A rebellion against science is running rampant in the West, causing such oddities as the cult of Global Warming. Here we can focus on one of the most important fomenters of this rebellion: Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), author of the enormously influential "Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

Kuhn rejects the traditional view that science is a linear accretion of knowledge. In the traditional view, scientists build on the corpus that preceded them; through experiment and observation, they add a new fact here and a new discovery there, refining and adjusting the inherited learning. Slowly but surely, knowledge advances, and we modify the textbooks as we go.

Wrong, says Kuhn. Science in any given era is ruled by a paradigm, an over-arching theory that answers the big questions, and determines the bounds and the context within which everyday research takes place. Kuhn calls this everyday research "normal science," and its purpose is to flesh out and confirm the predictions of the paradigm.

At a certain point in the life of the paradigm, anomalies begin to appear. At first they are rationalized, as the paradigm is stretched and patched up to account for them. But eventually the anomalies become too glaring. Someone then comes along and proposes a bold new paradigm that completely replaces the old one. For example, Einstein's theory of relativity supplanting the former Newtonian system. Once the skeptics are defeated and the new paradigm is universally accepted, normal science resumes, but exclusively within the framework of the new paradigm.

In Kuhn's words:

"Sometimes a normal problem, one that ought to be solvable by known rules and procedures, resists the reiterated onslaught of the ablest members of the group within whose competence it falls. On other occasions a piece of equipment designed and constructed for the purpose of normal research fails to perform in the anticipated manner, revealing an anomaly that cannot, despite repeated effort, be aligned with professional expectation. In these and other ways besides, normal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does--when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice--then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions."

At this juncture, I find myself somewhat in sympathy with Kuhn. One can think of several cases that seem to correspond to this process, a prominent one being Darwin's theory of evolution. It was certainly revolutionary, and "normal science" has busied itself with filling out the theory and--more recently--with wildly bailing out the sinking ship. One can imagine a new scientific paradigm emerging, causing Darwin to be relegated entirely to the history books.

The problem begins when Kuhn goes beyond merely illuminating the great revolutions that have occurred in scientific thought. These revolutions, for him, completely supplant the previous view; in fact, they create a new truth. There is no such thing as an objective, empirically verifiable fact. The only thing that can be verified is a given phenomenon in relation to the ruling paradigm.

In the exposition of this argument, Kuhn reveals his relativistic hand by wading in the muddy waters of experimental psychology, which showed radical shifts in perception based on the beliefs and expectations of the test subject:

"An experimental subject who puts on goggles fitted with inverting lenses initially sees the entire world upside down. At the start his perceptual apparatus functions as it had been trained to function in the absence of the goggles, and the result is extreme disorientation, an acute personal crisis. But after the subject has begun to learn to deal with his new world, his entire visual field flips over, usually after an intervening period in which vision is simply confused. Thereafter, objects are again seen as they had been before the goggles were put on. The assimilation of a previously anomalous visual field has reacted upon and changed the field itself. Literally as well as metaphorically, the man accustomed to inverting lenses has undergone a revolutionary transformation of vision."

These "revolutionary transformations of vision," says Kuhn, are equally applicable to the world of science:

"After a revolution, scientists are responding to a different world. It is as elementary prototypes for these transformations of the scientist's world that the familiar demonstrations of a switch in visual gestalt prove so suggestive. What were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards...Transformations like these, though usually more gradual and almost always irreversible, are common concomitants of scientific training. Looking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, the cartographer a picture of a terrain. Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events."

As an exercise, let us apply Kuhn's method to Kuhn himself. We begin the exercise by saying that for thousands of years, at least since Aristotle, the reigning epistemological paradigm was that science is based on objective, verifiable facts. But more and more anomalies were found; modern thinkers noticed that the ideas of different individuals, groups, and nations are dependent upon a set of received values and beliefs. Thus who is to say which of the systems represents the truth? Along comes Kuhn and applies this modern relativistic approach to the last great bastion of objective truth: science itself.

