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Sometimes the non-normal sciences represented a revolt against the excesses of Newtonianism, but mostly they were various kinds of survivals from earlier ages that had retained some of the old symbolism and outer trappings while attempting to gain legitimacy with selection of methods as well as problems from normal science. As the scientific community closed ranks and developed into a highly professional subgroup that talked to itself, it began to think of such activities as pseudo-sciences or non-sciences. In some instances, the devotion to superstition strengthened proportionately to the intensity of the rational scientific assault. The simultaneous success of, on the one hand, what we know as modern science, and, on the other, activities that were perpetrated in the name of science, has always posed one of the greatest puzzles for scholars.

Although the National Institute of Mental Health characterizes its Research Domain Criteria program as a “paradigm shift,” its change in emphasis from discrete mental disorders to psychophysiological constructs does not depart dramatically from prior research strategies. The RDoC program supports psychopathology research that utilizes newer, biologically-based investigational methods; avoids pre-existing conceptions of mental disorders; and provides insight into the full range of psychological functioning, from normal to pathological. However, it maintains the methodological rules of the existing psychopathological paradigm. This chapter traces the conceptual history of construct validity to show its consistency across disorder-based and construct-based approaches to the study of psychopathology. Because the RDoC research program is grounded in construct validity and aims to develop existing theory, it does not constitute a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense, but simply rejects mental disorders as scientifically legitimate constructs.

This chapter makes a final case that policy issue substance is critical for understanding contemporary and historical lawmaking. Neglecting the direct study of policy issue substance has unnecessarily weakened and stunted progress in the research programs of Congress and American political development. Additionally, Congress scholars generally prefer to engage in what is referred to as “normal science”—making steady but incremental progress towards the goal, instead of chasing big and potentially intractable ideas. Policy issue substance is unquestionably a big idea, and the chapter seeks to demonstrate that it is possible to pursue big ideas while still making solid, incremental progress in understanding lawmaking and political behavior.

Thomas Kuhn subverted the image of science that had become entrenched by the mid-twentieth century, that science was a body of knowledge produced by logical reasoning about objective facts. Kuhn argued that a new approach to the history of science revealed that the process of discovery was integral to the practice of science and that nonlogical factors played a role in theory acceptance and theory change. Insofar as they entered into the reasoning leading to the formulation of a theory, facts were not objective but interpreted consistent with contingent assumptions on which the theory rested. Kuhn himself believed that scientific knowledge was about reality. His theory of how scientific knowledge was produced, however, strongly supported the view that scientific theories were contingent interpretations of experience.

This chapter sets the recent and partial transformation in the content and practice of classical archaeology against the background of Thomas S. Kuhn's well-known work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. A word or two is in place about Kuhn's analysis of how revolutions happen in the sciences, noting his view that, on an initially small scale, they happen very frequently. A ‘paradigm shift’ is what occurs when, perhaps at first in only one small part of one discipline, new beliefs, values and techniques are embraced. Really important paradigm shifts are ones which seriously interrupt the progress of the other main element of Kuhn's antithesis, ‘normal science’. This chapter presents examples which illustrate how, usually in combination, some of the following themes have recently been raised: rural life, domestic life, neglected periods, dedications, burial and the more backward regions of Greece.

This chapter discusses and characterizes the gap between logical and social-institutional perspectives in terms of argumentation theory after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. The gap opened up by Kuhn in his analysis of normal science is a situation “in which two perspectives on the cogency of scientific argumentation opposed one another” across an area of science studies “in which scientific arguments are persuasive but not logically compelling.” The chapter emphasizes that Kuhn’s attempt at the integration of different approaches appeals to revolutionary science as an argumentative process and leads to psychological receptivity while making decisions. It also discusses Carl Hempel’s purely syntactical model of confirmation for the evaluation of cogent evidential arguments, in which he differentiates between the pragmatic and the logical aspects of cogency.

