New Research Paradigms

Abstract

Since Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has appeared, the community of historians and philosophers of and by extension the communities of intellectuals in many fields, have been strongly influenced by the paradigm of paradigm, in the context of a kind of discontinuous march of science. Music theory, as a science of an art, differs fundamentally from the sciences Kuhn refers to. Taken as a group or in groups, Kuhn says, practitioners of the developed sciences are ... fundamentally puzzle-solvers.' While we music theorists do value puzzle-solving ability in our normal science, we equally value superior musicality, the ability to communicate persuasive aesthetic insights. In a natural science such as physics, whose subject matter itself is not a human art or its products, aesthetic considerations do come into play when one theory is, as a theory, judged more beautiful or elegant than another. While music theory shares this kind of criterion for judging theories, its subject matter is itself aesthetic. As I have argued elsewhere, the music theorist should give primary attention not to the beauty of the theory, nor to the beauty of the model of music within the theory, but to the beauty of the music as modeled in the theory.2 That our subject is aesthetic does not make us any less sus-