Protect Yourself

Anti-aids advertisement... really funny and romantic. Gay version

Graduate School of Social Work :: University of Denver

Graduate School of Social Work :: University of Denver

Haggard admits 'sexual immorality' - U.S. Life - MSNBC.com

Haggard admits 'sexual immorality' - U.S. Life - MSNBC.com

criticalrealism

criticalrealism

DenverPost.com - Ritter takes flight to get Dems off ground

DenverPost.com - Ritter takes flight to get Dems off ground

Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles by Paula M. L. Moya "

Book Description In Learning from Experience, Paula Moya offers an alternative to some influential philosophical assumptions about identity and experience in contemporary literary theory. Arguing that the texts and lived experiences of subordinated people are rich sources of insight about our society, Moya presents a nuanced universalist justification for identity-based work in ethnic studies.

This strikingly original book provides eloquent analyses of such postmodernist feminists as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Norma Alarcón, and Chela Sandoval, and counters the assimilationist proposals of minority neoconservatives such as Shelby Steele and Richard Rodriguez. It advances realist proposals for multicultural education and offers an understanding of the interpretive power of Chicana feminists including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Helena María Viramontes. Learning from Experience enlarges our concept of identity and offers new ways to situate aspects of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in discursive and sociopolitical contexts.

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DISCUSSION

I find it difficult to write about Learning from Experience, especially given the expertise and eloquence Moya commands of the English language. I am humbled by her argument and recognize that I may never have the words to express as succinctly the experience of what it means to me being Chicano/a.

I recall in class this past week the difficult I had in expressing my understanding of Moya’s writing about experience shaping identity. In her introduction she writes about Joan Scott’s position that experience prevents, rather then allows “critical analyses of the constitutive working of the discursive system through identities (and experiences) are produced” (p. 6). I have not been exposed to Scott's work so I plan to visit the library and see what she has to say about Experience but it sounds like she discounts it. Moya states “thus, in her efforts to establish the correct causal (and historical) relationship between discourse, experience, subjectivity, and identity, Scott, effectively delegitimizes experience as an authroitave source for knowledge. Supposedly, this position reinforces postmodernism that would have us believe it’s all about the power of langue and systems of discourse that create a relative experience of reality. It follows then that actions, accountability and responsibility become meaningless. This was illustrated in a footnote about Butler’s analysis of the New Bedford rape case at the end of “Contingent Foundations. In her deconstruction of a question of the defense attorneys asked of the rape victim, Butler concludes that the real culprit of the crime is the ‘category of sex.’ She writes: ‘Here sex is a category, but not merely a representation; it is a principle of production, intelligibility, and regulation which enforces a violence and rationales it after the fact. The very term by which the violation is explained enact the violation, and concede that the violation was under way before it take the empirical form of a criminal act…As a category that effectively produced the political meaning of what it describes, ‘sex’ here works its silent ‘violence’ in regulating what is and is not designatable (19).” Moya counters by exposing two problems “the first is that by focusing on the relationship between the rape and discourse (‘the very terms by which the violation is explained enact the violation…’), Butler misrepresents the causal nature of the crime. She presumes, but never shows, that the categories she exocoriates (sex and identity) determine that such violations will inevitably occur. It is the unsupported presumption that underlies her claim that ‘the violation was under way, before it take the empirical form of a criminal act.” Meanwhile, the agency (not to mention responsibility) of the men is erased; she represents them as mere ‘effects’ of discourse, as subjects mobilized thorough the grammar of the discourse that has ‘produced’ them.’ The second problem is that by focusing on the words spoken by the defense attorney, Butler unwittingly silences the victim and ignores her experience of the rape.

In class I shared a persona experience of living in a men’s homeless shelter, when I moved to Massachusetts. On a toss of a coin, tales was east coast, and heads was west, I ended up in Boston. I arrived with less than $40 in my pocket. I didn’t know any one but I knew what it was to be homeless from a previous experience, so I immediately searched for available resources. I found myself at the Salvation Army in Cambridge. I recall seeing men who also had that look on their face “how did I end up here?” I recall having to be in by 7:00 p.m. or risk loosing my space in the shelter. In the hall, I sat at a table drinking coffee, not feeling like I really belonged there. Inside, I felt a deep sense of shame and abandonment, which has more to do with the back-story that had me here in the first place. I shared that I tied my boots around my wrist to insure that no one took them in the night. The next morning, I got up and was assigned the cleaning of the restrooms. My military service reinforced the idea that the “head” should be cleaned right, so I was in there with bleach and Ajax scrubbing out the urinals and toilets. I enjoyed cleaning away shit and piss stains as if it was a cathartic cleansing of my sins. One of the regular guys came in and said to me, “Hey dude, this is not the Taj Mahal.” Feeling sheepish, I put away the cleaning supplies and started my day in search of a job and a more stable living arrangement. I only spent one night in that shelter, I moved to the Harvard Men’s Shelter located in the basement of a Lutheran Church. Within three months I had my own apartment in Somerville and a year later I started my MSW program at Boston College. After sharing this story, one of my classmates asked “What’s your point”? I felt embarrassed because I was not sure how to articulate the point.

After reading Chapter 1, I feel I’m better able to express my point. While reading this chapter, I understood Moya on many different levels and was grateful for helping me to finally understand the writing of Moraga and Anzaldúa. Like my colleague, I always wondered what the point of their stories and metaphors and how that related to me. The theory in the flesh has captured my experience in a way I was never able to articulate before. I am a Chicano/a - I know some would ask why I’m putting the “a” at the end of Chicano (which indicates a male gender) those who truly know me, know that as a child I thought of myself as a girl. As such, I was beaten, raped, humiliated and shared in the right of passage that many young girls in our culture experience. I’ve always said, I know what it is to be raped in more ways then physical. Talk about embodied knowledge. It is this experience that has made me acutely aware of the social dynamics that include use of language, social roles, and expectations of normal and deviance. Even as a young child, I observed the agreed upon reality where perpetrator was able to define reality, creating an illusion that we all get along, while simultaneously being aware that an alternative reality was taking place, unseen to most of the people in the social situation. I learned at an early age not to speak of these incidents, silenced, because they revealed a dark world of human oppression. It has been my life long journey to understand this by studying theory of social life and how to give voice to this silenced experience in order to create a better world. Like Moraga’s interview, I know (1) the family as the primary instrument of socialization (2) the need for theory to be grounded in emotional investment (3) the link between social location and experience (4) the body as a source of knowledge and (5) the cerntrality of struggle to the formation of her political consciousness. (p. 49)

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age by Stuart A. Selber

Book Description Multiliteracies for a Digital Age serves as a guide for composition teachers to develop effective, full-scale computer literacy programs that are also professionally responsible by emphasizing different kinds of literacies. Stuart A. Selber also proposes methods for helping students move among these literacies in strategic ways.

Defining computer literacy as a domain of writing and communication, Selber addresses the questions that few authors of other computer literacy texts consider: What should a computer literate student be able to do? What is required of literacy teachers to educate such a student? How can functional computer literacy fit within the values of teaching writing and communication as a profession? Reimagining functional literacy in ways that speak to teachers of writing and communication, he builds a framework for computer literacy instruction that blends functional, critical, and rhetorical concerns in the interest of social action and change.

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age reviews the extensive literature on computer literacy and critiques it from a humanistic perspective. This approach, which will remain useful as new versions of computer hardware and software inevitably replace old versions, helps to usher students into an understanding of the biases, belief systems, and politics inherent in technological contexts. Selber redefines rhetoric at the nexus of technology and literacy and argues that students should be prepared as authors of twenty-first-century texts that defy the established purview of English departments. The result is a rich portrait of the ideal multiliterate student in a digital age and a social approach to computer literacy envisioned with the requirements for systemic change in mind.

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DISCUSSION

I just finished reading Selber: 1/Reimagining Computer Literacy. Rather then wait to come together in class and discuss this issue, I thought I’d use a little technology to generate discussion about the reading now that it’s fresh in my mind. J

Initially, I was going to save this reading for last but as I started looking over the chapter I became intrigued with Selber’s ideas about technology literacy and practice, the next thing I know I was finished with the chapter. As I recall, we were not reading beyond chapter 1 this week, which Ann will be facilitating in the discussion on Thursday.

What I found most interesting about the first chapter was his discussion about myths of technology. Just because we invest in our technology infrastructure dose not necessary mean that students or instructors will be able to use it use the technology in a meaningful way. Just this week, I had an adjunct professor tell me that one of her students was unable to cut and paste in MS Word. I found it surprising that a master’s level student did not have basic computer skills. In my own class, I have seen a number of students wrestle with posting assignments on blackboard via the digital box. I’m also in the process of grading papers on the “Who am I?” assignment and feel irritated at the superficial level that most students answer the questions (and this is an advance standing class). In some cases, there is poor sentence and paragraph structure and most use terms without connecting them to meaning. So they will throw in the word “culture” a few times as if that answers the question, but don’t provide a definition or other information that indicates they understand the concept. For that reason, this chapter was particularly interesting.

