Abstract
Early in his work Kuhn identifies a tension in science between conservativeness and innovation in theory development; that is, scientists face uncertainty in choosing between the exploitation of an existing theory or the creation of a new one. Kuhn suggests that theory choice should be based on heuristics involving common scientific virtues; however, he does not specify how those values could lead a decentralized group of scientists to collectively produce successful science. In this chapter, we introduce a model for how this process might take place. We shift the focus of rational theory choice from selecting the best among a given set of theories to finding a balance between selecting among given theories and searching for new ones. Here we show that the local interactions of rational scientists balancing the exploitation and exploration of theories results in a very robust pattern characterized by a succession of tradition-bound periods punctuated by non-cumulative breaks.
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Notes
- 1.
“Even those who have followed me this far will want to know how a value-based enterprise of the sort I have described can develop as a science does, repeatedly producing powerful new techniques for prediction and control. To that question, unfortunately, I have no answer at all [….] The lacuna is one I feel acutely” (Kuhn 1977, pp. 332–333).
- 2.
The insight that division of labor increases productivity by fostering specialization is as old as Adam Smith ((1776, 2003)) and marked the birth of modern economics.
- 3.
It is only in the long term that these individual decisions will collectively exhaust that theory and lead to its collapse.
- 4.
Each agent only knows the utility of his own theory based on his local information from the neighborhood and when a convincing attempt is made the probability of success is proportional to the utility of their respective theories.
- 5.
Note that the utility of contributing to an entirely new theory is always exactly 1 because an undeveloped theory has no adopters and no production so both A and P are 0 and Eq. 8.4 always equals 1 irrespective of α.
References
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Poincaré, H. 1905. Science and hypothesis. London: Walter Scott Publishing.
Polhill, J. G., Sutherland, L.-A., and Gotts, N. M. 2010. Using qualitative evidence to enhance an agent-based modelling system for studying land use change. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 13 (2): 1–0. http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/2/10.html.
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Reichenbach, H. 1938. Experience and prediction. University of Chicago Press.
Smith, A. 1776, 2003. Wealth of nations. New York: Bantam Classics.
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De Langhe, R., Rubbens, P. (2015). From Theory Choice to Theory Search: The Essential Tension Between Exploration and Exploitation in Science. In: Devlin, W., Bokulich, A. (eds) Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions - 50 Years On. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 311. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13383-6_8
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