The “scientific method” has been celebrated as the scientific ideal since the 17th century. This ideal provided us the typical and often taken-for-granted role of the scientist as being somewhat disengaged from the larger society to produce neutral, objective, and value-free knowledge. Critics of the (positivist) scientific method have questioned this ideal. Post-positivists acknowledged that human factors in research could lead to imperfect research and the need to address this issue. The American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn observed that assumption-laden worldviews provided the theoretical framework for researchers to make their observations and collect and analyze data. With his bestseller, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn paved the way for a public discussion about the “social production of knowledge” and the humanization of the scientist.

Kuhn’s ideas are relevant for the following modules, so let’s dive a bit deeper here. Kuhn (1922-1996) graduated cum laude and earned his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University. He became interested in the history and philosophy of science and had a career at UC Berkeley, Princeton, and MIT in teaching and researching that subject. Until Kuhn, science was commonly seen as the result of scholars building on each other work in a linear and steady progression. As Google Scholar advises: “Stand on the shoulder of giants.” Kuhn meticulously studied the work of physicists and concluded that new theories had often suddenly and radically replaced old theories, much like a revolution. Moreover, new theories did not develop in the proverbial “ivory tower” but in response to a challenge set by society, much like an organism responds to challenges in its environment. And like biological evolution, science has no end goal and scientific progress cannot me measured against an ideal true theory.

Kuhn brought his insights together in the word “paradigm”: a broad, assumption-laden worldview that provides a theoretical framework into which knowledge seekers can integrate facts and observations. A “paradigm shift” occurs when the current paradigm can no longer solve “puzzles” and has to be replaced by a new paradigm.

We are talking big picture here. Paradigms are institutionalized in academia, textbooks, curricula, careers, and people’s minds. With a new paradigm looming, there will be a crisis in the scientific community. Scientists will try to solve the new puzzles within the dominant paradigm as long as possible until the better rival supersedes it. Kuhn emphasized that the old and new paradigms are incommensurable and dismissed the idea that paradigms can be synthesized. It is either the one or the other paradigm, like indeed in political revolutions. It does not come as a surprise that scientific revolutions are particularly significant and reasonably rare episodes in the history of science. As the physicist Max Planck put it: Science advances one funeral at a time.

For his followers, Kuhn had unleashed a revolution himself in the way we should think about scientific progress as partly informed by non-scientific factors. For Kuhn, no such thing an the proverbial “ivory tower” exists, as scientists are always influenced by the “outside world.” It suddenly made sense that Galileo Galilei’s heliocentric model was not only informed by new observations, but also by the beginning of modernity in Europe. For that very same reason, his peers and the wider society quickly embraced his model. It also made sense that Charles Darwin mirrored the capitalist premise of survival of the fittest in his evolution theory. Vice versa, Darwin’s theory provided the perfect legitimation for the emerging capitalist society. The science and religion-driven sequel of paradigms in earth sciences provides another famous example (Bowler 1992).

 

Theories of the Earth: A sequel of Paradigms. Credit: Frans Padt, Penn State.

 

Kuhn was more influential in the social sciences than in the natural sciences. His theory was leading and blended with other theories in the field known as Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Critical social scientists argued that science is an inherently social and communicative process and should not be placed outside society (as positivists do) but in the midst of it (Bell & Ashwood 2014, Chapter 4). This was not just an academic debate as society saw itself more and more confronted with “wicked” problems, as Ritter and Webber so eloquently asserted in their 1973 publication Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Wicked problems are poorly structured, have temporary or uncertain solutions, and can only be resolved in interaction with the publics that help constitute them. The rounds model was already introduced in the Policy Module as a way to address wicked problems. What can scientists specifically do to address wicked problems? This is the question for the next three Modules.

 

Review Questions:

What is the dominant paradigm in your field of interest? When did it come in place, and for what scientific and societal reasons? How does the current paradigm affect the world we live in? Are there looming competing paradigms?