As I read the chapter, I also found myself thinking back about my work at MetLife as a teleservice representative in their pensions department. Each morning, we arrived at 7:45 (to accommodate EST) and become a Borg. I would put in my ear phone and mike to take phone calls. I would boot my computer and bring up the required programs as well as enter secured databases with my appropriate passwords. At precisely 7:45 the calls were released to a pool of 15 representatives and each of would average 120 calls per day. In our department meetings, I recall conversations about average time per call, how long clients were on hold, number of key stroke made by the representative and time away from our cubes. As we walked through the building, we would enter codes to access copy machines or send faxes, some doors were secured so we had to swipe them with our id badges, not to mention the video cameras that monitored the floor and the supervisor who walked around trouble shooting and making sure we were available. At the time, I had just finished reading 1984 by George Orwell and could not help but feel that I was under constant surveillance. I developed a deep resentment toward the technology and shared the opinion that “computers are evil, tools of the devil” (p. 11) at the same time, I was reading Kaczynski’s (a.k.a. Unabomber) manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, about the consequences of technology on the human race. I became aware that I needed use technology so that technology is not always using me. So I worked hard to understand new technological advances (I believe I would score pretty high on the computer literacy student evaluations as described in the book) but I still hold deep resentment for the intrusiveness of technology. By the way, I left MetLife because I could not tolerate Snoopy always breathing down my back. Corporations align themselves with a warm fuzzy mascot to camouflage their corporate fascism.

While at Boston College, I had the honor of studying policy with John McNutt who has done a great deal of writing about Social Work and technology. As a profession he claimed that we lagged in our ability to effectively use technology to assist in our work (e.g. PDA, Laptops, Nonprofit infrastructures, access to current research, etc). Consequently, we lack the ability to organize and engage in community practice. He would discuss the demonstrations against the G-7 meetings in Seattle and Washington and how the internet and other forms of technology helped to organize those activities and how Social Work was noticeably absent. We as a profession also suffer from being on the wrong side of the digital divide, like people of color, the poor, and other marginalized groups, feeling that we do not need to incorporate technology in practice. But as Selber discusses, we need to be “users of technology’ as well as “questioners of technology” as well as “producers of technology” which is part of reflective praxis.

I was particularly impressed with the way he structured his argument with principals of critical realism. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

Cyborg Manifesto

I started thinking about the use Borg, a Star Trek reference of organic beings that are also made up of technological mechanisms that create a collective consciousness, where individuality is obsolete and assimilation into the collective is the comfort of belonging to the group. I recall Walter suggesting we do some quick research on Cyborgs, and so I came back and found this link to a chapter by Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, which offers a nice introduction to these ideas. I just finished reading it and recall an early class in SW Theory where I was told that I had commited blasphemy. I suppose I am a cyborg…so I think I’ll need to do more reading on this so I can find a way to resist and become more fully human.

I also thought of Maureen, with some of your comments about feminism and animal rights. It will be interesting to hear what you have to say about this artile. ;)

TWELVE STROKES OF MIDNIGHT by Timoteo

Once upon a time, on the longest night of the year, Zayanya stepped out from the woods. She is one of the few creatures to survive the isolation of death. All that can be seen is her black hooded cape as she makes her way through the darkness, careful to avoid the light of the full moon. Her time of existence is only the twelve beats of midnight, measured in the silence of a clock that no longer works. The silence she walks in is deafening; not even the leaves she steps on give off any sound. Crossing the meadow, she is a soft wind blowing through the wild grass. The old castle she approaches is under the blue blanket of an aerie mist. Looking across the dry moat, she sees a closed draw bridge offering false security for a treasure long spent. On a dark wind she passes through the planks of defiance, like liquid shadow she regains her form. Zayanya casually walks past empty armor and rusted swords, a sarcastic grin across lips a shade lighter then congealed blood. Reaching the palace steps she looks up at her destination. A chill of animated memory forces her to cross her arms; she closes her cape to her breast. The 1st stroke of midnight has passed.

Halfway up the palace steps Zayanya utters her first words of the night, “Cinderella you pathetic bitch.” With that she releases a demoniac cackle that shatters the granite step in half. “Let this drama begin!” she commands, and with that she throws up her cape into the heavy wind. Her cape takes flight as it mutates into a raven; with a screeched, “Ach! Ach!” and a flash of lightning, he soars up to the highest tower. Zayanya looks down at the step; her memories flooded with the images of a palace ball where she was not welcomed. It was an enchanted evening, a night when fairies, godmothers, and the undead where allowed to make use of a few spells. Zayanya decided that it would be charming to dance among the unliving. She rode up in a coach the dark purple color of rapunzul. When she walked into the ballroom, solitude her date, commanded the room to fall silent. As she approached the royal family, she heard each whisper as if spoken into her ear. The hateful words filled the room with an odor of pungent fear. As she curtsied before the prince, she could not help think what a delicious bedtime morsel he would be. When the prince kissed the black pearl ring on her right hand, he sealed his doom. “But No.” Zayanya though out loud, “Cinderella had to show up and ruined everything.” Her head filled with the idea she spit out; “I hate innocence!” Like acid the words fell and began to eat their way through the ballroom floor. (In her heart, a delicate web of lies, resting on them a contented spider). She recalled the music of silence as the Prince danced with Cinderella. She focused her powers on their heart; still the illusion was greater. When they shared whispers of love under the moon, she was listening from the shadows. Strange that she should be such a part of their love, absorbed in each other they are unaware of the hunger that lurked in their mist. Zayanya recalled being on the palace steps that night, after all, on the last stroke of midnight her spell ended too. Who should come running down the steps with gown in hand? Cinderella. “It wasn’t that she denied me the taste of blue blood. It’s not even that she filled the castle with the stomach-turning stench of innocence. No, I stuck out my cane and tripped her because of the noise she made as she ran across the floor. How was I to know that she would lose one of those dammed glass slippers and live happily ever after?” she thought as she looked back into the ballroom. With a taint of regret, she added, “I didn’t anticipate that I’d always be referred to as ‘pitch on the palace steps.”

“Enough of this idle thought, I’m here with purpose” with that, Zayanya allowed her dark purple gown to slither down to the floor. Her naked body stepped out from the coiled serpent, and began to make her way to the queens secret chamber. Entering the library, she looked over thousands of books too delicate to be touched. Near the cold dead fireplace, she found what she was seeking. She pulled on Faust, Vol. I, releasing the door to a hidden chamber. She made her way up a spiral staircase, passing through cobwebs and over rat droppings, not disturbing a speck of dust. At the end of the 3rd silent chime Zayanya pushed open the queen’s bedroom door.

The queen’s chambers are round; on the marble floor is a huge extravagant pentagram, on the ceiling: a detailed mural of Lord Satanas sitting in final judgment. There are no windows; only a large balcony used to call on the stars. (In the day, the heavy drapes shield out the most hopeful ray). Zayanya walked over to the drapes and with little effort she pulls down the moth eaten remains. The blue light of the moon stop’s at the threshold, creating shadows where there was perfect nothing. Zayanya steps into the center of the pentagram, lifting her arms above her head the room begins to move around her, in a language that no man could understand, she calls out:

“Mirror, Mirror on the wall

Who is the biggest hypocrite of all?

I say you,

You say me,

either way we disagree.”

From the wall a brilliant light does away with all shadows in the room except for the umbra Zayanya’s presence holds. In the silver light Zayanya’s opaque skin is engaged in a dance of ecstasy. With a shrieking triumphant laugh Zayanya demands the light back into the mirror. She crosses the room and walks up three steps where the full length mirror hangs on the tower wall. Where the mirror stands, he reflects the balcony directly across the room. He is the almond-shape of a mandorla. His frame is made of rich mahogany; the color of sun-dried blood. The wood is shaped into a thorn bush; at the top, an eagle struggling to break free.

Zayanya looking into the black mirror, says, “A thousand eternity’s have passed since the last time we spoke.”

The mirror looking out into the empty room replies. “I’m okay with that.” The 7th stroke of midnight has passed.

After pressing her cold lips to the cool surface of the mirror, she replies, “I’ve missed you too.” “Tell me,” she continues, "how much do you miss your queen?"

"I only reflected her beauty, I cannot miss what was never mine.” he replied.

Did you love her? She asked, already knowing his defense.

The mirror spoke, “I told her all that she wanted to hear, my queen was the fairest in the land.”

Digging her palms with the thorn frame, she licked the surface of the mirror, then whispered, “Then why did you take her life?”

Sensing the flesh eating stench left across his reflection he replied, “Snow White.”

Covering the giggle with the tips of her fingers, she then responds, “So you destroyed them both.”

Looking past her, he answered, “How was I to know that some prince would dislodge the poison from her throat and that she would live happily ever after .”

With a howl of laughter she twirls around and shouts.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall

Tell me dear,

Whose essence is most putrid of all?

Don’t say me -- because it’s plain to see

That you hide in semblance filled with fear.

“Go away Zayanya, leave me to suffer my existence.”

Mirror, if you could see me it would be clear, I love you!”

