The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Reading Questions

Why begin a yearlong program in military strategy with a book that seems to have nothing to do with that topic?

I think the book does relate to the military and military strategy. The old saying that we are always preparing for the last war is very similar to the idea that paradigms are challenging to change and require identifying anomalies. The problem with the military is that the iteration rate is significantly slower than with science. SAASS, from my reading, is the same application of normal science education presented in text, stick to the knowledge base and paradigm of the program, and you will be good.

How does science take place?

Science takes place over a sigmoid curve. When a discovery or new paradigm is established, normal science jumps in to create depth and research the known unknowns. Over time, anomalies are identified, and once recognized as a crisis, the sigmoid jumps to a new function and the process starts over again. This continued progress is because no paradigm or theory perfectly reflects reality.

What is a paradigm?

A paradigm is the culture established around a field of research, including what questions must be answered, what data is important, what the rules of search are, and what the community’s world view must be.

How and why do scientific revolutions take place?

Revolutions generally come from anomalies identified in a paradigm that become crises because they can’t be resolved with the current paradigm. While anyone conducting normal science can identify an anomaly, generally only young men or outsiders can create the new theories and paradigms required for a revolution.

How does an understanding of normal science help us think about strategic puzzles?

From my observation, normal science can almost be replaced with strategy. Few new strategic paradigms have been created since Thucydides that are general enough to cover all military strategies. A persistent engagement strategy is a promising start for the cyber community, but unless the new world order completely breaks apart, I see little application to other domains.

What strategic puzzles does the US face?

IMHO, the primary is the return to a multipolar world (GPC), and the acute is Russian and Israeli aggression.

Is there such a thing as “normal strategy making”?

Yes, I think most strategy is normal strategy making. As a government and military, we are re-using the playbooks of old and filling in known unknowns with every engagement.

What does this book tell us about organizational and cultural change?

They are hard to change, due to cultural upbringings that lead people to identify with the world they were raised in. Over a decade into the stand-up of USCYBERCOM, most generals still have no appreciation for the domain because it is such a paradigm from the world they grew up in. Like Kuhn says, we will have to wait them out.

Is there a science of strategy?

No, there has been minimal advancement in strategy, and as Kuhn highlights, a topic can’t be science without advancement. While tactics evolve to meet threats, strategy continues to be the combination of ends, ways, and means informed by risk to meet political objectives.

Online Description

“One of the most influential books of the 20th century,” the landmark study in the history of science with a new introduction by philosopher Ian Hacking (Guardian, UK). First published in 1962, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ”reshaped our understanding of the scientific enterprise and human inquiry in general.” In it, he challenged long-standing assumptions about scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation, but instead occur outside of “normal science.” Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in today’s biotech age (Science). This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including “paradigm” and “incommensurability,” and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context. This newly designed edition also includes an expanded and updated index.

🔫 Author Background

Thomas Samuel Kuhn** (/kuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.

Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic “paradigm shifts” rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, there is no one-to-one correspondence of assumptions and terms. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon “objectivity” alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants.

🔍 Author’s Main Issue / Thesis

Kuhn argues that scientific progress isn’t additive/compounding, but cycles between normal science and scientific revolution. Normal science is a process of working in established paradigms and structures to deeply explore a topic, by analysis and experimentation to answer known questions, with known tools and methods. A scientific revolution occurs when a paradigm explored by normal science reaches an impasse where the paradigm no longer fits reality / the experiments being conducted, resulting in a new paradigm and a “new world”.

📒 Sections

Introduction

“This essay attempts to show that we have been misled by them in fundamental ways. Its aim is a sketch of the quite different concept of science that can emerge from the historical record of the research activity itself.”
Disproven science is still science, because it was based on the experience, knowledge, methods/tools, and paradigms of when it was conducted. While we view some theories as disproven, many are still good enough to give a rough estimate of reality.
Science progresses through the establishment of a paradigm by scientific consensus and through scientific revolution (completely new ideas/ways of looking at the world). The interplay between these two modes of science is, what creates continuous advancement.

I Introduction: A Role for History

The intro lays out the key terms, Normal Science and Paradigm, while arguing that science can not be conducted without paradigms.
“‘normal science’ means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.”
A paradigm is an idea that was “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.”
To be accepted as a paradigm, it has to seem better than its competitors, but it doesn’t have to be, and it almost certainly can not be a perfect depiction of the world.
As normal science progresses, communication in the field changes as well. It moves from books and knowledge sharing meant for the world to esoteric papers written to be read only by other researchers. This can be one sign that a field is in the state of conducting normal science.

II The Route to Normal Science

Chapter 2 lays out what normal science is, and why it is required, but can never truly progress scientific thought because paradigms bound it.
Normal science aims to understand better (in depth) the current theories of a field while being bound by paradigms. This leads to intolerance of new ideas and lays the groundwork for scientific revolution.
Without normal science, the world would never get the depth and detail of research required to understand a subject and identify errors in paradigms that lead to revolution.

