Method and Paradigm

A method does not, of course, get you anywhere. A scientific method might give you clues as to where you might find the next step in your research. If you have just done an experiment, then the method might suggest you analyse the errors, or consult the theory. It is not a matter of turning a handle or blindly attempting the next step. The method is not really for that, and nor does it replace creativity in research.

Given that, we can ask what, exactly, is a method for? This is not an easy question to answer. In practice, a lot of people in research do not explicitly follow a method. They do experiments, consider the errors and so on not because they have the steps of scientific method in mind, but because that is how they are trained; that is how the subject ‘works’ for them.

So a method, while possibly useful for introducing how the subject might be tackled, is not, in fact, that widely used. It might be a useful teaching tool, recognising that there are generic similarities between projects in the same subject. Hence, for example, there are a plethora of courses in research methods in assorted subjects such as the social sciences, history and so on. In part, these are practical, covering things such as how to get started, how to find suitable material, get ethical approval and so on. In part, though, they cover the sorts of things you need to do to do research in the subject.

Research is the process of starting from a known position and finding something out which was not known before. Despite a lot of media hype about scientific breakthroughs and the like, most research advances the subject incrementally. Each research paper published in the sciences is a little advance over what went before. Thomas Kuhn, a Twentieth Century philosopher of science, observed that most of the time scientific research was conducted within the remit of what he called ‘normal science’, that is, the core understandings of the science (the paradigm is physics, because that was the most developed at the time) are known, understood and largely unquestioned. The research that happens occurs around the edges; it is almost filling in the gaps.

Another way of looking at a subject is as a web. There are core assumptions at the heart of the web, and these are spun out into more and more tenuously held assumptions until you get to the edge. This, perhaps is where ‘normal’ science takes place. Changing the nature of these links in the web does not disturb the web as a whole.

Every once in a while, Kuhn argues, someone comes along and sweeps the whole of the central, core, assumptions of a subject away and replaces them. This is the paradigm shift (I think Kuhn coined the phrase), a sudden change in the basic assumptions of a topic that leads to a completely different web, a completely different direction for the subject.

The paradigm shifters in physics are fairly well known: Galileo, Newton, Einstein for example. Whether they actually single-handedly changed physics is a bit more controversial. They certainly did not act in a vacuum, as is often assumed. That they thought differently about a subject and bought new things into physics is not disputed, but in all things context is important: the time was right for a breakthrough; the problems of the normal paradigm were becoming obvious, if not pressing.

Similar changes can be seen in other subjects, although I am not sufficiently an expert to be able to say. Something happened in theology, for example, around the fourth century AD, when the Patristic Fathers were forced into using non-Biblical, philosophical language to describe God, His Son, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Not all of them were happy with this shift in language, however, and it still causes a degree of difficulty today. Again, something happened in the Middle Ages to enable a shift to Scholasticism, and again at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation to shift away from Scholasticism. I dare say that a variety of similar shifts could be identified both in theology and physics and in other topics.

A shift in paradigm is not a shift in the subject as it is. Mostly, the new paradigms encompass the knowledge and understandings there were before. For example, Einstein’s relativity theories (for there are two) encompass the results of Newtonian mechanics and gravity as low energy cases. While the way of looking at the universe changed as a result of Einstein’s work, the fundamentals of rolling billiard balls around the place did not. Einstein’s theories are useful in high mass, high speed and long distances. Similarly, the Reformation did not instantly abandon all that had gone before – the Reformers, mostly, would have been shocked by the argument that they had. The insights of the past still informed the thinking of the present, as mass and momentum are still fundamental quantities in physics.

Has any of this to do with method? Mostly, the people who started the paradigm shifts were trained in the methods of the subjects as it was at the time. Einstein, for example, knew quite a lot of fairly obscure mathematics which he put to good use in General Relativity. The mathematics is now rather less obscure, of course, but it still takes a fair bit of getting your head around. Galileo was trained in the Aristotelian school of physics which he subsequently had a hand in overturning. If we are unable to sweep away totally what has gone before (and we cannot), then in order to extend it we have to be experts in the subject.

So the methods with which we have been brought up are fundamentally useful. We might not think about them explicitly, but they are around and do inform how we undertake even the most revolutionary of paradigm shifts. Our intellectual history does constrain the past, no matter how much we might have thought we have left the past behind.