This document discusses progress in science and whether progress is reserved exclusively for scientific fields. It notes that normal science progresses when a community works within a single paradigm to solve problems. However, progress can also occur in other fields like technology and the arts. While normal science seems assured in its progress, this is partly due to how scientists are insulated from society and can focus on problems they believe they can solve. The document questions whether changing paradigms necessarily bring us closer to truth.

1. Chapter XIII: Progress through
Revolutions

2. Progress in science
• The term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do
progress in obvious ways. Progress is a perquisite
reserved almost exclusively for science activities.
• Debate: Whether one or another of the
contemporary social sciences is really a science.
• Does a field make progress because it is a
science, or is it a science because it makes
progress?

3. Is progress only reserved for normal
science?
• Normal science progresses because the enterprise
shares certain salient characteristics.
1. Members of a mature scientific community work from
a single paradigm or from a closely related set.
2. Very rarely do different scientific communities
investigate the same problems.
• The result of successful creative work is progress.
1. Progress is an attribution to many fields (technology -
now, painting - during the Renaissance)
2. Even if we argue that a field does not make
progress, that does not mean that an individual
school/discipline within that field does not.

4. • Progress seems both obvious and assured in normal science.
In part, this progress is in the eye of the beholder.
• Unlike in other disciplines, the scientist need not select problems
because they urgently need solution and without regard for the
tools available to solve them.
• There are no other professional communities in which individual
creative work is so exclusively addressed to and evaluated by other
members of the profession.
-> This insulation of the scientist from society permits the individual
scientist to concentrate attention on problems that she has a good
reason to believe she will be able to solve.
-> We would expect science to solve problems at a more rapid rate

5. Science’s insulation from society
• +Music, arts, literature: Practitioner gains
education by exposure to works of other artists.
• +History, philosophy and social science: Textbook
has greater significant. A problem has a number
of competing and incommensurable solutions.
• +Contemporary natural sciences: Rely mainly on
textbooks until 3rd,4th year of graduate work, until
beginning research. Not recommended: Reading
works not written specifically for students.
Scientists don’t want to change it because it has
been immensely effective.

6. Progress toward no goal
• Darwin example: When published theory of natural
selection, the greatest difficulty that Darwin encountered
was not the novelty of idea and resistance.
• The evidence pointing to evolution, including the evolution
of man, had been suggested and widely disseminated
before.
• The greatest difficulty stemmed from an idea that was
more nearly Darwin’s own. Pre-Darwinian evolutionary
theories (Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, German
Naturphilosophen) had taken evolution to be a goal-
directed process. However, “The origin of Species”
recognized no goal set either by God or nature. Natural
selection is responsible for the changes of species.

7. Kuhn’s question
• “We may have to relinquish the notion, explicit
or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry
scientists and those who learn from them
closer and closer to the truth” (P170)
• What must nature, including man, be like in
order that science be possible at all?