Science as a Human Activity: Kuhn’s Concept of a Paradigm

Abstract

In Chapter 3, I briefly discussed the dispute between the formalist, contextualist and realist views on the nature of scientific theory. There is little doubt that Kuhn’s approach to science is the penultimate contextualism, one diametrically opposed to the formalists, especially to the adherents of D-N. Kuhn also disavows the doctrine of scientific realism because it supposedly can not provide us with a tenable model of scientific change (or progress). Instead of viewing the transition from one fundamental scientific theory to a new, ‘better’ system in terms of what many of us would normally think of as ‘coming closer to the truth’ or ‘more accurately describing the world out there’,the process of scientific change is actually based on non-objective, sociological-political factors. 1 The notion of scientific transition being an objective process is a myth that has been perpetuated by the logical positivists, formalists and realists, and the sooner it is debunked, the better. Scientific progress must be viewed not in logical but human terms, in particular, in terms of the replacement of a total network of values, commitments and theoretical institutions of a scientific community with an entirely different set. Scientific change is more like an evolutionary struggle of ideas where the persuasive — vis-a-vis logical — force of a theory is a measure of its survival traits.2 Hence the structure of scientific progress mirrors that of a revolution where logic and objectivity of the D–N kind play little or no role in the process. Such a result actually follows from Kuhn’s analysis of the nature of scientific theory, in particular, his development and application of the notion of a scientific paradigm, to which I now turn.