Now, continuing our Kuhnian analysis of Kuhn: This paradigm, in its numerous permutations, has been in vogue for quite some time, going back at least to Hegel. Even looking at Kuhn alone, it is now nearly half a century since the publication of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Anomalies are accumulating, and we begin to realize that relativism is...well...relative. Kuhn's theory is merely one more paradigm that inevitably will be replaced. Are not relativism and its derivatives (such as deconstructionism and multiculturalism) dependent upon a received set of values and beliefs, just like any other theory?

Thus the paradox of relativism: If everything is relative, and there are no real "truths," then we have no reason to accept relativism itself as more valid and "true" than anything else. It can be deconstructed and thrown out like any other notion.

Like its ideological cousin, Marxism, Kuhnian relativism refuses to admit the existence of a world, with its laws, its nature, and its continuity. It refuses to admit that we and Aristotle are looking at the same rock. Certainly, our interpretations differ, but the rock remains the same, notwithstanding some gestalt hocus-pocus that tricks us into seeing the rock upside-down.

Kuhn's remark that ducks become rabbits as a result of a scientific revolution brings to mind the following statement by Aristotle (in "The Metaphysics") on the intellectual short-circuit that occurs in philosophical relativism:

"If all contradictions are true at the same time of the same thing, palpably all things will then be one. For if it is possible either to affirm or to deny anything of everything, the same thing will be a ship and a wall and a man, as it must be for those who repeat the theory of [the relativist] Protagoras. Then if anyone thinks that a man is not a ship, undoubtedly he is not a ship. But, in the same way, he is a ship, if the contrary is true....I mean that if it is true to say that a man is not a man, then clearly it is also true that he is a ship and not a ship....Then all things will be one, as we said before, and the same thing will be man and God and ship and their opposites. For if we can make all these assertions of everything, there will be no difference between any one thing and any other...

"And if all men are equally wrong and right, a person like that can neither speak nor tell us anything, for he is saying at the same time both "yes" and "no." And if he has no opinion but both thinks and does not think together, how is he different than a vegetable? So it is very evident that no one, neither those who profess this theory nor any others, really abide by it....When he wants and looks for a drink of water or a man to see, he does not go looking for everything and taking them all to be the same; and yet he should, if the same thing were equally a man and not a man." ( )

A brilliant book, and one that has changed the way in which we talk and think about ideas and disciplines. But I've reread it recently, and found it had not aged well; I really don't like it at all---which in no way diminishes the importance of reading it, but its flaws are more visible now than they once were, perhaps.
Karl Popper somewhere draws a distinction between traditionalism and rationalism (though this sense of rationalism includes classical rationalists and empiricists both). Traditionalists believe that the burden of the argument always rests on those who propose a change from The Way Things Are, and rationalists (of Popper's sort) think that that way of valuing things is reprehensible. Kuhn is a Traditionalist! Who would have thought it. And he has built a historicist philosophy of science to justify his Burkean tendencies.
But if you haven't read this book, put down whatever you're reading now, and read it.

