Earth Sciences

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.

A few miles farther on, we came to a big, gravelly roadcut that looked like an ashfall, a mudflow, glacial till, and fresh oatmeal, imperfectly blended. "I don't know what this glop is," [Kenneth Deffeyes] said, in final capitulation. "You need a new geologist. You need a Californian."
John McPhee, Assembling California, p. 11 [The Noonday Press; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993]

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The Philosophy of Science Association aims to further studies and free discussion from diverse standpoints in the field of philosophy of science. To this end, the PSA engages in activities such as: the publishing of periodicals, essays and monographs in this field; sponsoring conventions and meetings; and the awarding of prizes for distinguished work in the field.

In 1934 Popper published what many regard as his Magnum Opus The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The famous chemist Wachtershauser said that this is a "gem" and that it liberated him from a sterile accounting view of science. Wachtershauser subsequently went on to develop one of the main theories of the origin of life. Frank Tipler, the famous cosmologist, regards this as the most important book this century. In one majestic and systematic attack, psychologism, naturalism, inductionism, and logical positivism are swept away and replaced by a set of methodological rules called Falsificationism. Falsificationism is the idea that science advances by unjustified, exaggerated guesses followed by unstinting criticism. Only hypotheses capable of clashing with observation reports are allowed to count as scientific. "Gold is soluble in hydrochloric acid" is scientific (though false); "Some homeopathic medicine does work" is, taken on its own, unscientific (though possibly true). The first is scientific because we can eliminate it if it is false; the second is unscientific because even if it were false we could not get rid of it by confronting it with an observation report that contradicted it. Unfalsifiable theories are like the computer programs with no uninstall option that just clog up the computer's precious storage space. Falsifiable theories, on the other hand, enhance our control over error while expanding the richness of what we can say about the world.

Claudius Ptolemy was an astronomer and mathematician of the 2c A.D., whose exact dates we do not know, but who must apparently have worked in Alexandria between A.D. 127 and 148 since some of his astronomical observations are consistent with those dates.
(Thus the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The Geography itself also provides at least one clue, listing the Egyptian city of Antinoöpolis, founded in A.D. 130.)

For an insight into trends and fads in the humanities world, it is hard to improve on the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. It lists all citations in the major humanities journals—that is, an army of trained slaves keys in every footnote of every article and the computer rearranges them according to the work cited. The compilers of the index examined the records for the years 1976–1983, and issued a report on the most cited works of the twentieth century. The most cited author was Lenin, which speaks volumes on the state of the humanities in the West towards the end of the Cold War. But the most cited single works were, in reverse order: in third place, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism; second, Joyce’s Ulysses; and, well in the lead, Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Thomas Kuhn has been criticized for espousing a theory of scientific development inconsistent with the "natural" view that successive scientific theories draw closer and closer to the truth. The alleged problem with Kuhn's account is that it depends on an incorrect account of scientific language. Further, some critics have claimed that the natural view of scientific progress can be vindicated if scientific language is understood in terms of the causal theory of reference.
In this paper, I argue that such efforts to uphold the natural view of progress fail. The problem with current versions of the causal theory is that they leave us with no way of classifying episodes in the history of science as progressive. Advocates of the causal theory have tried enriching the basic account with maxims like the principle of charity or the principle of humanity. However, I show that these principles are unsuited to the tasks for which they were intended. Finally, I show that accounts of scientific language like those built on the causal theory of reference need to be informed by empirical psychology in order to serve in our classification of historical episodes as progressive or not. But to strengthen an account of language in this way is, in a sense, to abandon the program of antipsychologism prevalent in the philosophy of language since Frege.

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California--Berkeley, where in 1961 he became a full professor of history of science. In 1964, he was named M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In 1979 he returned to Boston, this time to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of philosophy and history of science. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT.

Thomas Kuhn gave us an interesting and provocative book in his Nature of Scientific Revolutions, in which he described science, under the stimulus of new discoveries, as making a radical change in its philosophy or basic assumptions.
The idea is appealing and it did seem that there were several such shifts, beginning with the Copernican "revolution," in which, supported by the labors of Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, it was realized that the earth revolved around the sun and not the contrary.
But as I've elsewhere shown, this was rather the beginning of Western science, the emphasis on experiment and fact as the basis for theory, instead of authority.