Love Zayanya? What do you think you know of love? It’s true I do not see you, how can I reflect what is dead?

“Your truth of death is a lie. You have spent way to may years reflecting the unliving, your ability to perceive is just a bit twisted. I pity that you can’t see the beauty that stands before you. Your limitations will not allow you to see me cup my breast, or tast from my nipple the sweet drop of nectar.”

“You self-satisfied leach, what you call nectar, would kill a thousand armies. Even if I could reflect your image, I wouldn’t want to.” Those words brought in the 9th chime.

Zayanya walks over to the mirror, horrible rage piercing from her eyes; she slashes into the mirror like talons into flesh. The mirror hangs there giving off a perfect refection of the room, unaffected by her outburst.

“Damn your apathy, you cold and shallow creature,” she spits.

“You continue to torture yourself Zayanya, go away and let me be.”

It’s not that easy; for you are something that I need. Allow yourself to see, and together we can welcome the morning sun. Break this spell of time, I beg you! Please say that you will be mine.

At the beginning of the 12th stroke, the Mirror answered, “I will not.”

With a pain filled scream and to the core of her hate, Zayanya utters her last words of the morning. You fool; you have damned us both. I have no more time to play with your stubbornness. If you will not break this spell, then I curse you to be the door to my next dominion. As the last reverberations of the 12th chime echo, Zayanya jumps head first into the black mirror. After crossing over, the mirror explodes out into thousands of pieces spread across the marble floor. The room is absorbed by the silence of night. A new day has been born. In the black immature hours of the morning, the mirror continues to float down from the air and creates a fine dust across the penatagram.

The morning gives way to the dawn. Over the mountains, that surround the woods, the first rays of illuminating light cross over the highest peak. As if directed, it shines into the queens' chambers. The light is reflected from each grain of the mirror, and it illuminates the mural above; revealing a cracked and faded illusion. A winged shadow disrupts the light as the Raven flies into the room. He circles three times before landing in the center of the pentagram. “Ach!” “Ach!” He brings a message from Zayanya, “Take pleasure in your brooding, I will not bother you again. Know that where I exist, I will remain dead happily ever after.

VATO & ONAGO by Timoteo

Once upon a time on Okinawa island there lived a hermit. In the western region, deep in the enchanted forest of Kadina, Onago lived alone. He was not an old recluse running from the world; instead he was a youth seeking the knowledge of the Absolute. Onago was like a lotus flower born in a world of chaos and mire he grew powerful and spirited. Once he was able to care for himself he left the comfort of family and friends to find his place in the cosmos. Solitude was his strength.

In the nearby village of Kinblu lived a simple young man who was as handsome as a golden ray of sun. Vato was impetuous, audacious and always in trouble. When others tried to control his behavior, he would flash a smile and say, "Let me enjoy for I may not pass this way again!" Then off he would run to find his next adventure.

Vato stood out side the Kadina forest, he knew this was taboo territory, that would make exploring even more delightful. Many warned him not to enter the forest, some men did not return, those who did say they saw fairies, dragons and other queer things. All these warnings were like a Siren's call, seducing him closer to his doom. "What the hell," he thought, "I may never pass this way again," as he ran through a welcome mat of wild grass.

Near the end of the Summer day, he thought, that this place is not so strange. He sat on a cliff watching the orange sun moving downward into the sea. Looking to the beach below he saw the first sign of life that was not a plant or tree. It was Onago on his evening walk. Vato stood up, waving his arms over his head, and shouted "Hello!" Onago was to far away to hear. Vato ran to find a way down the cliff to the beach. His heart raced with determination to meet the stranger. By the time he finally arrived on the sand the sun had set and it was too dark to see. He called out to the night and looked around, but he knew he was alone.

Vato was going to sleep on the sand, when a flame on a distant hillside caught his attention. He resumed the search for the stranger, going toward the flame like a moth. Vato stood behind a tree outside a small cave, when he peaked in he thought the man was part of the flame but quickly realized that he was only sitting close to the fire. With his most charming smile, Vato stepped into the light and said; "Hello friend can I warm myself by your fire?" Onago looked up as if he was expecting a visitor and said, "An answer to a prayer." They talked and shared stories through out the night, they where drawn to each other as yin to yang. Vato asked Onago "Can I stay and share this life with you?" Onago replied, "Stay as long as you know this is where you want to be, but not a moment longer." For Onago and Vato years had passed like days, and each day was lived like it was a life time -- it was paradise.

Every paradise has its serpent, and Kadina was no exception. There was a creature who roamed the forest; he fed on the dead and decay. Dada was an evil creature his putrid heart had no place in it for mercy, joy or forgiveness. One day while Dada fed on the dead carcass of a unicorn he herd the sounds of laughter and rapture coming from the beach below. When he stood and looked down the bluff he saw Vato and Onago loving each other on the hot white sand. Dada's icicle heart cracked when he saw the beauty and strength of Vato, and this made him loathe the sight of Onago. Then and there he determined, Vato would be his next meal.

Onago had sensed a change in his companion. Vato was sullen and uneasy; nothing seemed to bring him serenity. Some nights he could hear Vato screaming at the moon. Finally, Onago asked, "My love, is it time for you to go?" "No!" "Maybe -- I don't know?" "When I sleep my dreams are filled with whispers that seduce me to the dark, but when I'm awake, I see you, and the world is right." What Vato did not say was that more and more he felt the need to destroy what he loved the most. In his dreams he saw himself scraping his nails into his lover's chest, then cracking it open he devoured Onago's heart. He could taste the copper blood go down his throat, his face and chest stained with blood, and the glow of the fire burned in his lunatic eyes -- he would wake screaming. He was torn between two choices, to stay would be the destruction of paradise, to leave would be to enter death's cold embrace.

Dada's stomach ached with hunger for Vato; he would not wait a moment longer. He went through the forest picking mushrooms, pulling decaying roots and gathering maggot filled hearts. With these ingredients he concocted a brew that would end the life of Onago. He placed the poison on a rock and again visited Vato while he slept. "Go to the black rock, take the vile and give it to Onago -- do this if you want to be free!" Vato did as he was ordered. He put the poison in Onago's herb tea. With dark eyes and clinched fists he watched as Onago drank the last drop. Onago looked into Vato's' eyes and said, "My prayer is answered," then he fell to the ground. Onago was not dead for his life force was too strong. Instead a silk like cocoon formed around his sleeping body.

Vato walked out without looking back, what is done is done, and he knew he would never pass this way again. In the forest Dada was a tight empty stomach waiting with open arms. Vato waked into Dada's virulent embrace and allowed him to satisfy his ferocious appetite. Dada ate Vato, then he puked him up, and ate him again. He did this until there was nothing to left to puke and Vato was completely digested. It was the best meal Dada had ever eaten he enjoy Vato very, very much.

The cocoon that protected Onago began to open and from it came a mystic butterfly with black wings filed with colors of electric blue, passion red and emerald green. Onago crawled out from the cocoon, and the dark cave, to the warmth of the sun. He stretched and allowed the wind to dry his new wings. Soon he found they were strong enough to lift him from the ground, higher and higher he arose. As he looked back at the home where he was so happy he promised that he would never forget Vato. Now he was living a new life, his prayer was answered, he was free to be one with the absolute. Onago lived happily every after.

Quote from - Tom Stoppard

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account. (Freire, 1921)

Que Onda Homeboy! Why Do We Talk Like This?

Que Onda Homeboy! Why Do We Talk Like This?

By Oscar Gardea and Brenda Marusich

Te bato, que de aquella ramfla traes!

Whether you speak Spanish or not, this phrase will not make sense unless you speak border Spanish slang. Then it means, "Hey man, you have a nice car!

Every generation has its slang. Remember what was "groovy" in the 60s became "cool" in the 70s. This changed to "bad" in the 80s and "smooth" and back to "cool" in the 90s.

Most slang pops up from out of nowhere and gets bounced around for awhile. Then like a deflated ball, it ends up forgotten in the trashcan.

However, this pachuco slang or "Spanglish' is just not here to for a brief visit is here to stay.

The words and sentences are structured neither like the language of Shakespeare nor of Cervantes. If you put Spanish and English words in a can, shake them up and spill them out, the result is "Spanglish."

Janice Castro, who writes about border slang, says, "Spanish is a code for Latinos: the speakers know Spanish, but their hybrid language reflects the American culture in which they live." So how did this linguistic pattern develop in the U.S.?

In the 1930s a group of marijuana smokers and drug dealers from El Paso's Florence and Eighth Streets called themselves the 7-x Gang. They picked up a large part of their vocabulary from the Mexican underworld because of "business ties."

The batos (guys), also called pachucos, began to speak this way amongst themselves. Soon it reached other gangas (gangs).

"You can take the bato away from 'Spanglish' but you can't take 'Spanglish' from the bato

Later some of these batos (also spelled vatos) would jump on the Southern Pacific Railroad and go to other southwestern towns. While in these towns, they taught this lingo to their peers. Slowly, steadily and surely its use expanded to other areas.

However in 1942, it began to spread like wildfire and could not be controlled.