III The Nature of Normal Science

Three Foci for factual scientific investigation
- 1. “class of facts that the paradigm has shown to be particularly revealing of the nature of things.”
- 1. “facts that, though often without much intrinsic interest, can be compared directly with predictions from the paradigm theory”
- 1. “empirical work undertaken to articulate the paradigm theory, resolving some of its residual ambiguities and permitting the solution of problems to which it had previously only drawn attention.”
“Work under the paradigm can be conducted in no other way, and to desert the paradigm is to cease practicing the science it defines. We shall shortly discover that such desertions do occur. They are the pivots about which scientific revolutions turn.”

IV Normal Science as Puzzle-solving

Chapter 4 explains why normal science is conducted, even though it won’t create novel understanding. Scientists want to solve puzzles to enable a deeper understanding of the world, and this is where most researchers spend their entire careers.
Normal Science is conducted because it is like puzzle solving, allowing researchers to solve discrete problems that add to the scope and precision of how a paradigm is applied.
Rules are derived from paradigms, but paradigms can guide normal science without rules.

V The Priority of Paradigms

Paradigms and the learning/education they drive reinforce the paradigm by emphasizing what is known and what still needs to be determined under a paradigm.
Paradigms can be identified without agreement, because even the identification can drive search methods and topics without rules or consensus.
The application of paradigms is baked into how science is taught. Unlike the arts, students are not expected to be creative; they are expected to read and memorize what is known. Only at the graduate level do they start to think about solving problems that the current paradigm has presented.
The pre-paradigm period is marked by debates over the correct methods and problems to use for research, which created schools within a field and ultimately led to a paradigm.
- Author note: Outside of the text, Kuhn comments that he wishes he had used the term pre-paradigm because paradigms are not required to drive research.
Experience also plays a key role in normal science because it can drive changes that lead to revolutions. For example, a chemist and a physicist look at helium differently due to their different worldviews and experiences.

VI Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries

Normal science prioritizes known unknowns in a paradigm to gain a deeper understanding of it, but this limits researchers’ abilities to determine that the paradigm is wrong until anomalies begin to appear that can’t be avoided.
Normal science is a cumulative enterprise of puzzle-solving, to reinforce/learn more about a paradigm, but these activities lead to anomalies that the paradigm presents, leading to revolution.
Anomalies in a paradigm can start a revolution, but it may take years for them to be taken seriously or addressed, since research can often ignore them and move on to other areas of study.
Paradigms can and do limit the type of research done by setting norms for what kind of research equipment and data matter in a field.
“characteristic of all discoveries from which new sorts of phenomena emerge. Those characteristics include: the previous awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance.”

VII Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories

This chapter is about all the times new paradigms have been identified, but didn’t gain consensus until a crisis occurs, generally in the form of the old paradigm no longer matching reality.
Historically, anomalies and new theories they drive have occurred years before a paradigm is shifted unless a crisis occurs.
“characteristic of all discoveries from which new sorts of phenomena emerge. Those characteristics include: the previous awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance.”

VIII The Response to Crisis

VIII highlights how Crisis creates new paradigms from anomalies identified in normal science, normally by young men or men from outside the field, because the current paradigm does not bind them.
The decision to reject one paradigm is always coupled with the acceptance of a new paradigm, because science can not operate without paradigms.
To keep paradigms alive, researchers won’t falsify data; they will create ad hoc modifications to account for anomalies and try to bolt new concepts onto old ideas so their world doesn’t change.
This creates the ‘essential tension’ of science, a scientist must live in a strict world bound by paradigms and theories, but once a crisis occurs, be able to shift to a new world view.
The tipping point is when an anomaly becomes more than a puzzle piece to be solved under the current paradigm, and transitions to a crisis that the current paradigm can’t solve.
Scientists frequently turn to other fields for help, such as philosophical analysis, when a crisis occurs.
Almost all new paradigms have been created by young men or men new to a field, arguably because the last paradigm hasn’t brainwashed them.
“The proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals, all these are symptoms of a transition from normal to extraordinary research. It is upon their existence more than upon that of revolutions that the notion of normal science depends.”

IX The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions

IX establishes that normal science will go to great lengths to defend a waning paradigm, and be slow to convert to a new one, due to the significant emotional events they drive.
Old and new paradigms are incompatible and can not be determined by logic or experimentation alone, because paradigms drive what data and experiments matter.
Three phenomena that can drive a new theory
- Phenomena already established by the existing paradigm, when they do drive new theory, they rarely drive adoption because there is no way to discriminate between old and new.
- Phenomena that are identified by the current paradigm, but can only be explained with further research (where most normal science happens)
- When the first two fail, a new theory must be created to match an anomaly.
When a revolution occurs, old science that might have been dismissed may become valuable and the center of study, and the previous center of study may be thrown out; this is why revolutions are incommensurable to prior paradigms.
“In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mixture. Therefore, when paradigms change, there are usually significant shifts in the criteria determining the legitimacy both of problems and of proposed solutions.”
The incommensurable nature of paradigms means they can’t be debated because the men debating them have different lexicons and incompatible world views. As a result, they simply talk past each other with no chance of resolution.

