Thomas Kuhn developed his theory in relation to the relatively restricted domain of science.  He wanted to enquire into the processes by which new scientific ideas were generated, tested by the scientific community, and in some cases adopted so as to become the mainstream understanding of the phenomena under investigation.  In 1962, the first edition of his most famous book was published: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Kuhn’s study was intended to emphasise the cultural dimension of scientific study.  Standing back from the science establishment’s claims for objectivity, Khun argued that at any one time, in any one area of scientific study, scientific investigation and scientific discussion of the results of such investigations was always dominated by a small set of metaphors or analogies.  These constituted a body of shared understandings, shared ways of tackling the unknown, and shared ways of making sense of results in the face of inevitable uncertainty and ambiguity.  The commonality of these key metaphors characterised each research community and, most importantly, it defined the limits of what might be thought an appropriate form of further study, and what would be rejected as irrelevant, fanciful, or controversial.[1]

 

Each paradigm (metaphor or metaphor set) was not likened to an explicit set of rules that had to be obeyed.  Instead, as metaphors – and like Richards’ description of interaction – each paradigm acted as ‘an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions’ (Kuhn 1962: 23).  More generally then, Kuhn’s argument was that it was the metaphorical and analogical discourse of scientific communities which accounted for the direction and consistency of its endeavours, and largely determined what was to count as a ‘good test.’  In other words, he seemed to be arguing that science was not so objective after all:

Can we not account for science’s existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community’s state of knowledge at any given time?  Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? (Kuhn 1962: 170).

 

Kuhn called these key metaphors and analogies ‘paradigms,’ and some examples may be familiar, e.g. the idea of the atom being like a tiny version of the solar system, with electrons spinning around the central nucleus like planets round the sun, or chimpanzees being like failed human beings – limited by their lack of intelligence and too easily swayed by uncontrolled emotion.  However, Kuhn’s theory suggested that there were three aspects to using these key metaphors: the metaphor itself, understood as a literal model or analogy that could be tested; the community of researchers that worked ‘within’ the paradigm; and the notion of revolutionary change.

 

When criticism came, it focussed on his use of the term 'paradigm'.   Margaret Mastermann, for instance, identified at least twenty one different meanings given to the word ‘paradigm’ in the first edition of Khun's book (Mastermann 1970).  What was, in fact, already clear in the first edition, and more so in the second, was that the three principal ideas we have already identified: metaphor and model, community, and revolution - were in a state of dynamic tension.  Mastermann usefully described these in slightly different ways which brought out the types of work each idea was intended to capture.  For her, the three aspects of ‘paradigm’ that were most important were what she called the artefact paradigm, the sociological paradigm, and the metaparadigm.

 

These will be tackled in turn.

 

Artefact Paradigm: Mastermann insists that what is useful here is the crudity – we might also say vividness or 'embodied' nature - of the metaphor, model, or analogy being employed.  The paradigm, understood in this way, is ‘concrete.’

 

If a paradigm has got to have the property of concreteness, or ‘crudeness,’ this means that it must be literally, a model; or, literally, a picture; or, literally, an analogy drawing sequence of word-uses in natural language; or some combination of these (Mastermann 1970: 79).

 

The concrete nature of the models, metaphors, and artefacts is essential for scientific research because they limit the scope of abstract speculation and implication and encourage a practical perspective on what is ‘testable.’  More particularly, Mastermann argues that this same crudeness has social dimensions of great significance: what might be the private mental images of a particular researcher have to become public pictures; the words used to convey insight into the problem being tackled are tied down to a specific set of possible references; and the formal generalisations produced by theory are given a specific ‘application.’

 

Sociological Paradigm: this is intended to make explicit the idea that there are distinct communities which, as often as not, speak past each other because their discourses are structured around different key presuppositions (metaphors), and the more abstract their discourse, the more likely it is that they will, literally, not understand one another because the same term is being used to mean different things.  Kuhn argued that a science matured when debates about the nature of the most relevant model or metaphor to employ gave way to a generally accepted framework featuring a single paradigm.  However, to get to this point, according to Kuhn, there had to be a prior revolution that had created the context for the previous philosophical debate.  In his view this could be explained by reference to what Mastermann called the artefact paradigm: in producing a commonly accepted framework of expectation and interpretation the artefact paradigm lay the ground for the unexpected result – the anomalous finding which suggested that the currently dominant scientific ‘narrative’ was not revealing the truth.  However, his stress on the word ‘revolution’ came about because he considered it would always be the case that within a particular scientific community, vested interests would resist change – change would always be upsetting to the majority.

 

Metaparadigm: this refers to the functioning of paradigms within philosophical debates and in discussions held away from experimental work characterising what Kuhn refers to as a ‘preparadigm phase,’ i.e., the time before a revolutionary new paradigm is finally accepted by a research community.  Donna Haraway’s text on embryology, for example, is dominated by the discussions going on throughout the first forty or so years of the twentieth century that related to an understanding of embryological development.  Her book (Haraway 2004) documents the change from one dominant paradigm to another.  Her narrative starts at the beginning of the last century, at a time when organisms in general were understood as very complicated chemical and physical machines.  The implications of this assumption were that by further chemical and physical study the processes of life itself would become intelligible, and hence, predictable.  (This view had, in turn, vanquished the previous notion of vitalism – that living organisms possessed a 'vital spark' conferred by the deity – a view which had dominated thinking at the start of the 1800s.  The preparadigm studies Haraway’s book charts are intended to illustrate the shift from mechanism to ‘organicism.’  This was, and still is, the dominant view: embryological development is now thought to hierarchical, dynamic, and interactive with its various environments.  In other words, this new understanding takes the view that reductive explanations based on chemistry and physics are simply inadequate to deal with the complexity of what happens as an embryo develops.

 

The following conclusions are important:

1.     successful scientific metaphors are ‘crude’ and ‘literal’ - they have explicit predictive implications,

2.     successful scientific metaphors can be shared and used by a community, rather than just a private individual,

3.     successful scientific metaphors ‘anchor’ a community’s discourse – those within it know what the terms are intended to refer to,

4.     successful scientific metaphors have heuristic value – they explain puzzling phenomena, but more importantly, suggest ways in which they might be investigated.  They do this by offering users a perspective – they help to identify what is salient about the new phenomena,

5.     successful scientific metaphors are also those that are readily transmitted throughout a community and, importantly, can be employed in the induction of new researchers, i.e., they are educationally effective in getting new researchers to the point where they can take part in the community’s discourse patterns.

 

References

Haraway, D. ([1976] 2004) Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embryos Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Kuhn, T. (1970 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2^nd. edtn. International Encyclopaedia of Science. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Mastermann, M. (1970) ‘The nature of a paradigm.’  In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge London: Cambridge University Press.

And also, remember, Ortony, M. (1986) Metaphor and Thought Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.