Tuesday, September 4, 2012

science reminder

I can't pass up a chance to urge people to read, or re-read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book I've praised before as being valuable even for students of foreign policy and national security. Dan Drezner has similar words of praise for it today.

In a book published 50 years ago this year, Kuhn showed that the major sciences did not evolve according to careful logic and persuasive experimentation, but rather only after power struggles between the old order and its defenders and the challengers who sought to answer new questions and to resolve existing anomalies. He coined the phrase "paradigm shift" and used it more carefully than many since.


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