The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

P4 An apparently arbitrary element compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time. P18 When, in de development of a natural science, an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s practitioners, the older schools gradually disappear. P36 To scientists, at least, the results gained in normal research are significant because they added to the scope and precision with which the paradigm can be applied. P37 We have already seen, however, that one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, canoe assumed to have solutions. To a great extent theres are the only problems that the community will admit as scientific or encourage its members to undertake. Other problems, including many that had previously been standard, are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline, or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time. A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm supplies. Such orbs can be a distraction, a lesson brilliantly illustrated by several facets of seventeenth-century Baconianism an by some of the contemporary social sciences, One of the reasons why normal sciences seems to progress so rapidly is that its practitioners concentrate on problems that only their own lack of ingenuity should keep them from solving. P60 Paradigm procedures and applications are as necessary to science as paradigm laws and theories, and they have the same effects. Inevitably they restrict the phenomenological field accessible for scientific investigation at any given time. P62 Those characteristics (discoveries from which new sorts of phenomena emerge) include: the previous awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance. P64 Either as a metaphor or because it reflects the nature of the mind, that psychological (Bruner and Postman) experiment provides a wonderfully simple and cogent schema for the process of scientific discovery. In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation. P76 The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science - retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived. P87 This sort of extraordinary research is often, though by no means generally, accompanied by another. It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. P89 What the nature of that final stage is - how an individual invents ( or finds he has invented ) a new way of giving order to data now all assembled - must here remain inscrutable and may be permanently so. Let us here note only one thing about it. Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them. P137 For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks ( and too many of the older histories of science ) refer only to that part of the work of pas scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solutions of the texts’ paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of canons the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. No wonder the textbooks and the historical traction they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative. P162 With respect of normal science, then, part of the answer to the problem of progress lies simply in the eye of the beholder. Scientific progress is not different in kind form progress in other fields, but the absence at most times of competing schools that question each other’s aim and standards makes the progress of a normal-scientific community far easier to see. That, however, is only part of the answer and by no means the most important part. We have, for example, already noted that once the reception of a common paradigm has freed the scientific community from the need constantly to re-examine its first principles, the members of that community can concentrate exclusively upon the subtlest and most esoteric of the phenomena that concern it. Inevitably, that does increase both the effectiveness and the efficiency with which the group as a whole solve new problems. Other aspects of professional life in the sciences enhance this very special efficiency still further. P163 The most esoteric of poets or the most abstract of theologians is mare more concerned than the scientist with lay approbation of his creative work, though he may be even less concerned with approbation in general. That difference proves consequential. Just because the is boring lonely for an audience of colleagues, an audience that shares his own values and beliefs, the centrist can take a single set of standards for granted. He need not worry about what some other groups or school will think and can therefore dispose of one problem and get on to the next more quickly than those who work for a more heterodox group. Even more important, the insulation of the scientific community from society permits the individual scientist to concentrate his attention upon problems that he has good reason to believe he will be able to solve. Unlike the engineer, and many doctors, and most theologians, the scientist need not choose problems because they urgently need solution and without regard for the tools available to solve them, In this respect, also, the contrast between natural scientists and may social scientist proves instructive. The latter often tend, as the former almost never do, to defend their choice of a research problem - e.g. the effects of racial discrimination of the causes of the business cycle - chiefly in terms of the social importance of achieving a solution. Which group would one then expect to solve problems are a more rapid rate? P163 The effects of insulation from the larger society are greatly intensified by another characteristics of the professional scientific community, the nature of its educational initiation. In music, the graphic arts, and literature, the practitioner gains his education by exposure to the works of other artists, principally earlier artists. Textbooks, except compendia of or handbooks to original creations, have only a secondary role. In history, philosophy, and the social sciences, textbooks literature has a greater significance. But even in these fields the elementary college course employs parallel readings in original sources, some of them the “classics” of the field, others the contemporary research reports that practitioners write for each other. As a result, the student in any one of these disciplines is constantly made aware of the immense variety of problems that the members of his future group have, in the rouse of time, attempted to solve. Even more important, he has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately evaluate for himself. Contrast this situation with that in at least the contemporary natural sciences. In these fields the student relies mainly on textbooks until, in his third or fourth year of graduate work, he begins his own research. Many science curricula do not ask even graduate students to read in works not written specially for students The few that do assign supplementary reading in research papers and monographs restrict such assignments to the most advanced courses and to materials that take up more or less where the available texts leave off. Until the very last stages in the education of a scientist, textbooks are systematically substituted for the creative scientific literature that made them possible. Given the confidence in their paradigms, which makes this educational technique possible, few scientists would wish to change it. Why, after all, should the student of physics, of example, read the works of Newton, Faraday, Einstein, or Schrodinger, when everything he needs to know about these works is recapitulated in a far briefer, more precise, and more systematic form in a number of up-to-date textbooks? Without wishing to defend the excessive lengths to which this type of education has occasionally been carried, one cannot help but notice that in general it has been immensely effective. Of course, it is a narrow and rigid education, probably more so r than any other exec perhaps in orthodox theology. But for normal-scientific work, of puzzle-solving within the tradition that the textbooks define, the scientist is almost perfectly equipped. P166 Inevitably those remarks will suggest that the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be. Furthermore, that suggestion is not altogether inappropriate. There are losses as well as gains in scientific revolutions, and scientists ten dot be peculiarly blind to the former. P168 Novelty for its own sake is not a desideratum in the sciences as it is in so many other create fields. P169 We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the option, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth. P170 We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there by any such goal? Can we not account for both science’s existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community’s state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? If we can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of vexing problems may vanish in the precess. Somewhere in this maze, for example, must lie the problem of induction.

所以能做得出来的研究，得有这么个特点，就是通过已经建立起来的paradigm能够预见到问题的答案是存在的。是以在这个时代，很少再有激动人心的paradigm shift了，因为大部分人都不会去冒着丢饭碗的风险开创一个新的paradigm。

个人之于某一学科的知识体系总是渺小的存在，除了少数几个天才之外。这大概也是弥漫在学术界的年轻人中的那种绝望的来源吧。