Brad+Mitchell+Entry+9

I completely agree with Thomas Kuhn in his statement that when he says that science is non-cumulative. It is often the case that new scientific theories simply replace their predecessors. With a total replacement of theory, a society will not technically gain a whole lot more information about the natural world but instead gain a greater understanding of the natural world. “If paradigms change in such a sudden way, how can they simply built on prior knowledge? For Kuhn (p.92), this indicates that scientific revolutions are "** non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one. **"” This is shown time and time again throughout history.   Especially in the early development of science, where full-fledged scientific revolutions where relatively common place, every time a new idea was put out it would replace the current explanation for the natural phenomenon which it explained. Sometimes it was just a minor amendment to a theory but more often than not the current idea would be completely erased from working theory. “For example, Aristotelians said that a stone fell because of its ‘nature’ drove it toward the center of the universe. Afterwards the normal seventeenth-century tradition of scientific practice insisted that " **the entire flux of sensory appearances, i ncluding color, taste, and even weight, was to be explained in terms of the size, shape, position, and motions the elementary corpuscles of base matter. **" (p.104) The attribution of other qualities to the elementary atoms was a resort to the occult and therefore out of bounds for science.” This goes to show that from one time period to another the explanations for explaining the same thing, even in scientific terms, where completely different meaning that their scientific knowledge could not have been accumulative. 