A paradigm is a global organizing model or theory with great explanatory power.

An immature science is preparadigmatic -- that is, it is still in its natural history phase of competing schools.

Slowly, a science matures and becomes paradigmatic.

This happened in chemistry with Dalton, in geology with Charles Lyall, and in biology with Darwin.

Paradigms are not always correct, but we learn more quickly through error than through confusion.

What we speak of as "normal science" is the day to day scientific work of articulation of the dominant scientific paradigm.

Occasionally, scientific crises precipitate paradigm change. This results from persistent anomalies that effect a blurring of the old paradigm and a loosening of rules for normal research. Competing schools arise again.

Paradigm change is a value change; normal science can articulate a paradigm but it cannot change it -- only intuition can change paradigms.

Kuhn writes: " Paradigms are not corrigible by normal science at all... normal science ultimately leads only to the recognition of anomalies and to crises. And these are terminated, not by deliberations and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch. Scientists then often speak of the "scales falling from the eyes" or of the "lightning flash" that " inundates" a previously obscure puzzle. On other occasions the relevant illumination comes in sleep. No ordinary sense of the term "interpretation" fits these flashes of intuition through which a new paradigm is borne." (Structure, pages 122-123)

Scientific revolutions are then made invisible by textbooks, which are written in such airway to make science seem purely cumulative and progressive.

Kuhn believes that the word "science" must be reserved for fields that progress. In Kuhn’s opinion, the humanities and religion are preparadigmatic. Individual schools may make progress, but the overall enterprise does not.

What then of truth and reality? Kuhn asserts that a new paradigm must resolve generally recognized problems and it must preserve a large part of the problem solving ability of the older paradigm. But paradigm change does not carry us ever closer to truth. Kuhn writes: "there is no theory independent way to reconstruct phrases like 'really there'." Science is a unidirectional and irreversible process in the sense that later theories are:

-- wider and scope,
-- more accurate in prediction,
-- and solve more problems,

but still that does not get us closer to the Truth, according to Kuhn.

Thomas Kuhn is correct at least in part. Like the rest of us, scientists see what they expect to see. Facts come clothed in history and colored by context. Science is less a statement of truth than a running argument.

Albert Einstein once observed: "If the researcher went about his work without any pre-conceived opinion, how should he be able to select out those facts from the immense abundance of the most complex experience, and just those, which are simple enough to permit lawful connections to be evident?"

Because of the social contexts of science and religion, in both, novelty emerges only with difficulty, in the face of resistance and against the background provided by expectation. Therefore, science is not purely synonymous with "objective." Theories are systems of meaning explaining observed facts, and meaning is contingent on many psychological, sociological, and cultural factors that inevitably makes it less than completely certain.