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Kuhn 18: A difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences
Working away on the question of the distinction that Kuhn draws between rules and paradigms, and why he thinks it's important to draw such a distinction:
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions p. viii: I was struck by the number and extent of overt disagreements between social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods. Both history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possess firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science. Yet, somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today often seem endemic among, say, psychologists and sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of "paradigms." These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.
pp 3-4: Instructed to examine electrical or chemical phenomena, the man who is ignorant of these fields but who knows what it is to be scientific may legitimately reach any one of a number of incompatible conclusions.
So, the success of the natural sciences as opposed to the social sciences lies not in the natural scientists' knowing better than the social scientists what it is to be a scientist, or their having a better grasp of something called "scientific method," but in the members of a particular field or subfield sharing a set of model problems and solutions (i.e., paradigms). This isn't yet telling us the difference between paradigms and rules (as opposed to a paradigm being a type of rule, say, or a collection of rules), or why Kuhn thinks it's important that we notice such a difference. But it tells us what he thinks is at stake: a paradigm is what allows a particularly scientific community - a scientific field or subfield - to proceed with effect, without constantly having to ask itself what it's doing.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions p. viii: I was struck by the number and extent of overt disagreements between social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods. Both history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possess firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science. Yet, somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today often seem endemic among, say, psychologists and sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of "paradigms." These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.
pp 3-4: Instructed to examine electrical or chemical phenomena, the man who is ignorant of these fields but who knows what it is to be scientific may legitimately reach any one of a number of incompatible conclusions.
So, the success of the natural sciences as opposed to the social sciences lies not in the natural scientists' knowing better than the social scientists what it is to be a scientist, or their having a better grasp of something called "scientific method," but in the members of a particular field or subfield sharing a set of model problems and solutions (i.e., paradigms). This isn't yet telling us the difference between paradigms and rules (as opposed to a paradigm being a type of rule, say, or a collection of rules), or why Kuhn thinks it's important that we notice such a difference. But it tells us what he thinks is at stake: a paradigm is what allows a particularly scientific community - a scientific field or subfield - to proceed with effect, without constantly having to ask itself what it's doing.