...These three characteristics are presented in Thomas Kuhn’s indispensable book for historians and scientists alike, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962....
...The narrative of the scientific revolution (and similarly of the Enlightenment) that we’ve all been told and taught is that the philosophical founding principles of reason and rationalism and the methodological approaches of positivism and empiricism opened the way for an objective and indisputable form of inquiry. This was the beginning of the apex for human achievement: The collective and dedicated efforts of all enlightened believers following this approach, accumulating over the course of years, will eventually lead mankind toward better knowledge about the world and consequently toward a better life. True knowledge, in other words, is possible and provable, but only by scientific and technological means. Such a standard, we call “progress,” and it first began in the 16th century.
...Kuhn’s book (a short and rewarding read) makes an excellent contextual point: Historians of science had a difficult time distinguishing between the work done by these key thinkers that they would label “scientific” by their standards and “error” and “superstition” from our contemporary vantage point. Kuhn takes it another step further and writes,
If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today.
Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, as the name implies, disrupted the accepted notions of the world during the respective age in which each thinker was living. As a result, the development of science became something other than the linear progression of improvement that we’ve been taught; becoming, instead, a multiplicity of developments wherein thinkers from various points in time are responding to questions and interpreting their world within a different theoretical framework. The shift between paradigms, moreover, takes place when a “crisis” takes hold of the scientific community, or the general public at large within a particular nation, and this crisis is eventually resolved in a “revolutionary” way that drastically changes the preconceived notions of that society (its paradigms). If a paradigm shift is so strong, however, so as to irrevocably alter a society’s way of life, then the shift is not only scientific, but more deeply philosophic and consequently cultural.
...There is, however, a distinction to be made between arguing that Kuhn rejects truth and that he rejects the idea of progress. After all, what makes us believe that only progress can get us closer to “the truth”? Such a faith in scientific progress is ironic. Mankind has accepted the notion, perhaps since the late 16th century, that scientific progress correlates with proximity to truth, but what kind of truth are we talking about? Biological and chemical facts might be a form of truth, but it is certainly not the truth that we as humans intrinsically desire in order to live a fulfilling life on this earth. Another way of looking at Kuhn’s insight is by recognizing that he separated himself from his colleagues by rejecting the idea that truth and science are directly related....
...Kuhn seemed to accept this fact, but his colleagues, for the most part, have not. What we have today is an aversion toward myth and magic that has resulted, as John Gray noted, in new iterations of magic that are, for lack of a better phrasing, devoid of meaning and spirituality....