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Essay for Philosophy of Science course Jan. 1997 by Shawn MonaghanPart 1. 'Normal Science'Part 2. (page 7 of this essay) Kuhn’s conceptualization of paradigm iscriticized for its characterization of scientists’ as uncritical drudges instead of ascritical and creative scientists.‘Normal science’ is a term Kuhn uses to describe the phase of science andresearch that take place at a time of consensus within the community. Theconsensus of the community means that the practice of a given field of science isbased and founded upon “past scientific achievements”. This consensus isestablished in part through the existence and propagation of textbooks.When the individual scientist can take a paradigm for granted, he need no longer, inhis major works, attempt to build his field anew, starting from first principles and justifying the use of each concept introduced. That can be left to the writer oftextbooks. Given a textbook, . . . the creative scientist can begin his researchwhere it leaves off and thus concentrate exclusively upon the subtlest and mostesoteric aspects of the natural phenomena that concern his group (p 19-20).The texts usually display discoveries and achievements in modern terms, termsthat would often be considered completely alien to the founding scientist (butmost certainly are rarely the original documents of the founding scientists)(p 10).Paradigm is the term Kuhn uses to refer to the
achievements
that definethe consensus. Paradigm is a very specific term that refers to two specificcharacteristics. The discoveries or achievements must be unprecedented enoughto attract a great deal of attention so as to attract scientists away fromcompeting scientific practices and activities. The second characteristic is that the
 
achievement has to be “open-ended” enough that it provides this group withguidance while leaving a great deal of answers yet to be discovered and puzzles yetto be solved (p 10). Kuhn’s phraseology at this early point in his book is somewhatstiff and artificial. Kuhn speaks of a paradigm as an ‘achievement’ with littleexplanation. It is the achievement that provides a sort of theoretical perspective,a consensus, around which scientists gather because of its relative novelty andlimited application to provide answers but almost unlimited application to providequestions, or puzzles to be solved.It is in relation to revolutions of science that Kuhn develops his definition ofparadigms and normal science. Essentially it is the paradigm that provides theorganizing principle around which a normal science exists. Normal science wouldnot exist without what Kuhn terms paradigm. Of course the paradigm is really justa set of conditions that enable normal science the consensus and stability that isits defining circumstance. Here is a definition of paradigm in Kuhn’s own words:In a science, . . . a paradigm is rarely like an object for replication. Instead, like anaccepted judicial decision in the common law, it is an object for furtherarticulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions (p23).This makes a most precise conceptualization of Kuhn’s paradigm. It is an acceptedperspective, a judgment, about phenomena that is commonly accepted and used as arule-of-thumb that facilitates future work, thought and decisions within a givenarea. The analogy to common law is an excellent one and provides an intuitivediscourse superior to any number of discursive sentences.At a certain point in the development of a science the scientific communitybecomes increasingly specialized and internalized. Rather than addressing theintelligent community at large a science which is largely developed and specialized
 
begins to write articles and research papers that address a small well definedcommunity of peers. It is this movement toward addressing scientific peers withincreasingly obscure and detailed work that allows for the rapid specialization anddevelopment that characterizes ‘normal science’. The work of these scientists isimmensely augmented by a good grounding of consensus in the foundations of theirfield of their study. It is the paradigm that provides this foundation through anever increasing realm of achievements and discoveries that this community largelyagrees upon. Thus, leaving the scientist with a large area of background knowledgeat their disposal that allows for concentration on very precise and specializedresearch.Sometime between 1740 and 1780, electricians were for the first time enabled totake the foundations of their field for granted. From that point they pushed on tomore concrete and recondite problems, and increasingly they then reported theirresults in articles addressed to other electricians rather than in books addressedto the learned world at large. . . . They had, that is, achieved a paradigm thatproved able to guide the whole group’s research. . . . it is hard to find anothercriterion that so clearly proclaims a field a science (p 21-2).The transition of which Kuhn speaks, in the above quotation, is a movement into‘normal science’ through the adoption of a paradigm by the community ofelectricians. Before this point of transition the field of electricity wascharacterized by a wide variety of groups and subgroups that were defined by awide variety of differing opinions about the rudiments of electricity.Communication between these groups would have been stultified by disagreementupon the very foundations of their research.The actual work of a normal science scientist involves what Kuhn terms
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