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Vic Walsh

Berker Basmaci

LPHI 3122 - Philosophy of Science

10 April 2022

Unity in Paradigms

According to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, normal-scientific research

has historically progressed within paradigms. Though the use of scientific paradigms has been

unchanging, the paradigms themselves have shifted through scientific revolutions many times

throughout the history of science. These paradigms provide a model for how science is to be con-

ducted, but are limited in that the science under them is only valid so long as that paradigm pre-

vails. Within paradigms, all science occurs within a unified system, but the result of shifting par-

adigms is a lack of coherence within scientific progress over time. Though enlightenment’s goal

of ultimate scientific unification is partially realized within paradigms, this demand of internal

unity precludes progressive unity.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn describes the concept of paradigms,

which are theories and achievements that serve as models for scientific research. Paradigms are

useful insofar as scientific problems can be identified and solved under them, but are subject to

replacement when an abundance of anomalies throw them into a state of crisis. So long as a para-

digm is accepted and thus taken for granted, normal science can be conducted with an internal

sense of progress. To a point, anomalies are tolerated, and a paradigm does not have to be able to

account for everything–just enough that progress can continue without calling its very essence

into question. Eventually, when a paradigm is no longer able to sustain normal science because
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anomalies can no longer be tolerated, science enters a crisis phase, revolution occurs, and a new

dominant paradigm emerges.

Within paradigms, scientific research is not conducted to make true progress, but rather

to maintain a unified conception of the science that the paradigm permits. According to Kuhn,

rather than attempting to articulate new theories, “normal-scientific research is directed to the ar-

ticulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies” (Kuhn 24). Sci-

entists operating under a paradigm are less concerned with approaching truth than making

progress towards fulfillment of their existing constructs of what is knowable. This is an attempt

to approach singularity within science by reducing all knowledge to the single system that is the

paradigm. This is in line with Adorno and Horkheimer’s description in The Concept of Enlight-

enment of enlightenment’s privileging of unity: “for the enlightenment, only what can be encom-

passed by unity has the status of an existent or an event; its ideal is the system from which every-

thing and anything follows” (Adorno 4). Paradigms set a unified standard for what can exist sci-

entifically at any point in time.

When the singularity of a paradigm can no longer account for enough results of scientific

research (when the presence of anomalies becomes to severe), Kuhn claims that a revolution

must occur and a new paradigm will replace the overly flawed one. But the new paradigm sets an

entirely new standard for how knowledge is produced and understood, and conducting science

under differing paradigms results in fundamentally different worldviews amongst scientists in

the same discipline over time. The proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in

different worlds. . . . Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different

things when they look from the same point in the same direction” (Kuhn 150). While paradigms

demand internal unity, they functionally make external unity impossible. That which is outside
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of the current paradigm cannot be reconciled with that which is within it, nor with the greater

perspectives of the world constructed by it.

In this drive for knowledge, the paradigm constitutes the inside, and everything external

to the paradigm must be considered outside. That which is exterior to the paradigm, however, is

a source of unease under the principles of enlightenment. “Humans believe themselves free of

fear when there is no longer anything unknown. . . . Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since

the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is the real source of fear” (Adorno 11). Anything existing outside

of the paradigm is a source of fear. Even anomalies are largely accepted to be internal to a para-

digm; it is only when their existence is such that it renders them external that the paradigm is

called into crisis. Anomalies that are extreme enough to be external to the dominant paradigm are

so feared that a new sense of internal must be developed to reabsorb them, and the paradigm

must be replaced. In so doing, the old paradigm becomes outside of the new paradigm, and must

be denied as science to maintain the insular unity of the new paradigm. Because paradigm shifts

render previous paradigms unscientific, and paradigm shifts have been historically shown to be

inevitable, it becomes impossible for paradigms to truly approach truth. As Kuhn puts it, we may

“have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and

those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth” (Kuhn 170). Because progress can

only be made within a paradigm, every paradigm shift is, in a sense, regression. The search for

truth has to restart each time a new paradigm becomes dominant, and each new paradigm will

meet the same fate.

Paradigms are useful for conducting internally-progressive science and creating (albeit

temporary) worldviews, and the science conducted within them has resulted in technological and

medical advances. At the same time, progress towards a universal scientific truth does not seem
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to be possible within the paradigmatic system. In the attempts of scientists operating within para-

digms to attain the enlightenment goal of unity, the self-contradiction of such an ideal is realized

instead. The demands of intra-paradigm unity result in an incapacity for inter-paradigm unity.

Thus, science itself cannot be unified, as a direct result of the requirement of unity for science to

proceed: the ideal of unification undermines itself.

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Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. “The Concept of Enlightenment.” Dialectic of En-

lightenment, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford

University Press, Stanford, CA, 2002, pp. 1–34.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The University of Chicago Press, 1996.