Position
Kuhnian Puzzle-Solving
A field is scientific only when its practitioners share a paradigm and work within it on puzzles that the paradigm itself certifies as solvable. Refutable predictions are not enough: astrology made them, saw them fail, and was never a science.
Classification
- Position level
- specific
- Domains
- Epistemology, Philosophy of Science
Overview
Kuhn located the mark of science in the settled periods rather than the revolutionary ones. Normal science is the patient articulation of an accepted paradigm, and it is precisely the researcher's willingness to blame themselves rather than the paradigm for a failed result that makes the work productive.
On this account the astrologer's problem was not that their predictions could not fail — they failed constantly — but that a failure gave them no puzzle to solve, and so no tradition of research to join.
Position on
Rival positions
- Falsificationism
Question scope: Science and Pseudoscience
References
- Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), ch. 3–4
- Thomas S. Kuhn, 'Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?', in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1970), where Kuhn argues against Popper that puzzle-solving under a paradigm, not falsifiability, marks a field as scientific, and that astrology, lacking puzzles, never was one
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Science and Pseudo-Science, §4.4 'The criterion of puzzle-solving' (for Kuhn a criterion must refer to the workings of normal science, and astrology, having no puzzles, has never been a science)