Constrained Bliss Point

I just finished reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by T.S. Kuhn, so that now I know what all the fuss was about. The book was rather brilliant, a good read, and a thorough examination (or re-examination) of the whole enterprise of science. Science, Kuhn argues, is not a linear process of knowledge accumulation, but instead exhibits a sort of punctuated equilibrium. Scientific communities adhere to a particular paradigm at a particular point in time, and occasionally shift to a new one. These scientific revolutions occur when cracks appear in the dominant paradigm and another paradigm emerges to try to unseat the first. So, most of the time a scientific community engages in normal science, which is the sort of problem solving we typically think of scientists engaging in, with a commonly agreed-upon paradigm underlying scientific research in a field. Revolutionary science is like when Darwin was all “Yo guys I got this idea about evolution” and then Huxley and Wilberforce started duking it out in the Scopes Trial. (This is more or less how it happened; I am clearly taking some liberties with history here).

The reason I was reading Scientific Revolutions had to do with my conception of economics as a science. A big question I am set on resolving is the nature of the very clear distinction between the natural sciences, on one hand, and the social sciences, on the other. What makes physics or chemistry so much more science-y than economics or — wince — sociology? Now I feel a lot closer to having an answer.

The last chapter in particular was elucidating. Perhaps (along with some methods, mindsets, and other similarities) the common point among the sciences is the homogeneity of their adherence to one particular paradigm. Science seems to progress so linearly because of an almost Orwellian process of rewriting history from the standpoint of the dominant paradigm.  When all a field’s practitioners are trained using one set of textbooks, and after each revolution the textbooks are rewritten, is it any wonder that this adherence of all a field’s scientists to one paradigm is achieved? From the other direction, is it a black mark on macroeconomics to have enough factions, and enough different text books that are not agreed upon, that there is not one dominant paradigm in use that constitutes the field?

More on this to come.