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This just is not true to the degree that people are typically led to believe. As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, Thomas Kuhn completely demolished this idea

This just is not true to the degree that people are typically led to believe. As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, Thomas Kuhn completely demolished this idealized version of how science works when he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. The particular field that I know best where Kuhn's critique applies is that of psychology. For many decades, Skinnerian behavioral psychology was the orthodoxy for the scientific approach to psychology. Back in the day, if a scientist wanted to pursue a more cognitive approach, he would be squeezed out of the field. The rationale for this from the behaviorists was that cognitivism was anti-scientific because it posited complex internal mental states that could not be directly observed, which was considered to be counter to Empiricism, and hence anti-scientific. Behavioral psychology was based on the premise that mental states are very simple, and therefore that nearly everything important can be easily measured by directly observing behavior. In their enthusiasm to be "scientific" and promote objective measurement, the behaviorists missed something very important: That their model was completely wrong. Wanting something to be easy to measure doesn't make it so. And the cognitivist claim that people have complex internal states is not anti-scientific, despite the protests of the behaviorists. The "paradigm shift" did eventually come, when no other than Noam Chomsky published a devastating criticism of behaviorism that opened the door for the cognitive approach to be taken seriously. But this didn't happen without a fight that had lasted decades, where many careers were needlessly ruined, and the entire field was held back by decades. The fact that Kuhn was so right on is seen by the fact that Kuhn's book was actually written before the Behavoirsim -> Cognitive Psychology shakeup was complete. The most prominent example in Kuhn's book, I believe, is for the rise of quantum mechanics.

lusr 14y ago
I'm puzzled by this. As far as I can understand from your argument, a bunch of scientists didn't apply scientific method as well as they could. Meanwhile, another bunch did apply scientific method more objectively. And objectivity won out. Where is the problem? There is an implicit, and idealistic, assumption here that science is flawed because the implementation scientists have is less than perfect and new ideas are not accepted instantly - despite there being very good reasons for this, and, in the long run, all of this working perfectly well to advance human knowledge.
- nessus42 14y ago
  I don't think that Kuhn described this process as "flawed". He was an historian wo revealed for us a pattern that often plays itself out in actuality, where for scientific progress to continue, the proponents of the current orthodoxy have to grow old and retire, in order to allow the new paradigm in. This process is completely different from what we are typically taught. Also, what was not so apparent pre-Kuhn is that proponents of the new paradigm were often forced out of the field altogether if the time was not yet right. To conclude that this means that science is "flawed" is a value judgement. But it certainly means that it is not an idealized puck on a frictionless plain.

lusr 14y ago

I'm puzzled by this. As far as I can understand from your argument, a bunch of scientists didn't apply scientific method as well as they could. Meanwhile, another bunch did apply scientific method more objectively. And objectivity won out. Where is the problem? There is an implicit, and idealistic, assumption here that science is flawed because the implementation scientists have is less than perfect and new ideas are not accepted instantly - despite there being very good reasons for this, and, in the long run, all of this working perfectly well to advance human knowledge.

nessus42 14y ago
I don't think that Kuhn described this process as "flawed". He was an historian wo revealed for us a pattern that often plays itself out in actuality, where for scientific progress to continue, the proponents of the current orthodoxy have to grow old and retire, in order to allow the new paradigm in. This process is completely different from what we are typically taught. Also, what was not so apparent pre-Kuhn is that proponents of the new paradigm were often forced out of the field altogether if the time was not yet right. To conclude that this means that science is "flawed" is a value judgement. But it certainly means that it is not an idealized puck on a frictionless plain.