Jason He Phil 160 Philosophy of Science Professor Kyle Yrigoyen April 22, 2015 Paper Assignment #2 Kuhn believes that science progresses through history instead of how it is illustrated through the use of philosophical theories of rationality and knowledge. He first attempts to reason his idea by utilizing the genesis of science and trying to describe it. He describes it as science changing through the cycles of paradigms. However, Kuhn’s idea brought up discussions which involved many questions of what should be considered science. Other philosophers such as Imre Lakatos and Larry Laudan both agreed with the way Kuhn saw science as an irrational process. While they did agree, Lakatos and Laudan both created their own rational view of science …show more content…
Paradigms are defined as a “whole way of doing science” which also consists of the scientific community’s claims about the world and the methods of obtaining and interpreting data (Godfry-Smith 76). Another important thing about paradigms is that they are incommensurable. This means that only one paradigm can exists at a time because the linguistic and standards of evaluation and justification are relative to each paradigm. In the beginning stages of the paradigm cycle, also known as the pre-science paradigm, there are many philosophical theories that conflict with one another because there is no science being done. When a consensus is reached in terms of ideas through the different justification methods, actual science presents itself in the normal science paradigm. Any failure in expanding the paradigm through experiments will result in a puzzle. It will then be the scientists’ mission to discover solutions to the puzzles. The scientist must look for ways to make the puzzles fit into the paradigm since scientific change can never occur from within a paradigm. If the paradigms encounter a number of anomalies, it would be impossible to find a solution with the amount of puzzles that need to be solved. At this point, the ideas are debatable again and results in shifting back to the beginning, which is pre-science. When we can conclude and come to agreements upon a consensus, it will then be comprehensible according to the new normal science