Excerpt:
Introduction
According to Kuhn (1970), a scientific discipline can develop in two qualitatively distinct ways. During periods of normal science knowledge grows cumulatively but in times of revolutions progress will be non-cumulative.
Every scientific discipline starts with a preparadigmatic stage. This will be described in section 1. A stage of normal science will be reached when one paradigm becomes prominent. Normal science is by nature paradigm based. Normal science will be encountered in section 2. Inevitably, every normal scientific period will sooner or later result in a crisis. Section 3 will be about scientific crises. One possible result of a scientific crisis is a revolutionary change towards a new paradigm. Revolutions are described in section 4. According to Kuhn, a revolutionary change is far from cumulative. There exists incommensurability between the old and the new paradigm. The last section of this paper, section 5, will be about incommensurability.