John Lisle

Like, okay, Ptolemy makes this prediction about where the planet should be, but it turns out the planet's actually not there.

It's a little bit off.

That's an anomaly.

And Kuhn says, what do scientists do with anomalies?

Do they throw out their theory?

No.

He says they either ignore it or they find a way to rationalize it.

Well, Ptolemy made that prediction, but it's close enough to where it's, you know, his theory still works for most of the observations we're making.

So scientists usually ignore or rationalize the anomaly.

But over time, as they do more and more puzzle solving, normal science...

more and more anomalies crop up to the point where we just can't ignore them anymore.

There are just too many anomalies.

At a certain point, we realize that our worldview, our paradigm must be wrong.

And Kuhn says this allows for a crisis within the scientific community.

The group of scientists within this paradigm, they enter a crisis period, and it's during that crisis period when someone can put forward an alternative paradigm

that accounts for all those anomalies, and then we accept that as our new paradigm.

So it accounts for all the things that the previous paradigm could do, in addition to all the anomalies that the previous paradigm couldn't account for.

Now we're in a new paradigm, and what do we do?

We do puzzle solving.

We try to prove our paradigm right, and in the process, we uncover anomalies.