em português

Bit of a preface: I hated this book. It contains some really good ideas, which are totally worth discussing, but the whole thing is so much wordier and denser than it needs to be (this, coming from me!); seriously, the ideas put forth in this 200-page monstrosity would have been better shared in a 5-10 page article. Still, we were assigned to read it for LIS 2000, Understanding Information, and asked to write a 400-word review, describing "how the content of this book relates to the information professions. Why do you think this is assigned reading?" followed by a 250-word addendum, restating our opinion and describing how it had changed in reading the other students' essays, so I tried my best to get through it. Although I'm a little embarrassed to post this--and nervous that people who already took the class will say "No! You are so wrong! You'll see!"--I still think it might be useful to do so. I can't change my answer now (or, well, not after 11pm--but I promise not to, now that I've made this public), so I'm curious what people who've been through this hazing ritualbook have to say.When we were assigned Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and asked to define its relevance to the information professions, I falsely assumed my professors were implying that our field is undergoing a "paradigm shift." Certainly, that argument can be made: With the Internet making information simultaneously more plentiful and harder to find, the effectiveness of distributed tagging and its effects on discussion of cataloguing, and the popularity of digital libraries and plans for automation thereof, nobody would seriously assert that our field is in any way stagnant or unchanging. On the other hand, paradigms point to fundamental thought patterns, and to suggest that our "paradigm" is in flux seems questionable: We still believe that information should be freely available to all, and we still strive to provide it in the best way available to us; that, I claim, is our true paradigm. That we have one at all shows the applicability of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; certainly, we make assumptions about the world and about information, and we consider questions relevant or irrelevant based on those assumptions. Just as scientists are not the impartial observers that we are told they should be, we are not the impartial information providers that we would like to be.Although Kuhn has many interesting and widely applicable ideas, I do not agree that his is the best way to think about science and progress. Certainly, the book has its fans (London 2008), but I was pleased to see that I was not its only doubter: Weinberg (1998), for instance, disagrees with nearly all of Kuhn's central assertions. I do not go quite so far. As a scientist*, I believe that science, taken as a whole, does progress with time--to argue that our understanding of the universe today is not fuller than it was 200 years ago seems ludicrous--but we should be cautious in treating any one scientific finding or theory as "progress," in and of itself: First, a scientist's paradigm and her puzzle-solving nature restrict what questions she considers asking (p. 37), and second, the explanations provided by a new theory or paradigm may not be any closer to truth than those of its predecessor (see discussion of opium, p. 104). I think the latter point also applies to the information professions: We may find that any one of the "advancements" we make is really a step back, hampering access to information.------With the help of my colleagues' reviews and Dr. Tomer's lecture, my views about Kuhn have changed over the last week. While I stand by my assertion that the information professions, like every field, have sets of accepted viewpoints ("paradigms") at their foundation, I no longer contend that that is Kuhn's sole applicability. Information Science is, after all, not really a science. Rather, I believe that Kuhn's description of incremental advances--and of new paradigms overwriting, if you will, previous work--is relevant to us in our capacity as guardians and gatekeepers of knowledge. A Kuhnian view of progress requires us to remain both vigilant and flexible in our maintenance of the scientific knowledge base; we must catalog the day-to-day work of "normal" knowledge accumulation in every field, particularly science, but we must also be aware that the rules and accepted facts are subject to change. As such, we must struggle to provide the information that daily practitioners of the field will deem relevant, perhaps in addition to previous "advances," or perhaps instead of them. I would add that I do not think we can expect to determine, entirely on our own, precisely which scientific information is worth keeping; as Kuhn says, people outside of a sub-field stand little chance of understanding the literature, and even people inside a field cannot predict with certainty which research direction will lead to a paradigm change. Rather, we should maintain a dialog with the experts and seek to improve our collections in collaboration with them. Kuhn, T.S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.London, S. (2008). Book Review. Retrieved September 9, 2008, from http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/ku... S. (1998, October 8). The Revolution That Didn't Happen [Review of the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions], The New York Review of Books, pp. 48-52.*As a post-script, separate from my review, I feel it necessary to point out that Kuhn would disagree with my assertion that I am a scientist. My formal training was in engineering (p. 30), and I am female. Both seem to count strongly against me, in his estimation. ( )

The term "paradigm shift" is often quoted by sociologists out to forge upheaval and marketers out to make a buck, but odds are that most who parrot the term have never carefully read the work that coined the idea. Although it pulled physical science down from its pedestal, the ideas apply just as readily to any enterprise of the production of knowledge, including the humanities and the social sciences. Anyone who has ever worked as a real scientist (as I have) knows that the world is not nearly so clear as the carefully defined experiments of school would have it. Scientists more often than not choose to design experiments and instruments which will confirm what they already suspected to be true. It is quite easy to explain away an anomaly as an error of measurement or a special circumstance rather than a refutation of one's comfortable worldview. This book should be required reading for any scientist in training, and it is critical for psychologists who wish to understand the nature of cognitive bias. It is rare for a book to become an instant classic, but this work well deserved that honor.