On Science: Fatigue, Ownership, and It's Soul

In discussing the extent to which science has met our curiosity about the university, we must remember that different minds are curious about different things.

August 21, 2025

On Science: Fatigue, Ownership, and It's Soul
Your Scholarly Digest 21st August, 2025

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Online Thumbnail Credits: The MET Open Access Collection: Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

Hi Scholar,

The act of scholarship often involves looking backwards to go forwards, as beautifully outlined by this poem:

BRAIN FOOD

When Science Gets Tired: On Paradigm Fatigue and Exemplars

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific communities conduct their research according to a paradigm - a shared set of assumptions, beliefs, examples, and values. Early in a field’s development, multiple schools of thought may exist, each advocating for the wider adoption of their specific paradigm until one school achieves dominance over the others: an event Kuhn terms a “paradigm shift”, which he argues is the main driver of scientific progress. With this consolidation, a discipline “matures”: its basic assumptions are stabilized, and research becomes conducted within agreed rules, methods, and standards of success. “Mature” science - compared to a science without a dominant paradigm - is faster and more efficient because it has essentially become an exercise in “puzzle solving”.

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