The Theory Of Science And Scientific Revolutions

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Thomas Kuhn was an American philosopher, born in 1922, whom wrote about the distinction between normal science and revolutionary science. He was interpreted as a destroyer of logical empiricism throughout his career, and this is because his work seemed to show how interesting it was to connect philosophical questions about science with questions about the history of science. Throughout this essay, I will connect these questions together by explaining Kuhn’s account of the structure of normal science and scientific revolutions. Firstly, normal science and revolutionary science are pieces of a paradigm. A paradigm, in turn, is a whole way of doing science. It is a package of claims about the world, habits of scientific thought and action,…show more content…
This could be a successful experiment, or the formulation of a set of laws. These specific achievements are what Kuhn says causes a paradigm in the narrow sense. This means that paradigms in the broad sense, include within them, paradigms in the narrow sense. When a paradigm is used, it is often associated with normal science and revolutionary science. In short, normal science is well organized. These scientists tend to approach determined important problems specifically, and assess possible situations. Similarly, they agree on what the world is like in the broad sense. Revolutionary science, on the other hand, occurs when a paradigm breaks down and is replaced with another one (77). Karl Popper, born in 1902, presents objections against Kuhn’s normal and revolutionary science arguments, and following I will explain these objections, Kuhn’s replies, and reveal the most important of them all. Popper thought that science was characterized by permanent openness, however Kuhn disagreed. He thinks that it is false for science to exhibit a permanent openness to the testing of fundamental ideas and that science would be worse off should this occur (78). Popper makes another claim about scientific change, stating that science proceeds through a single process; that of conjecture and refutation. Although there can be revolutions, they are considered to be larger conjecture and more dramatic refutations. Kuhn rebuttals and states that this cannot be
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