HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 5

                 DISCUSSION OF PARADIGMS ---continued 

   Natural analogies and and resemblances can be found within almost any group of items. A paradigm is not only an achievement but also a particular way of modeling future practice upon it. How does a community perpetuate particular ways of carrying on from an achievement ? First ask what the problems at the ends of chapters in science texts are principally for. What can it be that students learn while solving them ? 
  One has to acquire an "ability to see resemblances between apparently disparate problems." Yes, textbooks present lots of facts and techniques. But they do not enable anyone to become a scientist. You are inducted not by the laws and the theories but by the problems at the ends of the chapters. You have to learn that a group of these problems, seemingly disparate, can be solved by using similar techniques . In solving these problems you grasp how to carry on using the "right" resemblances. The student discovers a way to see her problems as like a problem she has already encountered. Once that likeness or analogy has been seen, only manipulative difficulties remain. 
  Publishing in 1974, Kuhn could say that work on sociology of the sciences developed in the 1960s enables one to have sharp empirical tools for distinguishing scientific communities. There is no question about what a scientific community "is." The question is what binds its members together as working in the same discipline. This is the fundamental sociological question to be asked of any identified group, large or small, be it political, religious, ethnic, or simply a soccer club for teenagers, or a group of volunteers who deliver meals on wheels to the elderly. What keeps the group together as a group ? What will cause a group to divide into sects, or simply fall apart ? This can be answered in terms of paradigms.