The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

Over time, this person’s theory persuades more and more scientists, and a new paradigm takes hold. Eventually, Kuhn suggests, one brilliant thinker has an almost instantaneous, intuitive revelation-and a new scientific theory, able to explain the anomaly, is born. Various researchers try to defend the existing theory in different ways, and the scientific community starts to splinter.

As more and more people start to pick up on this anomaly, an intellectual crisis breaks out. However, sometimes in the course of normal science, someone notices an anomaly that the theory fails to explain.

Normal science is useful because it allows scientists to focus on a specific set of problems and build on one another’s work instead of constantly arguing with one another. Instead, the goal of normal science is “attempt to force nature into the box that the paradigm supplies.” In other words, normal science entails working to prove and specify a given theory, not to alter it. Kuhn argues that normal science, which is what the vast majority of scientists spend their days doing, actively discourages new and original thinking. In normal science, scientists learn about these rules and strategies through textbooks and then work to apply them to a variety of problems. Normal science is what takes place once one transformative insight or discovery has created a new “ paradigm,” or a collection of perceptions, rules and strategies that define a certain scientific era. To dig deeper into his argument, Kuhn begins by describing what he calls the process of normal science.

Specifically, he argues that the study of the natural world develops through a perpetual cycle of scientific revolutions, in which one set of questions and “arbitrary” perceptions are replaced by a different-though not inherently better-set of scientific beliefs. But Kuhn believes that the history of science is more circular than linear in nature, and that by teaching people to look at the history of science in this way, he can help reshape the popular view of what science is and what it can accomplish. Most people, raised on simplistic science textbooks, believe that scientists make straightforward, linear progress toward objective truth. In the introduction, historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn lays out a radically new conception of scientific discovery.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn