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PARTISAN REVIEW
Fleck's book remained virtually unknown for nearly forty
years, but in 1962, Thomas Kuhn brought similar ideas to the atten–
tion of a wide public with his enormously popular and influential
book
The Structure of Scientific Revolution
(University of Chicago
Press). Three key terms used by Kuhn were "paradigm," "normal
science" and "revolution." Although these terms were abstracted
mostly from case studies in physics and chemistry, they found less
acceptance by physical scientists than by social scientists, among
whom they spread like wildfire.
By "paradigm," Kuhn meant the contents of textbooks or
treatises, read by practitioners of a particular scientific discipline at a
particular historical time and place, which "expound the body of ac–
cepted theory, illustrate many or all of its successful applications,
and compare these applications with exemplary observations and ex–
periments." As long as the paradigm remains sufficiently open–
ended to leave all sorts of scientific problems to solve, its adherents
are practicing "normal science." However, after a while the orderly
increase in knowledge produced by normal science usually leads to a
"crisis" or to observations that cannot be accounted for under the
reigning paradigm. The crisis is eventually resolved by introduction
of a novel theory, which contravenes some essential features of the
paradigm and initiates a new paradigm which replaces the old. In
that case, a scientific "revolution" has occurred, leading to a different
kind of normal science, which may be "incommensurable" with that
which preceded it, in the sense that what was held to be true for good
reasons under the earlier paradigm may no longer be true under the
new paradigm. Thus, just as hermeneutics recognizes to be the case
for texts, a natural phenomenon may have many different true
meanings (explanations), of which (just as in the case of the Bible)
only that intended by God could be said to be privileged.
In the 1970s, Holton put forward his own version of the car–
dinal role of pre-understanding in scientific practice
(Thematic Origins
of Scientific Thought .
Harvard University Press, 1973). Holton's ver–
sion, which he restates in
The Advancement of Science and Its Burdens,
is
formulated in terms of what he calls a "spatial analogy, or mnemonic
device." He likens the earlier (late eighteenth century) view of scien–
tific knowledge to a two-dimensional plane, within which particular
pieces of knowledge correspond to areal elements. The two dimen–
sions, or "axes," that characterize the location of any areal element in
this plane are the logical and mathematical propositions by which in–
ferences are drawn from a set of given premises (following Kant,
