Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos - Thomas Kuhn - Scientific revolutions: normal science

5 important questions on Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos - Thomas Kuhn - Scientific revolutions: normal science

What are two characteristics that Samuelson and Kuhn share?

1. Their achievement was sufficiently remarkable to draw a group of followers away from competing modes of scientific activity

2. They are sufficiently open-ended to supply all sorts of unsolved problems for new generations

What is the difference between a paradigm and normal science?

The functio of a paradigm is largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. (Provide scientists with puzzles to solve and the tools for their solution)


Normal science consists of the actualization of that promise, achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing and by increasing the extent of the match between predicitons

What is the main purpose of normal science?

To bring the nature of the scientific enterprise. A puzzle solver will not be entering a completely unexplored territory, so solutions are quite straightforward. Normal science can expect to accumalate a growing stock of puzzle solutions (reasonable chance for success)

Puzzles do consist of rules that limit the nature of acceptable solutions due to the paradigm
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What happens when a community accepts a paradigm?

A criterion for choosing the problem that are assumed to have solutions is chosen. Only problems that are seen as scientific withing the paradigm are chosen.

Why does not all science progress at the same pace?

Practitioners concentrate on problems that can be prevented from solving problems that are solvable, and not on those that cannot be solved because of the lack of information

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