Question

Kuhn discusses the “box” of the paradigm and describes efforts to place all the events of nature within that box.

What are the advantages and/or dangers associated with attempting to place social science in a box? Use the case of behaviorism to make your point; did behaviorism become confined to a box and, if so, to what consequence?

Answer 1

According to the scientific revolutionary philosopher Thomas Kuhn, science represents what he called a ‘paradigm’. That is, scientists constitute a culture of their own and their beliefs and academic behaviours are governed by certain implicit And explicit norms which validate their perspective on objectivity and positivism. To this end, the scientist community can promote and generate only those ideas which can fit the similitude of their common beliefs. Thus, a major critique of positivist science can be that it loses the larger vision of generating novel ideas and instead focuses on fitting theories and research within existing, confined “boxes”. Research in social science then becomes a strenuous practice of forcing nature into the conceptual boxes acquired from ones educational experience. However, scientific revolutions can also emerge in this situation when there is dissent in the community about the existing normative practices within a discipline and this leads to emergence of a new set of theory or a paradigm shift.

Kuhn’s Ideas on scientifc revolution is significant as it can be used as framework to evaluate the potential decay within the system of theories in the social sciences. Within Psychology, we can see how certain ideas which may have been revolutionary at the time of their emergence had become archaic over the decades. Thus for instance,Watsonian behaviourism at one point provided a practical way to apply the psychological theories to resolve the real life problems in society such as the use of conditioning in treating phobias, aggressive behaviour in young adults, etc. however, a the same time, it can be seen that the treatment model within behaviourism itself has been influenced by the cultural politics of the time. Thus for instance, classical conditioning and punishment were increasingly applied as ways to give institutionalised treatment to even the sexual minorities since homosexuality was stereotyped as a pathology. Thus, in a way, a behavioural therapist too was prone to fall short of te ideal of objectivity and his/her treatment approach was built towards perpetuation of even some the draconian and inhuman practices in society.

In the end, it appears that a once revolutionary theory of objective behaviourism ended up being confined to a box of concepts such a study behaviour and environment (S-R chains) and it became oblivious to some of the more dynamic aspects of human life such as emotional, interpersonal relationships, the myriad of simple and complex cognitive processes, unconscious motives, etc.