Recent insights from sociology insist that our knowledge is socially constructed, and this has led to shaking not only the scientific foundation, but also the very foundation of our religious faith. It is argued that the kind of questions we ask, the kind of explanations we seek, and even the criteria of rationality we use are all socially and culturally shaped. All this would mean that science never exists in a general abstract sense, but always in a very specific social, historical and intellectual context. For a long time, people thought of science as objective, universal, rational, and based on solid observational evidence. In contrast, religion was seen as subjective, parochial and emotional. With the exposure of the new philosophy of science, these differences seem to disappear.
In his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn shows the influence of culture and thus historical assumptions on the development of science. It is generally believed that science develops through the accumulation of data, which is correct in a way, because the body of scientific knowledge does not grow and develop in successive stages. However, in Kuhn argued that science is not a stable, cumulative acquisition of knowledge, as is usually depicted in standard histories of science.
Kuhn shows three stages that take place in the development of science. There is normal science that most scientists at any given time accept and work with. This normal science becomes normative because of its past success, and it is through this paradigm that the student of science acquires the necessary theoretical concept. Then comes a crisis when this dominant paradigm cannot explain a certain phenomenon. In the second phase, the crisis can be resolved in one of three ways. Current normal science can deal with the problem causing the crisis and in that case everything will return to normal. Sometimes a problem is seen as a result of the field not having the necessary tools to solve it, so scientists put it aside for a future generation to solve with more advanced tools. In a few cases, the crisis seems to defy all solutions, and new theories and new paradigms emerge.
According to Kuhn, a paradigm is fundamental to scientific inquiry and he describes a paradigm as a cluster of conceptual, metaphysical and methodological ideas accepted by the scientific community. The paradigm thus represents a research tradition confirmed by the scientific community. In a paradigm shift, known data is seen in a new way and some old terms often acquire a changed meaning. In such a shift, the evaluation of theories becomes an act of judgment on the part of the scientific community. This would mean that pioneering scientists do not simply add to the work of predecessors, but undo some of that work because they see things in a new way. This is how a new way of seeing nature occurs, a transformation of scientific thinking.
Thomas Kuhn points to historical, social and cultural assumptions in the development of empirical science. Science has now become part of a broad cultural and historical change. However, the social construction of science does not mean that science is merely a socially constructed form of knowledge without any reference to actual 'reality'. Science refers to reality, albeit in terms of models and metaphors. Thus, scientific theories are loaded with theory, and not simple theories. Although the goal of science is to depict reality, it has been recognized that there is no literal language for reality; but only different systems of patterning symbols in different ways. As a result, scientists now talk less about definite laws and more about probability; less determinism, more hypothetical theories; less truth and more models and metaphors.
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