Kuhn, Thomas normal science

For chemistry as a whole, and for each of these chemical disciplines, there developed a historical (indeed, genealogical) legacy and a core literature, as well as a set of shared problems, practices, principles, and values. Thomas Kuhn has treated such disciplinary components as categories of the "paradigm" or the "disciplinary matrix," which are useful in understanding normal science before its transformation during a period of revolution.5 My concern is not revolution but the evolution of eighteenth-century chemical philosophy, whose practitioners aspired to understand the dynamics of matter, into twentieth-century theoretical chemistry, whose practitioners claimed to do so. 

At a conference in Oxford in 1961, Thomas S. Kuhn presented a paper on The Function of Scientific Dogmas in Scientific Research in which he summarized his thesis on paradigms, normal science, and scientific revolutions which was about to be published by the University of Chicago Press. [2] At the beginning of the Oxford paper, Kuhn noted the similarity of his and Michael Polanyi s views on the... 

---