Thought provoking but poorly written
Review: Khun's ideas are thought provoking for the most part. He even invented the current usage of the word paradigm as it relates to science. However, his writing style is unnecessarily long winded, so much so that I often forgot his point by the time I reached the end of a sentence. He also used words like lacuna, seriatim, heuristic, ontology, incommensurable, etc. when using simpler words would probably help clarify his meaning and maybe help him be more precise. His writing style seems to make his good simple ideas obscure and difficult. Ironically, his confusing style would never be accepted by a science journal. He desperately needed to read Elements of Style, by Strunk and White.

His idea about truth is also difficult to accept. Theories are not getting closer and closer to reality, but merely becoming better puzzle solvers(see p. 206):

"One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently, generalizations like this refer not to the puzzle solutions or concrete predictions derived from a theory, but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is 'really' there."
.......(omitted sentence)...
"There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like 'really there'. The notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its 'real' counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle."

This seems to imply that truth doesn't exist, but perhaps that's not his intention. Perhaps his meaning is that truth is merely impossible to articulate without words in the form of a theory.
You can easily see how this could be interpreted to mean there is no objective reality and that science is no closer to "reality" than Mayan theology, for example, human sacrifice and all. The lack of clarity in this passage and many others allows different interpretations to be drawn that were perhaps unintended.

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Summary: Easy to Read - Hard to Forget
Review: This is an easy to read important major contribution to the History of Science. Members of other disciplines (notably philosophers of science and, less importantly, scientists) find it difficult to swallow. It has been criticized by both as often as it's been mindlessly endorsed by creationists and other anti-science groups. Enlightenment-style rationalists hate it. Not written in the eighteenth century.

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Summary: A landmark but not very profound.
Review: I understand that this book was quite a jewel when it first appeared in the 60's, but as I read this I realized that I already seemed to understand most of it. Thus, to me it lacked profundity. Maybe my ranking would be different had I no previous knowledge on the subject of paradigms and worldviews. But what is great about this work is that it says, quite clearly and systematically, something I already know.

In short, the major points of the book are what makes one more paradigm more appropriate than another. The more appropriate paradigm (a worldview which may operate under a set of theories but doesn't necessarily have to) is the one that seems to be able to answer most of those questions that the old paradigm has been unable to solve. When one paradigm replaces another, the result is a scientific revolution although it may not be a 'loud' one. A scientific revolution includes the replacement of one paradigm for another, a transformation of one's understanding of the world, and a resituation of the important questions that demand answering.

Kuhn's words are much more convincing than mine, and I do recommend this book to any scholarly, or philosophical, individual that enjoys a good read. This book simply seemed to support some of my postmodern beliefs, even though Kuhn claims that he is not postmodern. (But only being able to view the world through a paradigm seems very postmodern to me.)

In short, I enjoyed reading the book, found a sound argument for most of my beliefs, would use it in support of most of my theories in a paper, but would not say that it caused me to change my worldview or adopt a new paradigm. It was simply candy for the brain.

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Summary: Things change: Kuhn's analysis.
Review: In educating scientists for the work of "normal science" it is apparent that the solubility of problems within the received structures of thought must be the centerpiece of that education. In other words, 'this is the kind of problem that is important, this is how to resolve the problem, this is what that resolution should look like.' Throughout the course of their education and subsequent work, many scientists may give little or no thought to what this means or to where it leads. This is not generally problematic, as the work of normal science is that of fine-tuning specialized niches, and a larger perspective may not be helpful. As a young physicist finishing his doctorate at Harvard, Kuhn was less interested in embracing the norm than in analyzing its structure. Kuhn's interest in these received structures of thought (to which he affixes the label "paradigms"), in their histories, psychologies, products, and limits, resulted in this classic analysis of how the natural sciences work. Many believe that this is the finest analysis ever produced examining the necessary advantages of these structures and how and why paradigms of scientific thought inevitably become intractable and inadequate.
As a philosopher and historian of science, Kuhn's perspective encompasses most of the historically great ideas of the natural sciences, from the astronomy of Ptolemy (one of science's earliest universal paradigms) to the problems of vibrating strings (interesting in that this was published in 1962). As a result, the book is broad in scope and extremely well supported. In it's examination of the history and philosophy of natural science and the psychology and methodology of the scientific community, this is one of those few books which is rightly called important.
Individuals who hold to a simplistic perspective as to what science is may take offense with aspects of Kuhn's thesis, but they need not, this volume is certainly not "anti-science". While the work of science inevitably leads to the modification or replacement of paradigms, these changes are generally of a pragmatic nature, i.e., we do not know that they resemble truth more closely, only that they seem to 'work' better. In the end we are left with important questions that may not be answerable through the work of science: "what must the world be like in order that man may know it?" Such problems are philosophical in nature and do not malign or censor the work of science, a work in progress to which this book brings an enlarged perspective. Kuhn's points are made economically but please don't rush to oversimplify them (as some obviously have), there is significant subtlety here as well.
Highly recommended.

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Summary: Science as puzzle solving
Review: To quota Kuhn: "What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see". In our day-to-day research, we often forget how paradigms influence and steer us into solving particular problems. This book makes these paradigms more obvious and looks at the "development" of science. Specifically, Kuhn points out textbook writers as establishing a basic paradigm, and I would also add journal editors, who may avoid publishing the anomaly or negative results. The anomalies are the irritants that cause science to generate the next pearl. The end is not necessarily truth, but something useful in accounting for the anomalous. Kuhn's postscript is interesting, since after five years of reviews, he had a chance to reflect on his previous work, and perhaps shift his own viewpoints with respect to scientific community. He also admits the imprecision in his use of the word paradigm. I would have been interested in his reflection on what the Internet is doing in terms of defining the community.

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Summary: NOT a hard read
Review: Despite what others may say, this book is not a "hard" read. In fact, that's why I recommend it to so many people. It is simple in structure, wording, and logic. Its final effect, though, is startling and subversive. This book turned my ideas about science upside down. It may be the most important text I have ever read. This book is a "must read" for anybody interested in science and technology, whether pro- or con-. (Actually, this book should be a standard text for EVERY student, because most of its lessons can be applied to any system of knowledge, including the fine arts.)