I recently finished reading Thomas Kuhn’s “Structures of Scientific Revolutions” while I had read shorter works on this theme I had never gotten around to reading the more thorough piece.
In the work, Kuhn does the intellectual spadework for the sociological analysis of science – the idea, contra Karl Popper, that scientists are deeply concerned with their own existence inside a community. Kuhn argues that mature science (typically this means the physical sciences) is defined by the hegemonic influence of a single instrumental perspective – what Kuhn dubbed a paradigm (thus plaguing us all to the misused cliche, “paradigm shift)
Under paradigms, scientists are given a shorthand for determining how to conduct their discipline – what questions to ask, what apparatus to use to answer it, what data to ignore/highlight etc. Paradigms frame the discourse within the scientific community, giving a common referent for what are often highly abstract concepts.
Kuhn argues that paradigm adoption is rarely a rational, evidence based process of considered migration. It is instead, usually the result of a crises in the old paradigm – scientists clamour aboard the most plausible alternative in the hopes to be saved from the problems plaguing the old paradigms.
In the word of Herbert Simon, they “satisfice” in their selection.
It takes little effort to see that Kuhn’s theory hinges upon many different assumptions about human cognition. He doesn’t make a normative argument about what science should be, nor does he make categorical claims about what science can never be – he merely states that paradigm adoption/rejection is how science operates currently. That is, how science is now supervenes on truths regarding how human beings think about science, which in turns supervenes on how human being think at all.
This has some interesting ramifications for cognitive science and organizational cognition. Science is arguably history’s greatest example of collective cognition and many scientific enterprises are exemplars of successful organizational cognition. Kuhn’s description implies strongly that human cognition strictly determines collective human enterprise.
If our best example of individual human intellectual transcendence (science knows more about the world than any other collective enterprise and has the clearest grasp of what it knows) is confined quite dramatically by certain very human, very mundane cognitive realities what implications does this raise about the possibility space for future collective human efforts?
It does make a strong case for something I’ve believed. That organizational systems are surprisingly regular at very large scales and the relation between individual and collective is less complex than the system’s scale would indicate.
This issue is akin to certain problems in physics. A system containing one or two particles is easy to make predictions. Another system containing millions of particles is also, at the systemic level, easy to predict. It is in the intervening levels of complexity that prediction becomes difficult.
This is common-sensical when one considers the difference between making predictions regarding one’s graduating class vs. one’s sibling vs. one’s generation.
The critical difference here is that it is clear what kind of predictions are possible at the uppermost and lowermost levels of complexity – the kinds of things one can plausibly say of a generation or a person respectively.
Kuhn’s insight is that the uppermost level has a character that is, surprisingly to many, heavily constrained by the lowest level.
This view of paradigms, in many ways, parallels attentional scaling. That the individual elements one retains in working memory strongly determine the range of possible gestalts one can perceive. A new gestalt is almost always the result not of new insight on static elements, but of the shifting nature of the elements themselves – by foregrounding one fact.
To Kuhn, paradigms are distinct from gestalts in that paradigms are one-way. Gestalts, according to Kuhn, can be manipulated and flexed at will.
This seems convincing when one considers the example of Necker Cubes or Navon letters. However, in the light of insight problem solving, this distinction becomes problematic.
In issues of insight problem solving, the solution once discovered becomes permanently salient. To the extent one can recall the solution to say, the nine-dot problem, one can’t help but perceive the entailed salience map.
Thus, paradigms can be seen as the salience maps generated from the solution to certain ill-defined problems that plagued the previous paradigm. By making this adjustment to Kuhn, one can square his theory with many important psychological phenomena.