Paradigms and revolutions (Philosophy HL)

The big idea: Popper pictured science as a steady stream of theories being tested and dropped. Thomas Kuhn looked at the actual history and saw something quite different.

Science spends most of its time calmly working inside one big framework — until that framework cracks, and everything is overturned at once.

Kuhn called that shared framework a paradigm. Inside it, scientists do normal science — not questioning the big picture, just filling in the details.

The interesting question for Kuhn is what happens when the puzzle-solving stops working.

How a revolution happens: Every so often results turn up that the paradigm just can't explain — anomalies. At first scientists shrug them off. But they pile up, a crisis sets in, and eventually a new paradigm appears that makes sense of everything. The whole community switches over — a paradigm shift.

Think of the switch from an Earth-centred to a Sun-centred universe: not one more fact added, but a completely new way of seeing the same sky.

Checkpoint — Kuhn: In one line: science works inside a shared paradigm until anomalies force a revolution — a paradigm shift — where one whole framework replaces another.

One thinker pushed Kuhn's history even harder — and reached a radical conclusion.

Feyerabend: 'anything goes': Paul Feyerabend studied the great scientific breakthroughs and found that the big ones broke the rules of their day — guessing, bluffing, ignoring awkward evidence. His conclusion was deliberately provocative: 'anything goes'. There is no single 'scientific method' that all good science follows; pinning science to one fixed set of rules would only have strangled the discoveries that changed everything.

Go further — higher-level insight: Notice the danger lurking in Kuhn and Feyerabend. If there's no neutral ground to call one paradigm 'truer', and no single method, does science become just opinion — as good as astrology? Most philosophers resist that slide: paradigms can still be judged by fruitfulness, accuracy and scope, even without one master rule. Holding the line between 'no single method' and 'anything is as good as anything' is a top-band move.