The Science, Health, and Technology Room
Up till Kuhn most focused on creativity in science but you need a traditional base on which to work. Same applies to politics.
Thomas Kuhn and why radicals need tradition
...In 1959, Thomas Kuhn, who at the time was just a physicist who had turned historian of science (his ground-breaking philosophical book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was yet to be published), was invited to give a talk at a University of Utah Conference on the identification of scientific talent. There, psychologists stressed again the significance of divergent thinking for creativity, of the freedom to entertain possibilities and of the capacity to go off in different directions. Kuhn began his talk by asking his audience to entertain his divergent idea, namely that creativity in science depends not only on divergent but, equally, on convergent thinking.
Kuhn spoke of the “essential tension” between convergence and divergence, a tension that he took to be a prerequisite of scientific advancement and creativity. He argued that these two conflicting modes of thought ought to characterize both the scientific community and the individual scientists. Convergence builds traditions and divergence, at crucial junctures, draws attention to new possibilities. The individual scientist must be able to act as both “a traditionalist and an iconoclast”, Kuhn said (1977, 227). In Kuhn’s view, “only investigations firmly rooted in the contemporary scientific tradition are likely to break with that tradition and give rise to a new one” (ibid., 229). That is why Kuhn gave his article in which the Utah talk was published, the title: “The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research”....
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Originally Posted by RMNIXON
