5.3 Limits to science
5.3.2 Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)

Notwithstanding the relevance and efficiency of Karl Popper's concept of falsification (to be described in Section 5.3.2 [ http://www.wfsj.org/course/en/L5/L5P19.html ]), the most well known of the contemporary philosophers of science is Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962 and still enjoying great popularity.

Kuhn said that the search for objective truth is not the real goal of science, but that science is essentially a method of solving problems operating within a contemporary system of beliefs. That system of beliefs and values manifests itself through a series of experimental procedures that produce results, which, in turn, reinforce the original system of beliefs and values. Kuhn calls such systems paradigms. Scientists, normally, spend most of their time doing normal science i.e. they work within a specific paradigm.

But, sometimes, the likes of Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein come up with new belief systems that trigger scientific revolutions. Respectively, their systems reshaped the universe such that its centre is occupied by the Sun and not the Earth; brought celestial mechanics under the same laws obeyed by terrestrial mechanics; moved from a world created by God to a world without purpose and never finished; and switched from a physics with an absolute and uniform flow of time to a new physics where the flow of time is elastic and varies according to the relative speeds of the experimenter and the observed.

Kuhn argued new paradigms take over not because of their scientific merit, but because their adversaries eventually die: the Einsteinians' general relativity becomes accepted as a true description of nature following the thinning of the ranks of Newtonians.

Kuhn has taken some veneer from a naïve conception of science that would discover reality in a gradual, linear, and rational way. Science lost an aura that was only fooling philosophers; the innovative scientists know too well how tough it is to get their ideas accepted.


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