Frank Kogan

kuhn's theory seems to GET presented as if science as a whole is a field

Yes, and Kuhn gets widely misinterpreted, though that's only occasionally (as w/ his original expansion of what he meant by "paradigm") his fault.

Just because there are different histories and revolutions doesn't mean that the revolutions can't nonetheless have a similar structure. There are different species with different ancestry, but that doesn't mean that Darwin's idea of variation and natural selection can't apply to all species change. (That and genetic drift and the like, which wasn't Darwin's idea obv.) Of course, we can question whether scientific revolutions do have similar structures, and when we get to that topic we'll once again run into some circularity: do all scientific revolutions involve a paradigm shift? Well, a scientific revolution is a paradigm shift, so if there's no paradigm shift there's no revolution. How can you distinguish between the hard sciences and the "non" (or "soft") sciences? Well, the nonsciences haven't ever come up with a dominant paradigm. Hence psychotherapy, for example, is not (yet?) a science.

(Btw, is math considered a science? I'm not sure. Usually it's classed in the humanities.) (Next to my asterisk where I listed "nonsciences," the only ones other than math I was thinking might have "normal" periods akin to "normal science" were "organized sports," which nonetheless are easily distinguishable from science - though I wonder whether there might not be games of sorts that run closer to science than basketball does.)