Normal science accumulates anomalies, enters crisis and undergoes paradigm change; successive paradigms may be partly incommensurable.
Kuhn's 1962 book. The incommensurability claim is the contested part — that rival paradigms cannot be fully compared — and Lakatos's research programmes were written partly to answer it.
In practice
- A field accumulates twenty anomalies filed as measurement error, and then one account explains all twenty and the vocabulary changes.
- An engineering team explains away nine intermittent faults until someone proposes a different model of the system and all nine become one fault.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is that a paradigm supplies the problems, methods and standards of a field, so anomalies accumulate without dislodging it until an alternative exists that can absorb them.
- In its favour
- The account of normal science, crisis and change fits several well-documented episodes, and it reshaped how science is taught and studied.
- Against it
- The incommensurability claim is the contested part, since rival paradigms are compared in practice all the time, and Lakatos's research programmes were written partly to supply the standards Kuhn's account left out.
- Standing
- The incommensurability claim is the contested part; the account of crisis and change is more widely accepted.
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- How knowledge grows, and how inquiry fools itself