Question

Define scientific method and write essay on thomas kuhn's critique of scientific method

Answer 1

So how are paradigms created and what do they contribute to scientific inquiry? Normal science "means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice". These achievements must be sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity and sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners (and their students) to resolve. These achievements can be called paradigms. Students study these paradigms in order to become members of the particular scientific community in which they will later practice. Because the student largely learns from and is mentored by researchers "who learned the bases of their field from the same concrete models" there is seldom disagreement over fundamentals. Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. A shared commitment to a paradigm ensures that its practitioners engage in the paradigmatic observations that its own paradigm can do most to explain. Paradigms help scientific communities to bound their discipline in that they help the scientist to create avenues of inquiry, formulate questions, select methods with which to examine questions, define areas of relevance. and establish or create meaning. A paradigm is essential to scientific inquiry - "no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism". How are paradigms created, and how do scientific revolutions take place? Inquiry begins with a random collection of "mere facts" (although, often, a body of beliefs is already implicit in the collection). During these early stages of inquiry, different researchers confronting the same phenomena describe and interpret them in different ways. In time, these descriptions and interpretations entirely disappear. A pre-paradigmatic school appears. Such a school often emphasises a special part of the collection of facts. Often, these schools vie for pre-eminence. From the competition of these pre-paradigmatic schools, one paradigm emerges - "To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted", thus making research possible. As a paradigm grows in strength and in the number of advocates, the other pre-paradigmatic schools or the previous paradigm fade. A paradigm transforms a group into a profession or, at least, a discipline. And from this follow the formation of specialised journals, foundation of professional bodies and a claim to a special place in academe. There is a promulgation of scholarly articles intended for and "addressed only to professional colleagues, [those] whose knowledge of a shared paradigm can be assumed and who prove to be the only ones able to read the papers addressed to them".