Sublime

Thomas Samuel Kuhn, qui a élaboré la notion de paradigme : des découvertes scientifiques universellement reconnues qui, pour un temps, fournissent à la communauté scientifique des problèmes types et des solutions, jusqu’à ce qu’un nouveau paradigme vienne apporter un cadre théorique neuf et des conceptions nouvelles.

He had a gift for aphorism; and his names have acquired an unusual status, for although they were once arcane, some of them are now part of colloquial English. Here is the sequence: (1) normal science (§§II–IV—he called these sections, not chapters, for he thought of Structure as more of a book outline than a book); (2) puzzle-solving (§IV); (3) pa

But if the aim of normal science is not major substantive novelties—if failure to come near the anticipated result is usually failure as a scientist—then why are these problems undertaken at all? Part of the answer has already been developed. To scientists, at least, the results gained in normal research are significant because they add to the scop

As Kuhn describes it, science oscillates between “normal” periods, when there is a dominant theory within which scientists seek to resolve problems, and periods of “scientific revolution,” in which the general paradigm is swept away and phenomena are reinterpreted within a new conceptual framework.

For Kuhn, a scientific theory is a conceptual framework, a “paradigm,” for describing a series of phenomena.

“To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.” A crisis involves a period of extraordinary, rather than normal, research, with a “proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundament

The success of a paradigm—whether Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computations of planetary position, Lavoisier’s application of the balance, or Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field—is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualiz