3 ms·
The following quote is also relevant (from the 1969 postcript to the book) "A number of those who have taken pleasure from it have done so less because it illu
by aaronjg 15y ago
The following quote is also relevant (from the 1969 postcript to the book)
"A number of those who have taken pleasure from it have done so less because it illuminates science than because they read its main theses as applicable to many other fields as well. I see what they mean and would not like to discourage their attempts to extend the position, but their reaction has nevertheless puzzled me. To the extent that the book portrays scientific development as a succession of tradition-bounds periods punctuated by non-cumulative breaks, its theses are undoubtedly of wide applicability. But they should be, for they are borrowed from other fields. Historians of literature, of music, of the arts, of political development, and of many other human activities have long described their subjects in the same way. Periodization in terms of revolutionary breaks in style, taste, and institutional structure have been among their standard tools. If I have been original with respect to concepts like these, it has mainly been by applying them to the sciences, fields which had been widely though to develop in a different way."
Social, Mobile, REST/CRUD, etc. are revolutions, but they are not 'Kuhnian revolutions.' They are innovative technologies that enable progress. Just as cubism, pointillism, impressionism are revolutions in painting. The difference is, that in a scientific revolution, a new idea completely supplants its predecessors. An example in Computer Science would be the 'information revolution' in the late 1940s, in which Shannon's theory of information supplanted that of Hartley and Nyquist. While leaps and bounds in things like development of scripting languages are revolutionary, they are revolutionary in a manner different from Kuhn's description.
- kijin 15y agoA "Kuhnian revolutions" doesn't need to be a wholesale replacement of assumptions underlying an entire field of inquiry. Sure, most of the examples he used in his original book were drawn from such large-scale paradigm shifts. But especially in his later writing, Kuhn seems to focus more on what we might call "micro-revolutions": paradigm shifts that affect only a small part of the relevant science or technology, but which work in much the same way as large-scale scientific revolutions. Of course this isn't the only interpretation out there, and philosophers of science can disagree among themselves all day long. But much of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge research that took place after Kuhn's book followed this broader interpretation, and studied small-scale changes in very narrow sub-fields of science as well as larger ones. In other words, Kuhnian revolutions aren't as rare and far between as his original book might seem to suggest. New concepts in IT might not "completely supplant" their predecessors, but their rise to prominence can certainly be called revolutions in the area(s) that are irreversibly changed by them. For example, very few people nowadays think that APIs on the Internet should be anything other than RESTful. Previous paradigms for remote computing protocols have been almost completely supplanted in this area. Likewise, table-based HTML layouts have been completely supplanted by CSS in the last 10 years. The change, of course, was motivated by the previous paradigm's inadequacy in addressing the needs of the evolving Web. There are lots of examples like this, even trivial ones, that can nevertheless be called miniature Kuhnian revolutions.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]