This article uses Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to reflect on how normal science and paradigms determine the direction of scientific and academic research, and how they affect the puzzles faced by researchers and their motivation.
I found it an interesting read. It gave me a chance to reflect on some of the psychological backgrounds that I’ve been lost in lately. I started reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which had been gathering dust on the side of my bookshelf for a long time, and was able to convince myself that the “disconnect between the discovery of important puzzles and the fun of solving them” was natural.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions vividly describes the nature of scientific research and the psychology of scientists. This is a depth that a dry summary of the book that says it “reveals how science actually works based on specific episodes in the history of science” would not have given me, and the analogy of “normal science” research, which is firmly grounded in past scientific achievements, as a puzzle to be solved, in contrast to scientific revolutions, is a jarring one. Kuhn stipulates that problems without solutions cannot be the subject of normal science, arguing that putting together a picture for which no solution exists is not a puzzle. The criteria for selecting a problem is a “paradigm,” a past accomplishment that is commonly recognized by a community of scientists. Paradigms exclude problems that are not reducible to puzzle form because they are “trivial, the concern of other disciplines, or too troublesome to be a waste of time,” and focus attention on those that can be stated in the conceptual and instrumental means they provide.
I participated in a research project organized by my department to encourage undergraduates to pursue graduate studies. I had a distinct disagreement with my assigned graduate student research assistant during the topic selection process, and the assistant’s guideline for selecting the final topic from the various candidates presented was how similar it was to ongoing research in the lab. In fact, even after graduate school, I was told that I would not have much freedom in choosing a research topic, and I wondered if originality was the most important criterion. However, Kuhn argues that it is not unusual for what can and cannot be problematic in normal science to be predetermined. In fact, he attributes the seemingly rapid progress of normal science to this choice and focus.
Other than paradigms, Kuhn argues, “it is hard to think of another criterion by which a field can be declared unequivocally a science.” He sees the convergence of different views into a paradigm as an inherent characteristic of science. However, as the conditional statement that in other disciplines we do not find the same remarkable degree of consensus as in science suggests, the key to the distinction is not the presence or absence of a paradigm, but the degree of its dominance. It is my observation that paradigms exist in disciplines other than science, and that they operate as criteria for determining the issues in which to “encourage their members to engage,” as Kuhn describes it.
Even in the case of history, we find that the acquisition of a new paradigm leads to the rejection of issues that were previously considered standard. I was in a Central Asian history class many years ago. A student asked me what the time periods of Central Asia were. I rushed to write down the answer because knowing the time periods helps me remember details, but the teacher questioned the question itself. He explained that periodization was a topic that was actively studied in the last century by Marxist-affiliated scholars, represented by the five-stage theory of historical development, but is rarely attempted today. It has become a neglected issue as scholarly agreement on the basic assumptions of periodization – a linear view of historical development and the existence of period-specific features – has eroded.
Kuhn presents the existence of paradigms and their separation from values as a hallmark of normal science. “Whether the outcome of a puzzle is intrinsically interesting or important is not the criterion for its superiority. Rather, some truly urgent problems, such as curing cancer or planning to perpetuate peace, may not be puzzles at all. He no longer has a problem with normal science operating independently of values, because he believes that “the certainty that if you are talented enough, you will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one has solved before, or has solved poorly,” is enough to motivate scientists to work.
However, no matter how challenging a puzzle is, if the solver is not convinced of the value of the finished picture, it is unlikely that the puzzle solving will continue. Kuhn’s own path can be understood in this context. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University’s physics department and went on to earn a Ph.D. in applying quantum mechanics to solid-state physics. However, he gradually became bored with physics and turned his attention to history and philosophy. Teaching a science course for liberal arts college students gave him the opportunity to take a serious look at scientific classics that had previously been considered silent, which led him to write The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It’s hard to say that he lacked fulfillment in his physics research, but one could speculate that it was because philosophy of science provided something that physics lacked. If physics research is about looking closely at a single tree, philosophy of science is an attempt to see the forest for the trees. The central questions of philosophy of science, such as the methodologies scientists rely on and the nature of the knowledge that results, aim to reveal meaning beyond individual acts of inquiry.
Great thinkers are not the only ones searching for meaning. My skepticism about studying a major stemmed from a sense that the value of the puzzle to be completed was unclear. My ambition for choosing a major was lofty: I wanted to contribute to society by helping solve energy problems such as environmental degradation and regional imbalances, but the real-world issues were only in the introduction to draw attention to them, and the main body of the course was a mechanical exercise. The idea that it would one day be the basis for solving important problems was wishful thinking, and there was no tangible connection. A friend of mine, who spent a semester as an undergraduate research student assisting in lab research, had a similar experience. He repeated the experiment several times with different specimen molds to find out the difference in properties according to the thickness of the material, and analyzed the overall trend and error factor, but he was frustrated because he could not see the usefulness of the results. Eventually, he gave up on graduate school and started studying for a professional license.
So, is closed-ended puzzle solving inherent to science, and can it be overcome by choosing a different field? I think it was because I believed that the answer was yes, that I took classes in the humanities and social sciences. However, in retrospect, I think it’s a matter of degree, and it’s inevitable that as we become more specialized in any discipline, we emphasize the solvability of a puzzle over its practical implications. I recall another experience in a history class. In an introduction to the history of Southwest Asia, the teacher decided to teach the class in a format where students would read from a reference and answer questions as they came up. After listening to each of the students’ questions for the first hour, he spoke slowly, as if confused. He said he realized that there was a huge gap between the satisfaction of his research, deciphering the property documents of Islamic merchants in ancient Turkish, and the curiosity of his students, who wanted to know why the Islamic world had fallen behind Europe after the Middle Ages. One historian’s warning that “historiography without empathy for human beings is nothing more than a giant mirage palace built in the kingdom of logic” was not rhetoric, but a matter of reality.
Kuhn’s puzzle metaphor can be loosely applied to characterize academic research in general, not just the normal sciences. The puzzle is proposed by a prior achievement (paradigm) that many scholars agree upon, and the joy of immersing oneself in its solution drives the researcher’s dedication. But what Kuhn did not note is that the conviction that one is facing a worthwhile puzzle and the sense of mission that comes with it are also important components of research motivation, and no discipline is immune to the fact that inquiry can only be sustained by the constant intersection of these two driving forces. Choosing a major is about having a puzzle that you can solve. The puzzle in your hands may seem so small compared to what you expected to be able to solve, but it allows you a sense of accomplishment as a successful puzzle solver that you wouldn’t know if you were complaining or stomping your feet because you couldn’t solve it. This is why many college students look forward to solving their own puzzles.
