The Logic of Burning it All Down
Reaction and revolution versus normal politics
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, philosopher Thomas Kuhn argued that science doesn’t progress in a straight line. We don’t just gradually accumulate more and more knowledge about the world. Instead, science progresses through a series of what he called “paradigms.”
Pre-scientific inquiry is characterized by a bunch of competing paradigms. It’s like people can’t even agree on what they’re looking at. Each paradigm has its own vocabulary and its own way of divvying up the world. Like that old black-and-white image that changes from an elegant young lady to an old babushka depending on how you look at it, a paradigm is a way of seeing the whole world at a glance.
Sometimes one paradigm proves more successful than others. Over time, it comes to dominate and even displace them. To do science at all means accepting the dominant paradigm as the starting point, and then delving deeper and deeper into its implications. This period is what Kuhn calls “normal science.”
But this process ends up undermining itself. We’re fallible beings, after all. We can never capture the world at a glance. And over time, the very technological and experimental progress the paradigm makes possible also reveals its limitations. Anomalies begin to appear…
