ABSTRACT
Thomas Kuhn's image of science emphasizes the constitutive elements in science, and this is hardly surprising, given that Kuhn is trying to understand conceptual change in science as the basis for scientific revolutions. Kuhn argues that his use of the term revolution to describe changes in science is appropriate because, like political revolutions, scientific revolutions overturn existing rules and institutions in order to establish new ones. Friedman theory of the constitutive elements in science is designed to account for scientific revolutions and the conceptual change that they entail. Once a paradigm has been established, scientists can use it to do more specialized and esoteric work. Scientific work is esoteric because only those who have been trained in the research community that accepts the paradigm are able to understand it. Normal science is defined by a paradigm as a set of open problems and puzzles that are well defined enough to be recognized and worked on by a community of specialists.
