THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE: DISCIPLINE AND SCIENCE - Essay Example

Groundbreaking products can radically redefine both markets and consumer expectations leading to a broader shift in fashions, styles, or designs. One important aspect that distinguishes Kuhn’s model of scientific knowledge and the exceptionalist model is that Kuhn does not see a linear, steady, or uniform rate of evolution in scientific progress but one that changes in paradigm shifting moments related to technological innovation, new invention, and groundbreaking discoveries that radically alter the way science perceives or conceives the universe.

Kuhn recognizes two broad types of science, one related to these paradigm shifting breakthroughs and one related to administration or technical matters related to existing knowledge. For example, the transistor may have been a paradigm shifting innovation in science, which led to an administrative or technical progress of advancing the efficiency, complexity, and design of the original invention to make ever better products. This can relate further to two types of business management. One specializes in research and development to produce groundbreaking and revolutionary products which shift the market paradigm, such as the PC, iPhone, lightbulb, TV, automobile, etc.

The second type of business management is related to making the products themselves better designed, more efficient, produced, distributed, appropriately marketed, etc. Recognizing the difference between these two types of business management can be important in allocating resources, hiring employees, developing a company’s business plan, and understanding the role of each person in the business organization. As Alexander Bird (2004) writes: “The function of a paradigm is to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution.

A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’.” “According to Kuhn the development of a science is not uniform but has alternating ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ (or ‘extraordinary’) phases. The revolutionary phases are not merely periods of accelerated progress, but differ qualitatively from normal science.” “Generating new puzzles is one thing that the paradigm puzzle-solution does; helping solve them is another.

In the research tradition it inaugurates, a paradigm-as-exemplar fulfils three functions: (i) it suggests new puzzles; (ii) it suggests approaches to solving those puzzles; (iii) it is the standard by which the quality of a proposed puzzle-solution can be measured (1962/1970a, 38-39).” (Bird, 2004) Kuhn’s thesis can thus be seen as a refutation of Yearley’s statement that“science is distinguished from most other forms of knowledge because it tends to get truer as it goes along.” (Yearley, 2004) According to Kuhn, there is no real basis for this belief.

Rather, the history of science suggests that the more that is objectively known about the universe, and the feeling of certainty that what one knows is “true,” is actually a type of illusion or collective unconsciousness that is waiting the be illuminated or broken with the next paradigm shift in knowledge that leads to revolutionary change. How this applies to business management is very important, because it is essential to distinguish between “