The Growth of Science

The pattern of growth in the policy sciences may be quite different from the patterns in other areas of science. A proposition that is no longer tenable is the idea that science progresses by professional specialization. The growth pattern that Kuhn found in the natural sciences does not occur in the policy sciences. The policy sciences grow by the establishment of new perspectives alongside the old. The new perspectives reflect changes in society; they are primarily a product of society, not of science. The policy sciences grow by increasing complexity of theoretical frameworks and increasing variety of data. The old perspectives gradually become useless to science and remain useful only for propaganda. The accumulating knowledge of perception, decision processes, socialization, identification and identity maintenance, feeds back to improve the practice of science research. The growth of science is primarily a reflection of the growth of society.