A number of these batos in El Chuco (the pachuco name for El Paso) got in trouble with the placa (police). The placa told them to get out and stay out of El Chuco. If they ever returned they would spend time in la pinta (the penitentiary). These boys were called floras (floaters).

Given that alternative, they apañaron el rufo (hopped a freight), many wit no particular destination in mind. Many of them wound up in Los Angeles. These batos associated with the Filipinos and African- Americans in their barrios (neighborhoods) and adopted their way of dressing.

The Filipinos wore radically styled men's clothing called zoot suits. Long coats, pancake hats, (recognizable by their flattened tops), pegged pants and thick-soled shoes became their trademarks. However, the pachucos added heavy gold watch chains and long hair slicked back to a duck's tail.

Many of the Mexican-American living in the Los Angeles barrios adopted the manner, dress and speech of the pachucos.

These self-styled pachucos also formed clicas (gangs). Pressure was applied to all boys of Mexican descent living on their "turf" to join and conform to the pachuco style. Some joined willingly; others, reluctantly.

As the number of clicas increased, they became more dangerous. Tension grew when one gang challenged another. Fights often broke out between rival gangs.

As a result of so many pachuco gangs forming, Los Angeles became the capital of the pachuco world.

Lack of feria (money), pressure from la placa and the desire to become big shots in their hometowns promoted many batos to board el rufo and go their chantes (homes). This way they could also their jefes (parents) who were worried about them.

This spread the pachuco influence among less street-wise batos. Once again it was the railroad that became carriers of the pachuco style and speech.

Today gang members are not the only ones who speak this way. Most Hispanics understand at least some of this language. However, gang members are the ones who speak it habitually and have a larger, more up-to-date vocabulary.

Many people who grew up in the barrios speaking this way moved out and now have high paying jobs, college degrees and are business owners.

For instance, Carlos Gardea who grew up in south El Paso says, "When I was younger, I used pachuco language a great deal. I was always a good student, but because of the way I spoke, some people said I wouldn't ever succeed in life. I am presently attending the University of Washington. Out of twenty-four students chosen for the physical therapy program, I was the only ethnic minority."

People who speak "Spanglish" can speak correctly, using formal English when they discuss current events, investments and so on. But when they run into a bato from the barrio they may revert to the jargon they grew up with. This proves that you can take the bato away from "Spanglish," but you can't take the "Spanglish" from the bato.

It doesn't matter on what side of the tracks these men were born.

People who speak "Spanglish" still care about some of the same things other Americans want: having a chante (home), a jale (job) and a ramfla to share with the ruca (wife) and chavos (children) who love them.

Oh, yes. "Qué onda" (what wave) is just a slang greeting, equivalent to "What's happening?" in English.

Requesting Comments about this article!

This is the best article I've come across that dose a nice job explaining cricial realism

International Studies Quarterly
Volume 44 Page 213 - June 2000
doi:10.1111/0020-8833.00156

Volume 44 Issue 2

After Postpositivism? The Promises of Critical Realism

Heikki Patomäki & Colin Wight

This article argues that the current self-understanding of IR theory is misconceived and that it is time to move beyond the stagnant positivism/postpositivism debate. We argue that the attempt to occupy a middle ground compromise position between positivism and postpositivism is untenable because these two positions share much in common. In this sense a middle ground position between two problematic positions does not produce a less problematic position. What is needed is a metatheoretical analysis of the two extreme positions. We attempt to show how both positivism and postpositivism are embedded in a discourse of philosophical anti-realism. This anti-realism occurs as a result of what we call the post-Kantian-Humean 'problem-field' of international relations from which most contemporary positivist, constructivist, and post-structuralist IR approaches stem. We then try to overcome this 'problem-field' by means of radically reclaiming reality through a critical realist philosophy. Once outlined we try to show how this critical realist philosophy can help transcend some of the antinomies currently faced by IR scholars.

Quote of the Day

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."
- Nikola Tesla

"If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done."
- Peter Ustinov

Senior Driver

An older lady gets pulled over for speeding...

Older Woman: Is there a problem, Officer?

Officer: Ma'am, you were speeding.

Older Woman: Oh, I see.

Officer: Can I see your license please?

Older Woman: I'd give it to you but I don't have one.

Officer: Don't have one?

Older Woman: Lost it, 4 years ago for drunk driving.

Officer: I see...Can I see your vehicle registration papers please.

Older Woman: I can't do that.

Officer: Why not?

Older Woman: I stole this car.

Officer: Stole it?

Older Woman: Yes, and I killed and hacked up the owner.

Officer: You what?

Older Woman: His body parts are in plastic bags in the trunk if you want to see

The Officer looks at the woman and slowly backs away to his car and calls for back up. Within minutes 5 police cars circle the car. A senior officer slowly approaches the car, clasping his half drawn gun.

Officer 2: Ma'am, could you step out of your vehicle please! The woman steps out of her vehicle.

Older woman: Is there a problem sir?

Officer 2: One of my officers told me that you have stolen this car and murdered the owner.

Older Woman: Murdered the owner?

Officer 2: Yes, could you please open the trunk of your car, please.

The woman opens the trunk, revealing nothing but an empty trunk.

Officer 2: Is this your car, ma'am?

Older Woman: Yes, here are the registration papers. The officer is quite stunned.

Officer 2: One of my officers claims that you do not have a driving license.

The woman digs into her handbag and pulls out a clutch purse and hands it to the officer.

The officer examines the license. He looks quite puzzled.

Officer 2: Thank you ma'am, one of my officers told me you didn't have a license, that you stole this car, and that you murdered and hacked up the owner.

Older Woman: Bet the liar told you I was speeding, too.

Don't Mess With Old Ladies

Forms of identity politics

nIdentity politics is the political activity of various social movements for self-determination.

It claims to represent and seek to advance the interests of particular groups in society, the members of which often share and unite around common experiences of actual or perceived social injustice, relative to the wider society of which they form part. In this way, the identity of the oppressed group gives rise to a political basis around which they then unite

Ethnic nationalism may be regarded as a form of identity politics within the wider international community, as well as within individual countries. Examples of other social movements within societies that are based on group exclusion and group inclusion could include:

• Separatism, Irredentism & Revanchism
• Jingoism
• Race:
  • Black nationalism
    • pan-Africanism
    • Black Power
  • Indigenous peoples' movements
  • White nationalism
  • Dalit Nationalism
  • Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, MEChA (Chicano nationalism)
• Religious fundamentalism:
  • Christian fundamentalism
  • Islamic fundamentalism
  • Jewish fundamentalism
    • Zionism
  • Hindu nationalism
• Gender, sexuality or disability-based identities:
  • Disability rights
  • Autism rights
  • Deaf culture
  • Gay community
  • Feminism
  • Masculism
  • Gay rights
  • Transgender rights

A cartoon - Self

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

by Thomas S. Kuhn

Outline and Study Guide
prepared by Professor Frank Pajares
Emory University

Chapter I - Introduction: A Role for History.

Kuhn begins by formulating some assumptions that lay the foundation for subsequent discussion and by briefly outlining the key contentions of the book.

1. A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs (p. 4).
1. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice" (5).
2. The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs exert a "deep hold" on the student's mind.
2. Normal science "is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like" (5)—scientists take great pains to defend that assumption.
3. To this end, "normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments" (5).
4. Research is "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education" (5).
5. A shift in professional commitments to shared assumptions takes place when an anomaly "subverts the existing tradition of scientific practice" (6). These shifts are what Kuhn describes as scientific revolutions—"the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science" (6).
1. New assumptions (paradigms/theories) require the reconstruction of prior assumptions and the reevaluation of prior facts. This is difficult and time consuming. It is also strongly resisted by the established community.
2. When a shift takes place, "a scientist's world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory" (7).

Chapter II - The Route to Normal Science.

In this chapter, Kuhn describes how paradigms are created and what they contribute to scientific (disciplined) inquiry.

