I think I lost track of how the thread on Kuhn started, but the original
intent seems to have been to point out that acceptance of new ideas, on
Bee-L and elsewhere, can be for a number of reasons and at times related
to Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigms.  Even some 40 years after the first
edition of _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ was published, it
remains a controversial theory.

Essentially Kuhn wanted to point out that there is an academic inertia of
sorts that resides in all aspects of a particular disciplinary community.
In other words, Kuhn is saying that knowledge is not advanced or delayed
solely through the efforts of individuals; there is a *social* dimension
to knowledge that is lodged in every facet of what helps define a particular
disciplinary community on a social level.  Kuhn sometimes refered to a
paradigm as "the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and
so on shared by the members of a given community" (Kuhn, 1970, p. 175).
To put it in even simpler terms, when a particular community has a shared
commitment to a theory, idea, technique, and so on, the shared commitment
is what Kuhn (loosely) would refer to as a paradigm.  That's not hard to
accept, and neither is recognizing the bias that often goes along with
shared commitments hard to accept either.

Where Kuhn gets a little too esoteric for some intellectual palates are
the ways in which he wants to sketch out more specifically what a paradigm
might be beyond this basic common sense notion.  That's when he starts
talking about gestalt switches, exemplars, 'normal' science, disciplinary
matrixes, dragging Michael Polanyi's epistemology into the picture, and
so on.  As long as readers keep their feet grounded in the idea that what
Kuhn is talking about is the everyday sense of how a given community, *as
a whole*, thinks and accepts new ideas, then everyone will be ok.  That
basic commonsense notion is what makes the concept of paradigms, not the
Wylie Coyote of  philosophical science that keeps getting bashed, but the
roadrunner that keeps coming back.

Kuhn has had his critics, and rightfully so.  There are many problems with
how he presents his ideas and in the material he uses.  The history he
presents in support of normal science v/s paradigms shifts doesn't quite
mesh with the actual history of scientific ideas and yes, as the writer
in Technology Review pointed out, ideas are sometimes rapidly accepted
in the scientific community.  Maybe one of the more well known slapshots
was by Margaret Mastermann, who counted something like 28 different uses
of the word paradigm in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ and then
grouped them into three categories.

It's important, however, to keep in mind that Kuhn's ideas on paradigms are
a macro theory that operates on a global scale.  That makes it difficult to
either prove or refute in the kind of terms that make sociologists happy.
There are simply too too many variables in the theory, and it covers far
too wide a scale to be applied to the scrutiny of scientific inquiry and
verification.

That's probably one of the more important points -- Kuhn's ideas were not
fully accepted, and couldn't be accepted simply because the idea of paradigms
are a macro theory.  Paradigms as Kuhn described them were never given
recognition as being "factual," i.e., accorded the same status as the ideas
and principles of social cognition studies.  That's not where the primary
value of Kuhn's contributions lies, however.  Kuhn effectively punctured the
myth of the lone scientist working laboring to advance the cause of human
knowledge with his book.  Albert Einstein scribbling notes during his tenure
at a Swiss patent office comes closest to the myth but even he wasn't alone.
Poincare was close to completing his own theory of relativity -- Einstein
only beat him to the punch.  Kuhn's ideas attracted the attention of the
philosophical and scientific community and even appeared in texts on
sociological theory.   The discussion that ensued focused more attention
on how scientific ideas are generated and advanced within a community and
that, not Kuhn's theories themselves, are his chief contribution.  For
example, Peter Berger's book _The Sociology of Knowledge_, another macro
theory, appeared at about the same time as Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific
Revolutions_ but didn't attract nearly the same attention.

That's my two cents -- apologies if this was too lengthy or pendantic.
Back to lurking, reading Bee-Threads and making mead!  :-)


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Dan McFeeley
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"You learn something old every day."  Mr. McFeeley, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood