Kuhn's Opinion On Scientific Progress
The first edition of SSR ended with a chapter entitled "Progress through Revolutions", in which Kuhn spelled out his views on the nature of scientific progress. Since he considered problem solving to be a central element of science, Kuhn saw that for a new candidate for paradigm to be accepted by a scientific community, "First, the new candidate must seem to resolve some outstanding and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way. Second, the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem solving activity that has accrued to science through its predecessors." And overall Kuhn maintained that the new paradigm must also solve more problems than its predecessor, which therefore entailed that the number of newly solved problems must be greater than those solved in the old paradigm.
In the second edition of SSR, Kuhn added a postscript in which he elaborated his ideas on the nature of scientific progress. He described a thought experiment involving an observer who has the opportunity to inspect an assortment of theories, each corresponding to a single stage in a succession of theories. What if the observer is presented with these theories without any explicit indication of their chronological order? Kuhn anticipates that it will be possible to reconstruct their chronology on the basis of the theories' scope and content, because the more recent a theory is, the better it will be as an instrument for solving the kinds of puzzle that scientists aim to solve. Kuhn remarked: "That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress."
Read more about this topic: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions
Famous quotes containing the words kuhn, opinion, scientific and/or progress:
“By the year 2020, the year of perfect vision, the old will outnumber the young.”
—Maggie Kuhn (b. 1905)
“At the moment when a man openly makes known his difference of opinion from a well-known party leader, the whole world thinks that he must be angry with the latter. Sometimes, however, he is just on the point of ceasing to be angry with him. He ventures to put himself on the same plane as his opponent, and is free from the tortures of suppressed envy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)
“The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)