1. Normal science "means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice" (10).
1. These achievements must be
1. sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity and
2. sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners (and their students) to resolve, i. e., research.
2. These achievements can be called paradigms (10).
3. "The road to a firm research consensus is extraordinarily arduous" (15).
2. "The successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science" (12).
3. Students study these paradigms in order to become members of the particular scientific community in which they will later practice.
1. Because the student largely learns from and is mentored by researchers "who learned the bases of their field from the same concrete models" (11), there is seldom disagreement over fundamentals.
2. Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice (11).
3. A shared commitment to a paradigm ensures that its practitioners engage in the paradigmatic observations that its own paradigm can do most to explain (13), i.e., investigate the kinds of research questions to which their own theories can most easily provide answers.
4. "It remains an open question what parts of social science have yet acquired such paradigms" (15). [psychology? education? teacher education? sociology?]
5. Paradigms help scientific communities to bound their discipline in that they help the scientist to
1. create avenues of inquiry.
2. formulate questions.
3. select methods with which to examine questions.
4. define areas of relevance.
5. [establish/create meaning?]
6. "In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant" (15).
7. A paradigm is essential to scientific inquiry—"no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism" (16-17).
8. How are paradigms created, and how do scientific revolutions take place?
1. Inquiry begins with a random collection of "mere facts" (although, often, a body of beliefs is already implicit in the collection).
1. During these early stages of inquiry, different researchers confronting the same phenomena describe and interpret them in different ways (17).
2. In time, these descriptions and interpretations entirely disappear.
2. A preparadigmatic school (movement) appears.
1. Such a school often emphasizes a special part of the collection of facts.
2. Often, these schools vie for preeminence.
3. From the competition of preparadigmatic schools, one paradigm emerges—"To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted" (17-18), thus making research possible.
4. As a paradigm grows in strength and in the number of advocates, the preparadigmatic schools (or the previous paradigm) fade.
1. "When an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation's practitioners, the older schools gradually disappear" (18).
2. Those with "older views . . . are simply read out of the profession and their work is subsequently ignored. If they do not accommodate their work to the new paradigm, they are doomed to isolation or must attach themselves to some other group" (19), or move to a department of philosophy (or history).
5. A paradigm transforms a group into a profession or, at least, a discipline (19). And from this follow the
1. formation of specialized journals.
2. foundation of professional societies (or specialized groups within societies—SIGs).
3. claim to a special place in academe (and academe's curriculum).
4. fact that members of the group need no longer build their field anew—first principles, justification of concepts, questions, and methods. Such endeavors are left to the theorist or to writer of textbooks.
5. promulgation of scholarly articles intended for and "addressed only to professional colleagues, [those] whose knowledge of a shared paradigm can be assumed and who prove to be the only ones able to read the papers addressed to them" (20)—preaching to the converted.
6. (discussion groups on the Internet and a listerserver?)
9. A paradigm guides the whole group's research, and it is this criterion that most clearly proclaims a field a science (22).

Chapter III - The Nature of Normal Science.

If a paradigm consists of basic and incontrovertible assumptions about the nature of the discipline, what questions are left to ask?

1. When they first appear, paradigms are limited in scope and in precision.
2. "Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute" (23).
1. But more successful does not mean completely successful with a single problem or notably successful with any large number (23).
2. Initially, a paradigm offers the promise of success.
3. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise. This is achieved by
1. extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing,
2. increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm's predictions,
3. and further articulation of the paradigm itself.
4. In other words, there is a good deal of mopping-up to be done.
1. Mop-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers.
2. Mopping-up is what normal science is all about!
3. This paradigm-based research (25) is "an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies" (24).
1. no effort made to call forth new sorts of phenomena.
2. no effort to discover anomalies.
3. when anomalies pop up, they are usually discarded or ignored.
4. anomalies usually not even noticed (tunnel vision/one track mind).
5. no effort to invent new theory (and no tolerance for those who try).
6. "Normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies" (24).
7. "Perhaps these are defects . . . "
1. ". . . but those restrictions, born from confidence in a paradigm, turn out to be essential to the development of science. By focusing attention on a small range of relatively esoteric problems, the paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable" (24).
2. . . . and, when the paradigm ceases to function properly, scientists begin to behave differently and the nature of their research problems changes.
4. Mopping-up can prove fascinating work (24). [You do it. We all do it. And we love to do it. In fact, we'd do it for free.]
3. The principal problems of normal science.
1. Determination of significant fact.
1. A paradigm guides and informs the fact-gathering (experiments and observations described in journals) decisions of researchers?
2. Researchers focus on, and attempt to increase the accuracy and scope of, facts (constructs/concepts) that the paradigm has shown to be particularly revealing of the nature of things (25).
2. Matching of facts with theory.
1. Researchers focus on facts that can be compared directly with predictions from the paradigmatic theory (26)
2. Great effort and ingenuity are required to bring theory and nature into closer and closer agreement.
3. A paradigm sets the problems to be solved (27).
3. Articulation of theory.
1. Researchers undertake empirical work to articulate the paradigm theory itself (27)—resolve residual ambiguities, refine, permit solution of problems to which the theory had previously only drawn attention. This articulation includes
1. determination of universal constants.
2. development of quantitative laws.
3. selection of ways to apply the paradigm to a related area of interest.
2. This is, in part, a problem of application (but only in part).
3. Paradigms must undergo reformulation so that their tenets closely correspond to the natural object of their inquiry (clarification by reformulation).
4. "The problems of paradigm articulation are simultaneously theoretical and experimental" (33).
5. Such work should produce new information and a more precise paradigm.
6. This is the primary work of many sciences.
4. To desert the paradigm is to cease practicing the science it defines (34).

Chapter IV - Normal Science as Puzzle-solving.

Doing research is essentially like solving a puzzle. Puzzles have rules. Puzzles generally have predetermined solutions.

1. A striking feature of doing research is that the aim is to discover what is known in advance.
1. This in spite of the fact that the range of anticipated results is small compared to the possible results.
2. When the outcome of a research project does not fall into this anticipated result range, it is generally considered a failure, i.e., when "significance" is not obtained.
1. Studies that fail to find the expected are usually not published.
2. The proliferation of studies that find the expected helps ensure that the paradigm/theory will flourish.
3. Even a project that aims at paradigm articulation does not aim at unexpected novelty.
4. "One of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions" (37).
1. The intrinsic value of a research question is not a criterion for selecting it.
2. The assurance that the question has an answer is the criterion (37).
3. "The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly" (96).
2. So why do research?
1. Results add to the scope and precision with which a paradigm/theory can be applied.
2. The way to obtain the results usually remains very much in doubt—this is the challenge of the puzzle.
3. Solving the puzzle can be fun, and expert puzzle-solvers make a very nice living.
3. To classify as a puzzle (as a genuine research question), a problem must be characterized by more than the assured solution.
1. There exists a strong network of commitments—conceptual, theoretical, instrumental, and methodological.
2. There are "rules" that limit
1. the nature of acceptable solutions—there are "restrictions that bound the admissible solutions to theoretical problems" (39).
1. Solutions should be consistent with paradigmatic assumptions.
2. There are quasi-metaphysical commitments to consider.
3. There may also be historical ties to consider.
2. the steps by which they are to be obtained (methodology).
1. commitments to preferred types of instrumentations.
2. the ways in which accepted instruments may legitimately be employed.
4. Despite the fact that novelty is not sought and that accepted belief is generally not challenged, the scientific enterprise can and does bring about such unexpected results.

Chapter V - The Priority of Paradigms.

How can it be that "rules derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide research even in the absence of rules" (42).

1. The paradigms of a mature scientific community can be determined with relative ease (43).
2. The "rules" used by scientists who share a paradigm are not easily determined. Some reasons for this are that
1. scientists can disagree on the interpretation of a paradigm.
2. the existence of a paradigm need not imply that any full set of rules exist.
3. scientists are often guided by tacit knowledge—knowledge acquired through practice and that cannot be articulated explicitly (Polanyi, 1958).
4. the attributes shared by a paradigm are not always readily apparent.
5. "paradigms may be prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them" (46).
3. Paradigms can determine normal science without the intervention of discoverable rules or shared assumptions (46). In part, this is because
1. it is very difficult to discover the rules that guide particular normal-science traditions.
2. scientists never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves.
1. They generally learn these with and through their applications.
2. New theory is taught in tandem with its application to a concrete range of phenomena.
3. "The process of learning a theory depends on the study of applications" (47).
4. The problems that students encounter from freshman year through doctoral program, as well as those they will tackle during their careers, are always closely modeled on previous achievements.
3. Scientists who share a paradigm generally accept without question the particular problem-solutions already achieved (47).
4. Although a single paradigm may serve many scientific groups, it is not the same paradigm for them all.
1. Subspecialties are differently educated and focus on different applications for their research findings.
2. A paradigm can determine several traditions of normal science that overlap without being coextensive.
3. Consequently, changes in a paradigm affect different subspecialties differently—"A revolution produced within one of these traditions will not necessarily extend to the others as well" (50).
4. When scientists disagree about whether the fundamental problems of their field have been solved, the search for rules gains a function that it does not ordinarily possess (48).

Chapter VI - Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries.

If normal science is so rigid and if scientific communities are so close-knit, how can a paradigm change take place? This chapter traces paradigm changes that result from discovery brought about by encounters with anomaly.

1. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
2. Nonetheless, new and unsuspected phenomena are repeatedly uncovered by scientific research, and radical new theories have again and again been invented by scientists (52).
3. Fundamental novelties of fact and theory bring about paradigm change.
4. So how does paradigm change come about?
1. Discovery—novelty of fact.
1. Discovery begins with the awareness of anomaly.
1. The recognition that nature has violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science.
2. A phenomenon for which a paradigm has not readied the investigator.
2. Perceiving an anomaly is essential for perceiving novelty (although the first does not always lead to the second, i.e., anomalies can be ignored, denied, or unacknowledged).
3. The area of the anomaly is then explored.
4. The paradigm change is complete when the paradigm/theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous become the expected.
5. The result is that the scientist is able "to see nature in a different way" (53).
6. But careful: Discovery involves an extended process of conceptual assimilation, but assimilating new information does not always lead to paradigm change.
2. Invention—novelty of theory.
1. Not all theories are paradigm theories.
2. Unanticipated outcomes derived from theoretical studies can lead to the perception of an anomaly and the awareness of novelty.
3. How paradigms change as a result of invention is discussed in greater detail in the following chapter.
5. The process of paradigm change is closely tied to the nature of perceptual (conceptual) change in an individual—Novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation (64).
6. Although normal science is a pursuit not directed to novelties and tending at first to suppress them, it is nonetheless very effective in causing them to arise. Why?
1. An initial paradigm accounts quite successfully for most of the observations and experiments readily accessible to that science's practitioners.
2. Research results in
1. the construction of elaborate equipment,
2. development of an esoteric and shared vocabulary,
3. refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes.
3. This professionalization leads to
1. immense restriction of the scientist's vision, rigid science, and resistance to paradigm change.
2. a detail of information and precision of the observation-theory match that can be achieved in no other way.
1. New and refined methods and instruments result in greater precision and understanding of the paradigm/theory.
2. Only when researchers know with precision what to expect from an experiment can they recognize that something has gone wrong.
4. Consequently, anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm (65).
1. The more precise and far-reaching the paradigm, the more sensitive it is to detecting an anomaly and inducing change.
2. By resisting change, a paradigm guarantees that anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core.

Chapter VII - Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories.

This chapter traces paradigm changes that result from the invention of new theories brought about by the failure of existing theory to solve the problems defined by that theory. This failure is acknowledged as a crisis by the scientific community.

1. As is the case with discovery, a change in an existing theory that results in the invention of a new theory is also brought about by the awareness of anomaly.
2. The emergence of a new theory is generated by the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to be solved as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones (68). These failures can be brought about by
1. observed discrepancies between theory and fact—this is the "core of the crisis" (69).
2. changes in social/cultural climates (knowledge/beliefs are socially constructed?).
1. There are strong historical precedents for this: Copernicus, Freud, behaviorism? constructivism?
2. Science is often "ridden by dogma" (75)—what may be the effect on science (or art) by an atmosphere of political correctness?
3. scholarly criticism of existing theory.
3. Such failures are generally long recognized, which is why crises are seldom surprising.
1. Neither problems nor puzzles yield often to the first attack (75).
2. Recall that paradigm and theory resist change and are extremely resilient.
4. Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data (76).
1. In early stages of a paradigm, such theoretical alternatives are easily invented.
2. Once a paradigm is entrenched (and the tools of the paradigm prove useful to solve the problems the paradigm defines), theoretical alternatives are strongly resisted.
1. As in manufacture so in science—retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it (76).
2. Crises provide the opportunity to retool.

Chapter VIII - The Response to Crisis.

The awareness and acknowledgment that a crisis exists loosens theoretical stereotypes and provides the incremental data necessary for a fundamental paradigm shift. In this critical chapter, Kuhn discusses how scientists respond to the anomaly in fit between theory and nature so that a transition to crisis and to extraordinary science begins, and he foreshadows how the process of paradigm change takes place.

1. Normal science does and must continually strive to bring theory and fact into closer agreement.
2. The recognition and acknowledgment of anomalies result in crises that are a necessary precondition for the emergence of novel theories and for paradigm change.
1. Crisis is the essential tension implicit in scientific research (79).
2. There is no such thing as research without counterinstances, i.e., anomaly.
1. These counterinstances create tension and crisis.
2. Crisis is always implicit in research because every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another viewpoint, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis (79).
3. In responding to these crises, scientists generally do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis.
1. They may lose faith and consider alternatives, but
2. they generally do not treat anomalies as counterinstances of expected outcomes.
3. They devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.
4. Some, unable to tolerate the crisis (and thus unable to live in a world out of joint), leave the profession.
5. As a rule, persistent and recognized anomaly does not induce crisis (81).
6. Failure to achieve the expected solution to a puzzle discredits only the scientist and not the theory ("it is a poor carpenter who blames his tools").
7. Science is taught to ensure confirmation-theory.
8. Science students accept theories on the authority of teacher and text—what alternative do they have, or what competence?
4. To evoke a crisis, an anomaly must usually be more than just an anomaly.
1. After all, there are always anomalies (counterinstances).
2. Scientists who paused and examined every anomaly would not get much accomplished.
3. An anomaly can call into question fundamental generalizations of the paradigm.
4. An anomaly without apparent fundamental import may also evoke crisis if the applications that it inhibits have a particular practical importance.
5. An anomaly must come to be seen as more than just another puzzle of normal science.
6. In the face of efforts outlined in C above, the anomaly must continue to resist.
5. All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. As this process develops,
1. the anomaly comes to be more generally recognized as such.
2. more attention is devoted to it by more of the field's eminent authorities.
3. the field begins to look quite different.
4. scientists express explicit discontent.
5. competing articulations of the paradigm proliferate.
6. scholars view a resolution as the subject matter of their discipline. To this end, they
1. first isolate the anomaly more precisely and give it structure.
2. push the rules of normal science harder than ever to see, in the area of difficulty, just where and how far they can be made to work.
3. seek for ways of magnifying the breakdown.
4. generate speculative theories.
1. If successful, one theory may disclose the road to a new paradigm.
2. If unsuccessful, the theories can be surrendered with relative ease.
5. may turn to philosophical analysis and debate over fundamentals as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field.
7. crisis often proliferates new discoveries.
6. All crises close in one of three ways.
1. Normal science proves able to handle the crisis-provoking problem and all returns to "normal."
2. The problem resists and is labeled, but it is perceived as resulting from the field's failure to possess the necessary tools with which to solve it, and so scientists set it aside for a future generation with more developed tools.
3. A new candidate for paradigm emerges, and a battle over its acceptance ensues (84)—these are the paradigm wars.
1. Once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a paradigm is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place (77).
1. Because there is no such thing as research in the absence of a paradigm, to reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.
2. To declare a paradigm invalid will require more than the falsification of the paradigm by direct comparison with nature.
3. The judgment leading to this decision involves the comparison of the existing paradigm with nature and with the alternate candidate.
2. Transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is not a cumulative process. It is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals (85). This reconstruction
1. changes some of the field's foundational theoretical generalizations.
2. changes methods and applications.
3. alters the rules.
3. How do new paradigms finally emerge?
1. Some emerge all at once, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the mind of a man deeply immersed in crisis.
2. Those who achieve fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have generally been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they changed.
3. Much of this process is inscrutable and may be permanently so.
7. When a transition from former to alternate paradigm is complete, the profession changes its view of the field, its methods, and its goals.
1. This reorientation has been described as "handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework" or "picking up the other end of the stick" (85).
2. Some describe the reorientation as a gestalt shift.
3. Kuhn argues that the gestalt metaphor is misleading: "Scientists do not see something as something else; instead, they simply see it" (85).
8. The emergence of a new paradigm/theory breaks with one tradition of scientific practice that is perceived to have gone badly astray and introduces a new one conducted under different rules and within a different universe of discourse.
9. The transition to a new paradigm is scientific revolution—and this is the transition from normal to extraordinary research.

Chapter IX - The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions.

Why should a paradigm change be called a revolution? What are the functions of scientific revolutions in the development of science?

