8Cm(Desire)-y

All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent 8=loosening of the rules for normal research. As this process develops, the anomaly comes to be more generally recognized as such, through the ongoing Cm=disseminated communication about it, it, more attention is devoted to it by more of the field's eminent authorities. The field begins to look quite different: scientists express explicit discontent, competing articulations of the paradigm proliferate and scholars view a resolution as the subject matter of their discipline. To this end, they first isolate the anomaly more precisely and give it structure. They 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 to still satisfy their DESIRE.

All crises close in one of three ways reckons Kuhn:

(i) Normal science proves able to handle the crisis-provoking problem and all returns to "normal."
(ii) The problem resists and is labelled, 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.
(iii) A new candidate for paradigm emerges, and a battle over its acceptance ensues. Once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a paradigm is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place.

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. To declare a paradigm invalid will require more than the falsification of the paradigm by direct comparison with nature. The judgment leading to this decision involves the comparison of the existing paradigm with nature and with the alternate candidate. 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 . This reconstruction changes some of the field's foundational theoretical generalizations. It changes methods and applications. It alters the rules.

How do new paradigms finally emerge? Some emerge all at once, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the mind of a man deeply immersed in crisis . 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. Much of this process is inscrutable and may be permanently so - hopes Kuhn, to discard, above all the possibility of science#3...

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