ABSTRACT
Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has impacted the humanities, social sciences and – as we shall see in this chapter – also discussions of the arts. Its central concept, that of the ‘paradigm,’ is meant to capture how in ‘normal science’ there is seldom ‘overt disagreement over fundamentals. Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards’ (Kuhn, 1962: 11). A corollary of this is that scientific paradigms are ‘closed-systems’ that generate ‘puzzle-solving.’ The argument is that those operating within a paradigm are content to work on paradigm-specific puzzles until they confront what Kuhn terms ‘anomalies.’ These anomalies are an important source of change in paradigms:
As a rule, anomalies are either accommodated or ignored but occasionally they provide the impetus for a major crisis and with it a transition to a ‘revolutionary’ science. During this period the original paradigm is replaced by a new one whose consolidation signals the return of normal science and its associated puzzles.