1. A scientific revolution is a noncumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one (92).
2. A scientific revolution that results in paradigm change is analogous to a political revolution. [Note the striking similarity between the characteristics outlined below regarding the process of political revolution and those earlier outlined regarding the process of scientific revolution]
1. Political revolutions begin with a growing sense by members of the community that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created—anomaly and crisis.
2. The dissatisfaction with existing institutions is generally restricted to a segment of the political community.
3. Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit.
4. During a revolution's interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all.
5. In increasing numbers, individuals become increasingly estranged from political life and behave more and more eccentrically within it.
6. As crisis deepens, individuals commit themselves to some concrete proposal for the reconstruction of society in a new institutional framework.
7. Competing camps and parties form.
1. One camp seeks to defend the old institutional constellation.
2. One (or more) camps seek to institute a new political order.
8. As polarization occurs, political recourse fails.
9. Parties to a revolutionary conflict finally resort to the techniques of mass persuasion.
3. Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between fundamentally incompatible modes of community life. Paradigmatic differences cannot be reconciled.
1. The evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science do not work, for these depend on a particular paradigm for their existence.
2. When paradigms enter into a debate about fundamental questions and paradigm choice, each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm's defense—the result is a circularity and inability to share a universe of discourse.
3. Fundamental paradigmatic assumptions are philosophically incompatible.
4. Ultimately, scientific revolutions are affected by
1. the impact of nature and of logic.
2. techniques of persuasive argumentation (a struggle between stories?).
5. A successful new paradigm/theory permits predictions that are different from those derived from its predecessor (98).
1. That difference could not occur if the two were logically compatible.
2. In the process of being assimilated, the second must displace the first.
4. Consequently, the assimilation of either a new sort of phenomenon or a new scientific theory must demand the rejection of an older paradigm (95).
1. If this were not so, scientific development would be genuinely cumulative (the view of science-as-cumulation or logical inclusiveness—see Chapter X).
2. Recall that cumulative acquisition of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost nonexistent exception to the rule of scientific development—cumulative acquisition of novelty is not only rare in fact but improbable in principle (96).
3. Normal research is cumulative, but not scientific revolution.
4. New paradigms arise with destructive changes in beliefs about nature (98).
5. Kuhn observes that his view is not the prevalent view. The prevalent view maintains that a new paradigm derives from, or is a cumulative addition to, the supplanted paradigm. [Note: This was the case in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the book was published, but it is not the case today. As Kuhn points out, logical positivists were carrying the day then, but Structure proved revolutionary itself, and Kuhn's view is reasonably influential these days. Many would argue that Kuhn's view is now the prevalent view.] Objections to Kuhn's view include that
1. only the extravagant claims of the old paradigm are contested.
2. purged of these merely human extravagances, many old paradigms have never been and can never be challenged (e.g., Newtonian physics, behaviorism? psychoanalytic theory? logical positivism?).
3. a scientist can reasonably work within the framework of more than one paradigm (and so eclecticism and, to some extent, relativism rear their heads).
6. Kuhn refutes this logical positivist view, arguing that
1. the logical positivist view makes any theory ever used by a significant group of competent scientists immune to attack.
2. to save paradigms/theories in this way, their range of application must be restricted to those phenomena and to that precision of observation with which the experimental evidence in hand already deals.
3. the rejection of a paradigm requires the rejection of its fundamental assumptions and of its rules for doing science—they are incompatible with those of the new paradigm.
4. if the fundamental assumptions of old and new paradigm were not incompatible, novelty could always be explained within the framework of the old paradigm and crisis can always be avoided.
5. revolution is not cumulation; revolution is transformation.
6. the price of significant scientific advance is a commitment that runs the risk of being wrong.
7. without commitment to a paradigm there can be no normal science.
8. the need to change the meaning of established and familiar concepts is central to the revolutionary impact of a new paradigm.
9. the differences between successive paradigms are both necessary and irreconcilable. Why?
1. because successive paradigms tell us different things about the population of the universe and about that population's behavior.
2. because paradigms are the source of the methods, problem-field, and standards of solution accepted by any mature scientific community at any given time.
10. the reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science (103).
1. Old problems are relegated to other sciences or declared unscientific.
2. Problems previously nonexistent or trivial may, with a new paradigm, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement.
7. Consequently, "the normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before" (103).
5. The case for cumulative development of science's problems and standards is even harder to make than the case for the cumulative development of paradigms/theories.
1. Standards are neither raised nor do they decline; standards simply change as a result of the adoption of the new paradigm.
2. Paradigms act as maps that chart the direction of problems and methods through which problems may be solved.
3. Because nature is too complex and varied to be explored at random, the map is an essential guide to the process of normal science.
4. In learning a paradigm, the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mixture.
5. Therefore, when paradigms change, there are usually significant shifts in the criteria determining the legitimacy both of problems and of proposed solutions (109).
6. To the extent that two scientific schools disagree about what is a problem and what a solution, they will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigms (109).
1. In the circular argument that results from this conversation, each paradigm will
1. satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself, and
2. fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent.
2. Since no two paradigms leave all the same problems unsolved, paradigm debates always involve the question: Which problems is it more significant to have solved?
3. In the final analysis, this involves a question of values that lie outside of normal science altogether—it is this recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary (see B-8/9 above).

Chapter X - Revolutions as Changes of World View.

When paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. How do the beliefs and conceptions of scientists change as the result of a paradigm shift? Are theories simply man-made interpretations of given data?

1. During scientific revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before.
1. Familiar objects are seen in a different light and joined by unfamiliar ones as well.
2. Scientists see the world of their research-engagement differently.
3. Scientists see new things when looking at old objects.
4. In a sense, after a revolution, scientists are responding to a different world.
2. This difference in view resembles a gestalt shift, a perceptual transformation—"what were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterward." But caution—there are important differences.
1. Something like a paradigm is a prerequisite to perception itself (recall G. H. Mead's concept of a predisposition, or the dictum it takes a meaning to catch a meaning).
2. What people see depends both on what they look at and on what their previous visual-conceptual experience has taught them to see.
3. Individuals know when a gestalt shift has taken place because they are aware of the shift—they can even manipulate it mentally.
4. In a gestalt switch, alternate perceptions are equally "true" (valid, reasonable, real).
5. Because there are external standards with respect to which switch of vision can be demonstrated, conclusions about alternate perceptual possibilities can be drawn.
1. But scientists have no such external standards
2. Scientists have no recourse to a higher authority that determines when a switch in vision has taken place.
6. As a consequence, in the sciences, if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes, scientists cannot attest to these changes directly.
7. A gestalt switch: "I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite." (This leaves open the possibility that the earlier perception was once and may still be correct).
8. A paradigm shift: " I used to see a planet, but I was wrong."
9. It is true, however, that anomalies and crises "are terminated by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch" (122).
3. Why does a shift in view occur?
1. Genius? Flashes of intuition? Sure.
2. Paradigm-induced gestalt shifts? Perhaps, but see limitations above.
3. Because different scientists interpret their observations differently? No.
1. Observations (data) are themselves nearly always different.
2. Because observations are conducted (data collected) within a paradigmatic framework, the interpretive enterprise can only articulate a paradigm, not correct it.
4. Because of factors embedded in the nature of human perception and retinal impression? No doubt, but our knowledge is simply not yet advanced enough on this matter.
5. Changes in definitional conventions? No.
6. Because the existing paradigm fails to fit. Always.
7. Because of a change in the relation between the scientist's manipulations and the paradigm or between the manipulations and their concrete results? You bet.
4. It is hard to make nature fit a paradigm.

Chapter XI - The Invisibility of Revolutions.

Because paradigm shifts are generally viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge, and because the history of the field is represented in the new textbooks that accompany a new paradigm, a scientific revolution seems invisible.

1. An increasing reliance on textbooks is an invariable concomitant of the emergence of a first paradigm in any field of science (136).
2. The image of creative scientific activity is largely created by a field's textbooks.
1. Textbooks are the pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science.
2. These texts become the authoritative source of the history of science.
3. Both the layman's and the practitioner's knowledge of science is based on textbooks.
3. A field's texts must be rewritten in the aftermath of a scientific revolution.
1. Once rewritten, they inevitably disguise no only the role but the existence and significance of the revolutions that produced them.
2. The resulting textbooks truncate the scientist's sense of his discipline's history and supply a substitute for what they eliminate.
1. More often than not, they contain very little history at all (Whitehead: "A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.")
2. In the rewrite, earlier scientists are represented as having worked on the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution and method has made seem scientific.
3. Why dignify what science's best and most persistent efforts have made it possible to discard?
4. The historical reconstruction of previous paradigms and theorists in scientific textbooks make the history of science look linear or cumulative, a tendency that even affects scientists looking back at their own research (139).
1. These misconstructions render revolutions invisible.
2. They also work to deny revolutions as a function.
5. Science textbooks present the inaccurate view that science has reached its present state by a series of individual discoveries and inventions that, when gathered together, constitute the modern body of technical knowledge—the addition of bricks to a building.
1. This piecemeal-discovered facts approach of a textbook presentation illustrates the pattern of historical mistakes that misleads both students and laymen about the nature of the scientific enterprise.
2. More than any other single aspect of science, that pedagogic form [the textbook] has determined our image of the nature of science and of the role of discovery and invention in its advance.

Chapter XII - The Resolution of Revolutions.

How do the proponents of a competing paradigm convert the entire profession or the relevant subgroup to their way of seeing science and the world? What causes a group to abandon one tradition of normal research in favor of another? What is the process by which a new candidate for paradigm replaces its predecessor?

