Phil 100

Kuhn characterizes most of ‘normal science’ as something he likes to refer to as ‘mop-up work’. To him, ‘normal science’ means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice. (Kuhn, Page 10) In other words, he’s talking about theories, which act as building blocks for future research. These theories are recounted by scientific textbooks in elementary and university that explain in depth the body of the accepted theory, describe many or all of its successful applications along with any observations or experiments performed. These achievements must share two very special characteristics, one being that it must be sufficiently unique to attract a group of scientists away from competing modes of scientific activity and that it is also open ended to leave all different kinds of problems for future groups of scientists and their students to research and resolve. These achievements that fulfill the two requirements are called paradigms. Students study these paradigms in order to become members of a particular scientific community that they wish to eventually practice in. There is very seldom disagreement over the fundamentals of specific paradigms as students learn from researchers who have themselves learned from the bases of their field. Therefore, all students and researchers whose research is based on the same paradigm must be committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. How are paradigms born though? First scientific inquiry begins with a random collection of facts, then different researchers confronting the same phenomena describe and interpret them in differ...

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...ned their idea and focused on a new change instead, the Copernican system. This was a good example of how scientists kept trying to study within their paradigm dimensions but instead of uncovering more normal science, anomalies were discovered breaking their old scientific tradition. As said earlier by Kuhn, as a new paradigm gains fame, the older paradigms lose members and their ideas and assumptions eventually get entirely forgotten. This is what Kuhn means by ‘mop-up work’ and how scientists strive to keep researching to expand upon the scientific achievements the community have deemed to be worthy or particularly revealing. New and unsuspected phenomena’s and anomalies are impossible to not uncover, introducing problems with the paradigm criterion and forcing scientists to possibly change their perspective on things, in time possibly resulting in a new paradigm.