X Revolutions as Changes of World View

Chapter X extends the idea of scientific evolution to the world of scientific existence. This means that with revolution, tooling, methods, lexicon, and data must all be redone to meet the structure of the new paradigm.
By changing what matters, a paradigm shift creates a new world for scientists, who must relearn how to interact with the world (methods, tools, problems to solve, etc).
A paradigm shift is world-changing because it changes what questions a scientist needs to explore.
Because all languages are human, it is impossible to report objectively; thus, language must also be re-learned with a new paradigm because the old lexicon holds on to the old paradigm.

XII The Resolution of Revolutions

Textbooks and other learning factors downplay the history of the scientific revolution by imparting to students a continuous legacy of science that everyone before has built on. This upbringing shapes the worldview of all trained scientists who want to support current paradigms.

XII The Resolution of Revolutions

Chapter XII looks at how a new paradigm starts with few supporters, and many nay-sayers, but over time, as the paradigm is tested and the elderly die, it begins to take over and become normal science.
New theories or discoveries emerge in the minds of every man. For them to survive, the men who discovered them must be both hyper-focused on the anomaly and be able to communicate it.
New paradigms are achieved by fields splitting into schools and testing the new paradigms, not by direct competition between paradigms.
Once a new paradigm is established, old scientists must transfer to the new world; however, many don’t, and the community must wait them out. Conversion can not be forced.
Conversion occurs slowly due to the stickiness of Normal Science, until the new paradigm becomes conscious and begins to operate under the constraints of normal science.
- Conversion is slowed by the old guard believing they can fix the last paradigm and by new paradigms, which are, by definition, always less complete (there are more known unknowns that have yet to be researched).
To be a new paradigm early adopter is a leap of faith.

XIII Progress through Revolutions

Science must progress because progression is used to define science.
Scientific progress is also due to scientists being sheltered from society. Unlike engineers, they don’t have to solve today’s problems with what they have; they can solve problems they believe they can solve.
Scientific training creates people who are good at normal science and identifies anomalies that can lead to revolution. Still, it is not designed to create people who can devise the new approaches required to create new paradigms.
Normal science is based on a community, which, in science, is an exclusive group of folks trained together with perceived possession of knowledge and rules, making their judgment superior to that of out-group members.
“The analogy that relates the evolution of organisms to the evolution of scientific ideas can easily be pushed too far. But with respect to the issues of this closing section it is very nearly perfect. The process described in Section XII as the resolution of revolutions is the selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science.”

☠️ Agree, Disagree, or Suspend

Agree

While Kuhn recommends not extending his model of revolution to other fields, I think it is applicable in both science and the military. Which leads me to support his idea, because his arguments of science jumping the curve are compelling, and I have seen the military continuously hold on to old paradigms.

✍️ Key Terms

Paradigm
Normal Science
Incommensurabile
Anomolies

🗂 AI Summary

Summary of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; revised 1970) is a landmark work in the philosophy of science that challenges traditional views of scientific progress. Rather than viewing science as a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge, Kuhn introduces a model where periods of “normal science” are interrupted by revolutionary shifts in understanding, termed paradigm shifts.

Main Ideas

Paradigm and Normal Science
- A paradigm is a framework of theories, methods, and standards that defines legitimate work within a scientific community.
- Normal science is the phase where scientists work within a prevailing paradigm, solving puzzles and refining theories rather than questioning the framework itself.
Crisis and Anomalies
- Over time, persistent anomalies—observations that cannot be explained by the current paradigm—accumulate.
- When these anomalies undermine confidence in the paradigm, the field enters a crisis.
Scientific Revolutions
- A scientific revolution occurs when a new paradigm emerges and replaces the old one, reorienting the field’s concepts, methods, and questions.
- This shift is not purely logical or data-driven; it involves shifts in perception, values, and professional consensus.
Incommensurability
- Successive paradigms are often incommensurable: they involve different standards and conceptual frameworks, making direct comparison difficult.
- As such, progress in science is not always linear or cumulative.
Progress and Subjectivity
- Kuhn acknowledges progress in science but denies it follows a straightforward trajectory toward truth.
- The choice between paradigms may involve subjective and sociological factors, such as persuasion and community consensus, not just empirical proof.

Supporting Arguments

Historical case studies, such as the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy or from Newtonian mechanics to Einsteinian physics, demonstrate how revolutions transform scientific fields.
Kuhn emphasizes that textbook science often presents a distorted view of history by smoothing over revolutions and portraying science as cumulative.

Impact and Criticism Kuhn’s work reshaped the philosophy and history of science, introducing a sociological dimension to scientific change. However, it has faced criticism for allegedly promoting relativism and underplaying the role of rational evaluation in paradigm choice.