This chapter presents a more detailed examination of Thomas Kuhn’s structure than that provided in the Introduction. The chapter explains how and why Kuhn’s book permanently rejected the idea of scientific “progress.” The author notes that although most Catholics experienced the widespread critique of Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical as a sudden (if welcome) rejection of the kind of theological argument that the Church had utilized in its moral teaching for several centuries, the cracks in the foundations of that older approach to natural law had appeared considerably before 1968. The emergence of a historicist approach to moral theology in the decades before the promulgation of the encyclical contextualized the rocky reception accorded it within a much larger historical framework. Further, even the guild of moral theologians had come to a much more nuanced understanding of what could be (and what could not be) “unchangeable” in Christian ethics.

The conclusion reviews Ovshinsky’s accomplishments and historical significance. Ovshinsky is now gaining mare recognition. In May 2015 he was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. During his lifetime he “saw the future” because he envisioned new possibilities and consequences that others were unable to imagine. His innovations, which began with new amorphous and disordered materials, became the basis for new technological systems capable of changing society for the better. Although he made important scientific discoveries, his work was never a part of normal science, and his inventions were aimed not just at incremental technological advances but at transformational social change. Finally, while the conclusion considers how his career spanned, and to some extent helped bring about, the transition from the industrial to the information age, it also notes his continuing ties with the social and economic culture of his youth.

This article investigates whether it possible to derive a new narrative about the transformation of early modern natural philosophy from the way in which natural philosophy was systematized in academic writings. It introduces the notion of ‘normalisation’—the mutual adaptation of certain ideas and existing traditions—as a way of studying and explaining conceptual changes during relatively long periods of time. The article provides the methodological underpinnings of this account of normalisation and offers a preliminary application of it by focusing on the role of ‘occasional causality’ in natural philosophy through the writings of four authors: Pierre Sylvain Régis (1632-1707), Johann Christoph Sturm (1635-1703), Petrus van Musschenbroek (1692-1761), and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who progressively normalise an account of ‘occasional causality’.

This chapter establishes that professional writing in philosophy most often operates like a "normal science," a term Lysaker takes from after Thomas Kuhn. Most writing by professional philosophers in books and journal articles attempts to settle debates in an established field. The chapter goes on to discuss writing that is often deemed outside of the category of philosophy, including the work of Habermas and literature.

By the end of World War II, independent of one another (and sometimes in mutual ignorance), a small assortment of highly creative minds—mathematicians, engineers, physicists, astronomers, and even an actuary, some working in solitary mode, some in twos or threes, others in small teams, some backed by corporations, others by governments, many driven by the imperative of war—had developed a shadowy shape of what the elusive Holy Grail of automatic computing might look like. They may not have been able to define a priori the nature of this entity, but they were beginning to grasp how they might recognize it when they saw it. Which brings us to the nature of a computational paradigm. Ever since the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), we have all become ultraconscious of the concept and significance of the paradigm, not just in the scientific context (with which Kuhn was concerned), but in all intellectual and cultural discourse. A paradigm is a complex network of theories, models, procedures and practices, exemplars, and philosophical assumptions and values that establishes a framework within which scientists in a given field identify and solve problems. A paradigm, in effect, defines a community of scientists; it determines their shared working culture as scientists in a branch of science and a shared mentality. A hallmark of a mature science, according to Kuhn, is the emergence of a dominant paradigm to which a majority of scientists in that field of science adhere and broadly, although not necessarily in detail, agree on. In particular, they agree on the fundamental philosophical assumptions and values that oversee the science in question; its methods of experimental and analytical inquiry; and its major theories, laws, and principles. A scientist “grows up” inside a paradigm, beginning from his earliest formal training in a science in high school, through undergraduate and graduate schools, through doctoral work into postdoctoral days. Scientists nurtured within and by a paradigm more or less speak the same language, understand the same terms, and read the same texts (which codify the paradigm).