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vity. Australian scientists (mainly geologists and solar scientists) who are sceptical about whether climate change is real, and – if it is real – if it is due largely to carbon dioxide omissions and – if it is – whether human activity really constitutes a significant proportion of such emissions, contend that it is a waste of time applying for funding, because the word has been put around the funding authorities that their views are loopy, and that the funding agencies will be held up to ridicule among their peers and in the media (and therefore their appointments would be unlikely to be renewed).

There are other ways in which ‘mavericks’ are kept in checks. It is normal in universities for senior promotions committees to include a majority of members who are not experts in the discipline in which the applicant works. It is common to invite one or two external experts to join, who are very well regarded leaders in the field in question. A common question in such committee hearings is for one of the non-expert members to ask, ‘And how would this university look if we promoted the applicant?’ Any suggestion that it would not have a good look is generally lethal. Thus the prevailing orthodoxy is reinforced, and young researchers quickly get the message.

Reality or academic paranoia? I am of course content to leave it to you to observe and judge. The point to take out is that within each paradigm there are mandarins, and they include many who (no doubt sincerely believing they are acting in the name of scientific integrity and quality) are enforcers.

It is worth noting one of Kuhn’s observations about any science in its pre-paradigm stage of evolution. “History also suggests (that in) the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for a paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant. As a result, early fact gathering is a far more nearly random activity than the one that subsequent scientific development makes familiar.”  (Kuhn Chapter II p.15 – italics added). Given Kuhn’s view and assuming – which he disputes – it is appropriate to talk of paradigms in the social sciences, though there are none yet, then it is appropriate to ask whether any of the social sciences are currently in a pre-paradigm state with the characteristics Kuhn describes. If they are not, what are the implications?

3. Paradigms, normal science, and puzzle-solving.

According to Kuhn, a paradigm determines what problems are genuine problems that require solution. For example, as noted the Ptolemaic paradigm required that heavenly bodies moved in continuous circular orbits. However an anomaly was soon observed; namely what came to be called planetary regression. This is the appearance of back tracking. There was a great deal of speculation as to how this might be explained, including one view that it must be an optical illusion of some sort. Eventually an ingenious method of explaining it was devised, according to which the planets moved not in the circular orbits originally postulated, but rather in epicyclical motion around a continuous circular line, on which the epicyclical motion was centred. Brilliantly, this explained the apparent regression (the body was progressing around the far side of the epicycle, which from Earth looks like a reversal). But more importantly it preserved a central plank within the paradigm, namely that motion in th本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。