The Historian Of Science May Be Tempted

No Part Of The Aim Of Normal Science Is To Call Forth New Sorts Of Phenomena; Indeed Those That Will Not Fit The Box Are Often Not Seen At All. Nor Do Scientists Normally Aim To Invent New Theories, And They Are Often Intolerant Of Those Invented By Others.

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.

As In Political Revolutions, So In Paradigm Choice-there Is No Standard Higher Than The Assent Of The Relevant Community... This Issue Of Paradigm Choice Can Never Be Unequivocally Settled By Logic And Experiment Alone.

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.

What Chemists Took From Dalton Was Not New Experimental Laws But A New Way Of Practicing Chemistry (he Himself Called It The 'new System Of Chemical Philosophy'), And This Proved So Rapidly Fruitful That Only A Few Of The Older Chemists In France And Britain Were Able To Resist It.