 Okay, so I've given you one key example of how a relativist methodology in science looks. Let's develop this a little bit further and ask ourselves, so why was this perceived as a threat or as a challenge, we might say, to the philosophy of science? Some philosophers of science saw it as a threat because they felt that what is most valuable about science, namely scientific rationality, is somehow pushed into the background. Some philosophers felt that when we as philosophers or in general when we as historians of science even look at the past, we should always think about the scientific past in evaluative terms where this evaluation, the standard for this evaluation, is rationality, is scientific rationality. And then different philosophers of science have different theories about what that background rationality might be. So some people thought like Popper, for example, that scientific rationality consists in testing theories under the harshest possible conditions in an effort to refute them. And if you can't refute them, then you're allowed to stick with them for the time being. But it's a mark of scientific rationality that you always put your theories under the most severe tests. Shapin is saying that's not exactly what happened in the phonology case. The phonologists did not go out trying to refute their own theories. They felt, in light of what they saw about their society around them, it was a very well confirmed theory and it didn't need any further harsh testing. So by Popper's standards, they were doing bad science. So Popper would say, this phonology case to properly analyze it is to analyze what went wrong there. What went wrong is that it wasn't sufficiently put under harsh and severe tests. So a Popperian would think that a relativistic approach to the history of science misses what actually characterizes science. For a philosopher's of science of Popper's ilk, let me repeat this point, to study science in a relativistic spirit is to miss what makes science science. It would be like as if we studied science as if it was some other cultural phenomenon, like taste or fashion. We only see science as science on a Popperian view if we evaluate the rationality of the given scientific episodes. So here you have a sharp line against any relativistic approach to science. At the same time, though, it should be said that even within the philosophy of science itself and certainly within history of science more broadly, there were other approaches that were at least to some extent in harmony or at least more sympathetic towards the relativistic line coming from the sociologists. Of particular importance here is the work of the philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn, who in his famous book, you probably have heard about this in other units, the structure of scientific revolution from the early 1960s, developed a view, a theory about the way in which science develops. Perhaps it's appropriate that I remind you of one or two features of Kuhn's view so that we can then see both the commonality in some respect and the differences with the sociological view. So here's how Kuhn thinks about science. Kuhn thinks that science develops in a cyclical form. Kuhn thinks that once science becomes mature, it develops in a cyclical form in the sense that the same pattern repeats itself over and over again. So let me take you briefly through that pattern. The starting point of that pattern is a phase that Kuhn calls normal science. Another condition of normal science in a given scientific discipline, scientists in that discipline share a number of assumptions and techniques about the fields, about the phenomena they are studying. Kuhn calls this set of shared assumptions a paradigm. So a paradigm for Kuhn is something that defines a scientific community. You have a scientific community in so far as your number have a number of people who share the same paradigm. Meaning they share the same assumptions about how the phenomena for that field are to be studied, what methods are to be used, what kind of theories do we want to achieve, do we want them to be formal theories, mathematical theories using using mathematics, or do we want a more qualitative, less mathematical approach, what kind of instruments should be used, and what kind of exemplars exist for the study in this field. By exemplar, Kuhn means an exemplary achievement in that field of science. So I'll go back to the scientific, to the chemical revolution of the 18th century, just to have a, to have an example. They are a famous influential French scientist, Lavoisier, came up with a new idea of how to study chemistry. Lavoisier said the only way to properly study chemistry is to be able to measure. If you can't, if you can't give a mathematical characterization of the processes you are studying, you're not really doing chemistry. Chemistry before Lavoisier did not think that was important. Chemistry before Lavoisier was mainly practiced by pharmacists, that interestingly in Britain are still often called chemists. So the, the first chemists were the pharmacists, and the pharmacists were not interested in mathematical characterizations of the interaction of different materials. They were interested in mixing materials so that they would have a beneficial effect on someone's health. So Lavoisier introduced a new paradigm. Lavoisier suggested we have to put chemistry on a whole new footing. You have to have complicated machines, big machines. He was doing big science by the standards of the time, and incidentally the only reason why he could do it was because he was a tax collector, and most of the money that he collected in taxes for the king went straight into his own pocket, which soon made him one of the richest people in France, and that enabled him to run what we nowadays would call high-tech experiments that were hugely expensive. So by doing this, Lavoisier set a new standard for chemistry. He introduced a new paradigm. He said, from now on, let's use these complicated expensive machineries. Let's have mathematical characterizations of what we are observing and seeing, and let's not be pharmacists anymore. We want to be like physicists. We want to gain pure knowledge. So what I've characterized for you here is a paradigm, Lavoisier's paradigm. So that's normal science. You have like a face in which people share the same paradigm. But says Kuhn, if we look at the history of science, it's also striking that while a paradigm is influential and powerful for a time, it's not able to explain everything. There always will be phenomena that a given paradigm cannot explain. For example, it was a big problem for Lavoisier's chemistry that he wasn't actually able to measure everything that he was claiming to be measuring. For example, he introduced one element caloric, which he was not like the element of heat that he was not able to quantify. That was a big problem because he demanded everything should be quantifiable, but then he couldn't even quantify his own favorite element. So every paradigm over time encounters more and more things it can't really explain. It encounters more and more anomalies as the technical term goes in Kuhn's work. And as those anomalies build up over time, there comes a point when the scientific community in question somehow thinks it just can't go on like that. We can't be piling up more and more anomalies. There must be something wrong with our paradigm. And then Kuhn thinks when that happens, we enter a new phase in the cyclical process, the phase of a crisis, when like scientists in that field literally feel they're losing the ground under their feet. They don't quite know anymore what to do, how to go on. Eventually, during this period of crisis, a number of new paradigms, new ways of doing chemistry or physics, what have you, are new ways of doing this kind of research. And then eventually, the scientific revolution ushers into a new phase of normal science.