Sociology of The History of Science - Patterns in The History of Science

Patterns in The History of Science

See also: Scientific consensus#Scientific consensus and the scientific minority

One of the major occupations with those interested in the history of science is whether or not it displays certain patterns or trends, usually along the question of change between one or more scientific theories. Generally speaking, there have historically been three major models adopted in various forms within the philosophy of science.

The first major model, implicit in most early histories of science and generally a model put forward by practicing scientists themselves in their textbook literature, is associated with the criticisms of logical positivism by Karl Popper (1902–1994) from the 1930s. Popper's model of science is one in which scientific progress is achieved through a falsification of incorrect theories and the adoption instead of theories which are progressively closer to truth. In this model, scientific progress is a linear accumulation of facts, each one adding to the last. In this model, the physics of Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was simply subsumed by the work of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) (classical mechanics), which itself was eclipsed by the work of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) (Relativity), and later the theory of quantum mechanics (established in 1925), each one more accurate than the last.

A major challenge to this model came from the work of the historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) in his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962. Kuhn, a former physicist, argued against the view that scientific progress was linear, and that modern scientific theories were necessarily just more accurate versions of theories of the past. Rather, Kuhn's version of scientific development consisted of dominant structures of thought and practices, which he called "paradigms", in which research went through phases of "normal" science ("puzzle solving") and "revolutionary" science (testing out new theories based on new assumptions, brought on by uncertainty and crisis in existing theories). In Kuhn's model, different paradigms represented entirely different and incommensurate assumptions about the universe, and was uncertain about whether paradigms shifted in a way which necessarily relied upon greater attainment of truth. In Kuhn's view, Aristotle's physics, Newton's classical mechanics, and Einstein's Relativity were entirely different ways to think about the world; each successive paradigm defined what questions could be asked about the world and (perhaps arbitrarily) discarded aspects of the previous paradigm which no longer seemed applicable or important. Kuhn claimed that far from merely building on the previous theory's accomplishments, each one essentially throws out the old way of looking at the universe, and comes up with its own vocabulary to describe it and its own guidelines for expanding knowledge within the new paradigm.

Kuhn's model met with much suspicion from scientists, historians, and philosophers. Some scientists felt that Kuhn went too far in divorcing scientific progress from truth; many historians felt that his argument was too codified for something as polyvariant and historically contingent as scientific change; and many philosophers felt that the argument did not go far enough. The furthest extreme of such reasoning was put forth by the philosopher Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994), who argued that there were no consistent methodologies used by all scientists at all times which allowed certain forms of inquiry to be labeled "scientific" in a way which made them different from any other form of inquiry, such as witchcraft. Feyerabend argued harshly against the notion that falsification was ever truly followed in the history of science, and noted that scientists had long undertaken practices to arbitrarily consider theories to be accurate even if they failed many sets of tests. Feyerabend argued that a pluralistic methodology should be undertaken for the investigation of knowledge, and noted that many forms of knowledge which were previously thought to be "non-scientific" were later accepted as a valid part of scientific canon.

Many other theories of scientific change have been proposed over the years with various changes of emphasis and implications. In general, though, most float somewhere between these three models for change in scientific theory, the connection between theory and truth, and the nature of scientific progress.