1. Scientific revolutions come about when one paradigm displaces another after a period of paradigm-testing that occurs
1. only after persistent failure to solve a noteworthy puzzle has given rise to crisis.
2. as part of the competition between two rival paradigms for the allegiance of the scientific community.
2. The process of paradigm-testing parallels two popular philosophical theories about the verification of scientific theories.
1. Theory-testing through probabilistic verification.
1. Comparison of the ability of different theories to explain the evidence at hand.
2. This process is analogous to natural selection: one theory becomes the most viable among the actual alternatives in a particular historical situation.
2. Theory-testing through falsification (Karl Popper).
1. A theory must be rejected when outcomes predicted by the theory are negative.
2. The role attributed to falsification is similar to the one that Kuhn assigns to anomalous experiences.
3. Kuhn doubts that falsifying experiences exist.
1. No theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time.
2. It is the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that define the puzzles that characterize normal science.
3. If any and every failure to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times.
4. If only severe failure to fit justifies theory rejection, then theory-testing through falsification would require some criterion of improbability or of degree of falsification—thereby requiring recourse to 1 above.
3. It makes little sense to suggest that verification is establishing the agreement of fact with theory.
1. All historically significant theories have agreed with the facts, but only more or less.
2. It makes better sense to ask which of two competing theories fits the facts better.
3. Recall that scientists in paradigmatic disputes tend to talk through each other.
4. Competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.
5. Since new paradigms are born from old ones, they incorporate much of the vocabulary and apparatus that the traditional paradigm had previously employed, though these elements are employed in different ways.
6. Moreover, proponents of competing paradigms practice their trade in different worlds—the two groups see different things (i.e., the facts are differently viewed).
7. Like a gestalt switch, verification occurs all at once or not at all (150).
4. Although a generation is sometimes required to effect a paradigm change, scientific communities have again and again been converted to new paradigms.
1. Max Planck: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grow up that is familiar with it.
2. But Kuhn argues that Planck's famous remark overstates the case.
1. Neither proof nor error is at issue.
2. The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.
3. Proponents of a paradigm devote their lives and careers to the paradigm.
4. Lifelong resistance is not a violation of scientific standards but an index to the nature of scientific research itself.
5. The source of the resistance is the assurance that
1. the older paradigm will ultimately solve all its problems.
2. nature can be shoved into the box the paradigm provides.
6. Actually, that same assurance is what makes normal science possible.
7. Some scientists, particularly the older and more experienced ones, may resist indefinitely, but most can be reached in one way or another.
3. Conversions occur not despite the fact that scientists are human but because they are.
4. How are scientists converted? How is conversion induced and how resisted?
1. Individual scientists embrace a new paradigm for all sorts of reasons and usually for several at once.
1. idiosyncracy of autobiography and personality?
2. nationality or prior reputation of innovator and his teachers?
2. The focus of these questions should not be on the individual scientist but with the sort of community that always sooner or later re-forms as a single group (this will be dealt with in Chapter XIII).
3. The community recognizes that a new paradigm displays a quantitative precision strikingly better than its older competitor.
1. A claim that a paradigm solves the crisis-provoking problem is rarely sufficient by itself.
2. Persuasive arguments can be developed if the new paradigm permits the prediction of phenomena that had been entirely unsuspected while the old paradigm prevailed.
4. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances (158).
5. But paradigm debates are not about relative problem-solving ability. Rather the issue is which paradigm should in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely (157).
1. A decision between alternate ways of practicing science is called for.
2. A decision is based on future promise rather than on past achievement.
3. A scientist must have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it.
1. There must be a basis for this faith in the candidate chosen.
2. Sometimes this faith is based on personal and inarticulate aesthetic considerations.
4. This is not to suggest that new paradigms triumph ultimately through some mystical aesthetic.
6. The new paradigm appeals to the individual's sense of the appropriate or the aesthetic—the new paradigm is said to be neater, more suitable, simpler, or more elegant (155).
5. What is the process by which a new candidate for paradigm replaces its predecessor?
1. At the start, a new candidate for paradigm may have few supporters (and the motives of the supporters may be suspect).
2. If the supporters are competent, they will
1. improve the paradigm,
2. explore its possibilities,
3. and show what it would be like to belong to the community guided by it.
3. For the paradigm destined to win, the number and strength of the persuasive arguments in its favor will increase.
4. As more and more scientists are converted, exploration increases.
5. The number of experiments, instruments, articles, and books based on the paradigm will multiply.
6. More scientists, convinced of the new view's fruitfulness, will adopt the new mode of practicing normal science (until only a few elderly hold-outs will remain).
1. And we cannot say that they are (were) wrong.
2. Perhaps the scientist who continues to resist after the whole profession has been converted has ipso facto ceased to be a scientist.

Chapter XIII - Progress Through Revolutions.

In the face of the arguments previously made, why does science progress, how does it progress, and what is the nature of its progress?

1. Perhaps progress is inherent in the definition of science.
1. To a very great extent, the term science is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious ways.
2. This issue is of particular import to the social sciences.
1. Is a social science a science because it defines itself as a science in terms of possessing certain characteristics and aims to make progress?
2. Questions about whether a field or discipline is a science will cease to be a source of concern not when a definition is found, but when the groups that now doubt their own status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments (161).
1. Do economists worry less than educators about whether their field is a science because economists know what a science is? Or is it economics about which they agree?
2. Why do not natural scientists or artists worry about the definition of the term?
3. We tend to see as a science any field in which progress is marked (162).
2. Does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?
3. Normal science progresses because the enterprise shares certain salient characteristics,
1. Members of a mature scientific community work from a single paradigm or from a closely related set.
2. Very rarely do different scientific communities investigate the same problems.
4. The result of successful creative work is progress (162).
1. No creative school recognizes a category of work that is, on the one hand, a creative success, but is not, on the other, an addition to the collective achievement of the group.
2. Even if we argue that a field does not make progress, that does not mean that an individual school/discipline within that field does not.
3. The man who argues that philosophy has made no progress emphasizes that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress.
5. It is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured.
1. In part, this progress is in the eye of the beholder.
2. The absence of competing paradigms that question each other's aims and standards makes the progress of a normal-scientific community far easier to see.
3. The acceptance of a paradigm frees the community from the need to constantly re-examine its first principles and foundational assumptions.
4. Members of the community can concentrate on the subtlest and most esoteric of the phenomena that concern it.
5. There are no other professional communities in which individual creative work is so exclusively addressed to and evaluated by other members of the profession.
1. Other professions are more concerned with lay approbation than are scientists.
2. Because scientists work only for an audience of colleagues, an audience that shares values and beliefs, a single set of standards can be taken for granted.
3. This insulation of the scientist from society permits the individual scientist to concentrate attention on problems that she has a good reason to believe she will be able to solve.
6. Unlike in other disciplines, the scientist need not select problems because they urgently need solution and without regard for the tools available to solve them [note the important contrast here between natural scientists and social scientists].
1. The social scientists tend to defend their choice of a research problem chiefly in terms of the social importance of achieving a solution.
2. Which group would one then expect to solve problems at a more rapid rate?
7. The effects of insulation are intensified by the nature of the scientific community's educational initiation.
1. The education of a social scientist consists in large part of
1. reading original sources.
2. being made aware of the variety of problems that the members of his future group have, in the course of time, attempted to solve, and the paradigms that have resulted from these attempts.
3. facing competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems.
4. evaluating the solutions to the problems presented.
5. selecting among competing existing paradigms.
2. In the education of a natural scientist
1. textbooks (as described earlier) are used until graduate school.
2. textbooks are systematically substituted for the creative scientific literature that made them possible.
3. classics are seldom read, and they are viewed as antiquated oddities.
8. The educational initiation of scientists is immensely effective.
9. The education of scientists prepares them for the generation through normal science of significant crises (167).
6. In its normal state, a scientific community is an immensely efficient instrument for solving the problems or puzzles that its paradigms define—progress is the result of solving these problems.
7. Progress is also a salient feature of extraordinary science—of science during a revolution.
1. Revolutions close with total victory for one of the two opposing camps.
2. When it repudiates a paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied.
3. The community acknowledges this as progress.
4. In a sense, it may appear that the member of a mature scientific community is the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be (167).
1. But recall that the power to select between paradigms resides in the members of the community.
2. The process of scientific revolution is in large part a democratic process.
8. And what are the characteristics of these scientific communities?
1. The scientist must be concerned to solve problems about the behavior of nature.
2. Although the concerns may be global, the problems must be problems of detail
3. The solutions to problems that satisfy a scientist must satisfy the community.
4. No appeals to heads of state or to the populace at large in matters scientific.
5. Members of the community are recognized and are the exclusive arbiters of professional achievement.
1. Because of their shared training and experience, members of the community are seen as the sole possessors of the rules of the game.
2. To doubt that they share some basis for evaluation would be to admit the existence of incompatible standards of scientific achievement.
6. The community must see paradigm change as progress—as we have seen, this perception is, in important respects, self-fulfilling (169).
7. Discomfort with a paradigm takes place only when nature itself first undermines professional security by making prior achievements seem problematic.
8. The community embraces a new paradigm when
1. the new candidate is seen to resolve some outstanding and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way.
2. the new paradigm promises to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem-solving ability that has accrued to science through its predecessors.
9. Though science surely grows in depth, it may not grow in breadth as well. When it does,
1. this is manifest through the proliferation of specialties,
2. not in the scope of any single specialty alone.
10. We may have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth (171).
1. The developmental process described by Kuhn is a process of evolution from primitive beginnings—a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature.
2. This is not a process of evolution toward anything.
3. Important questions arise.
1. Must there be a goal set by nature in advance?
2. Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature?
3. Is the proper measure of scientific achievement the extent to which it brings us closer to an ultimate goal?
4. The analogy that relates the evolution of organisms to the evolution of scientific ideas "is nearly perfect" (172).
1. The resolution of revolutions is the selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science.
2. The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by period of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge.
3. Successive stages in that developmental process are marked by an increase in articulation and specialization.
4. The process occurs without benefit of a set goal and without benefit of any permanent fixed scientific truth.
5. What must the world be like in order that man may know it?