Lecture 5: Paradigm shifts

Question 1

What are paradigms?

Answer 1

• useful conceptual tools for making sense of scientific change
• productive sources of metaphors in intellectual and public life
• many authors use these concepts

Question 2

Why are scientists part of a certain paradigm?

Answer 2

Kuhn: People don’t choose the paradigm they’re in, they just use the must popular package of assumptions, techniques, and exemplars of the time.
Normal science: standard way of thinking about things.

Popper: Individuals choose the paradigm (falsification)

Question 3

What does a paradigm consist of?

Answer 3

• assumptions about the world under study
• a toolbox for solving problems
• style of theorizing

Question 4

What is the Kuhn cycle?

Answer 4

1. normal science
2. model drift
3. model crisis
4. model revolution
5. paradigm change

Question 5

How does a paradigm end?

Answer 5

Succesive stages:

1. scientist finds new data
2. data is dismissed as anomaly
3. accept the need to explain data
4. criticise the established paradigm for its inability to account for the data

Question 6

What is the teleological process of scientific knowledge?

Answer 6

• Traditional view
• Lineal development of science.
• Goal oriented.
• All science accumulates to where we are now.

Question 7

What is developmental progress of scientific knowledge?

Answer 7

• revisionist view
• darwinian organic development and growth
• progressive, but not cumulative
• when science evolutes in a way that is a dead end sometimes you need to go back

Question 8

What is a scientific revolution?

Answer 8

• paradigm switch in scientific discipline
• new data at the centre of their thinking
• revolutionary crisis: scientific community splits into progressive and conservative factions. They each have good claims.
• the revolution end with the creation of a new paradigm

Question 9

What is incommensurability?

Answer 9

There is no common measure between paradigms. They can’t talk to each other.

1. semantic
2. methodological
3. observational

Question 10

What is semantic incommensurability?

Answer 10

Scientific terms gain meaning from a paradigm. You can’t translate between paradigms.