NIMH Roundtable Discussion - Promissory Notes and Prevailing Norms in Social and Behavioral Sciences Research (1997)

Most workshops convened by the National Institute's of Health are devoted to the puzzle-solving activities of normal science,where the puzzles themselves and the strategies available for solving them are determined largely in advance by the sharedparadigmatic assumptions, frameworks, and priorities of the scientific community's research paradigm. They are designed tofacilitate what Thomas Kuhn referred to as elucidating topological detail within a map whose main outlines are available inadvance. And apparently for good reason. Historical studies by Kuhn and others reveal that science moves fastest and penetratesmost deeply when its practitioners work within well-defined and deeply ingrained traditions and employ the concepts, theories,methods, and tools of a shared paradigm. No paradigm is perfect and none is capable of identifying, let alone solving, all of theproblems relevant to a given domain of inquiry. Thus, the essential day-to-day business of normal science is not to question thelimits or adequacy of a given paradigm, but rather to exploit the presumed virtues for which it was adopted. As Kuhn cautioned inhis discussion of paradigms, re-tooling, in science as in manufacture, as an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion thatdemands it.