

Thomas Kuhn & Meaningful Innovation - mvs
http://www.disruptivemba.com/2012/01/thomas-kuhn-meaningful-innovation.html#!/2012/01/thomas-kuhn-meaningful-innovation.html

======
dantheman
The author of this piece seems to miss an extremely important piece of khun's
philosophy: 'normal science'. Normal science is the practice of the everday
scientist working in their paradigm, that is working on known problems, with
known methods, make progress - i.e. breeding fruit flies, observing planets.
As for the revolution, you need reasons that cause the fundamental shift -
problems/inconsistencies that resist current methods.

Computer Science and Software Development fall into a unique area in which
there are so many problems we are often working without paradigms and often
adopt pragmatic approaches, and quickly discover whole new "domains". Social,
mobile, REST/CRUD, media - are all revolutions, but not just in technology but
in society, they're fundamentally changing how individuals interact in
society.

Now this isn't to say that pure research isn't needed, but I don't think it's
supported through this appeal to khun. With so much low hanging fruit it's
hard to properly allocate resources. Is developing Ruby on Rails and
increasing the productivity of a large swath of programmers more important
than a more efficient garbage collector or better NLP system? Both types of
R&D are crucial and to write off mobile mobile apps as not being research is
short sighted; if an app gains traction like facebook or google it will most
likely radically change our current behavior in an as yet unforeseen way.

I'm glad he's reading up on the philosophy of science, it's critical imho to
better understand how ideas and technology progress.

~~~
aaronjg
The following quote is also relevant (from the 1969 postcript to the book)

"A number of those who have taken pleasure from it have done so less because
it illuminates science than because they read its main theses as applicable to
many other fields as well. I see what they mean and would not like to
discourage their attempts to extend the position, but their reaction has
nevertheless puzzled me. To the extent that the book portrays scientific
development as a succession of tradition-bounds periods punctuated by non-
cumulative breaks, its theses are undoubtedly of wide applicability. But they
should be, for they are borrowed from other fields. Historians of literature,
of music, of the arts, of political development, and of many other human
activities have long described their subjects in the same way. Periodization
in terms of revolutionary breaks in style, taste, and institutional structure
have been among their standard tools. If I have been original with respect to
concepts like these, it has mainly been by applying them to the sciences,
fields which had been widely though to develop in a different way."

Social, Mobile, REST/CRUD, etc. are revolutions, but they are not 'Kuhnian
revolutions.' They are innovative technologies that enable progress. Just as
cubism, pointillism, impressionism are revolutions in painting. The difference
is, that in a scientific revolution, a new idea completely supplants its
predecessors. An example in Computer Science would be the 'information
revolution' in the late 1940s, in which Shannon's theory of information
supplanted that of Hartley and Nyquist. While leaps and bounds in things like
development of scripting languages are revolutionary, they are revolutionary
in a manner different from Kuhn's description.

~~~
kijin
A "Kuhnian revolutions" doesn't need to be a wholesale replacement of
assumptions underlying an entire field of inquiry. Sure, most of the examples
he used in his original book were drawn from such large-scale paradigm shifts.
But especially in his later writing, Kuhn seems to focus more on what we might
call "micro-revolutions": paradigm shifts that affect only a small part of the
relevant science or technology, but which work in much the same way as large-
scale scientific revolutions. Of course this isn't the only interpretation out
there, and philosophers of science can disagree among themselves all day long.
But much of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge research that took place
after Kuhn's book followed this broader interpretation, and studied small-
scale changes in very narrow sub-fields of science as well as larger ones.

In other words, Kuhnian revolutions aren't as rare and far between as his
original book might seem to suggest.

New concepts in IT might not "completely supplant" their predecessors, but
their rise to prominence can certainly be called revolutions in the area(s)
that are irreversibly changed by them. For example, very few people nowadays
think that APIs on the Internet should be anything other than RESTful.
Previous paradigms for remote computing protocols have been almost completely
supplanted in this area. Likewise, table-based HTML layouts have been
completely supplanted by CSS in the last 10 years. The change, of course, was
motivated by the previous paradigm's inadequacy in addressing the needs of the
evolving Web. There are lots of examples like this, even trivial ones, that
can nevertheless be called miniature Kuhnian revolutions.

