Research Under A Paradigm Must Be A

We See The World In Terms Of Our Theories.

The Historian Of Science May Be Tempted To Claim That When Paradigms Change, The World Itself Changes With Them. Led By A New Paradigm, Scientists Adopt New Instruments And Look In New Places. Even More Important, During Revolutions, Scientists See New And Different Things When Looking With Familiar Instruments In Places They Have Looked Before. It Is Rather As If The Professional Community Had Been Suddenly Transported To Another Planet Where Familiar Objects Are Seen In A Different Light And Are Joined By Unfamiliar Ones As Well.

Concerned To Reconstruct Past Ideas, Historians Must Approach The Generation That Held Them As The Anthropologist Approaches An Alien Culture. They Must, That Is, Be Prepared At The Start To Find That Natives Speak A Different Language And Map Experience Into Different Categories From Those They Themselves Bring From Home. And They Must Take As Their Object The Discovery Of Those Categories And The Assimilation Of The Corresponding Language.

The Man Who Is Striving To Solve A Problem Defined By Existing Knowledge And Technique Is Not, However, Just Looking Around. He Knows What He Wants To Achieve, And He Designs His Instruments And Directs His Thoughts Accordingly. Unanticipated Novelty, The New Discovery, Can Emerge Only To The Extent That His Anticipations About Nature And His Instruments Prove Wrong... There Is No Other Effective Way In Which Discoveries Might Be Generated.

To Turn Karl [popper]'s View On Its Head, It Is Precisely The Abandonment Of Critical Discourse That Marks The Transition Of Science. Once A Field Has Made The Transition, Critical Discourse Recurs Only At Moments Of Crisis When The Bases Of The Field Are Again In Jeopardy. Only When They Must Choose Between Competing Theories Do Scientists Behave Like Philosophers.