Hello all,
In light of the often intense critical debate on this list, I thought people might be interested in this excerpt from the following paper:
Sterman, J. D., & Jason, W. (1999). Path Dependence, Competition, and Succession in the Dynamics of Scientific Revolution. Organization Science, 10(3), 322-341.
The main message for this list I think, is the need to be careful about being too intense in the criticism of new ideas, lest we kill off ones that could in fact be enormously helpful to our profession. At a wider level, I think we should be viewing this forum and others like as a nurturing ground (rather than a testing ground), allowing ideas to mature before letting them out on the wider world.
Regards
Tim Kannegieter
Excerpt:
"The interplay between intrinsic explanatory potential and historical contingency is quite subtle. A paradigm’s inherent potential (its logical force and power to explain nature) does influence its future development: of those paradigms surviving their youth, those with high intrinsic capability do remain dominant longer, on average, than those that are weaker.
But the impact of intrinsic capability on the longevity of any given paradigm is mediated by the competitive conditions in the emergence period. In particular, weak competitive environments make it more likely a new paradigm will rise to dominance, but can condemn even powerful paradigms to early deaths as they are extended too far and too fast, generating anomalies and prematurely destroying confidence.
On the other hand, though competition reduces the likelihood of survival, competition gives those that do survive time to bootstrap themselves into normal science, insulating them against mere disconfirmation, and ensuring they persist until the anomalies ultimately causing revolution, in Kuhn’s words, “penetrate existing knowledge to the core”.
Most important, however, competition does not serve to weed out the weak paradigms so the strong may grow. On the contrary, competition decimates the strong and weak alike -we found that intrinsic capability has but a weak effect on survival.
The mortality rate for paradigms seems to depend almost entirely on the environmental conditions surrounding their birth. This is a sobering result, since we can never know the microlevel contingencies of history that can prove decisive; here favoring an intrinsically weak paradigm, there killing an intrinsically strong theory. These characteristics of the competition among paradigms are consequences of the powerful positive feedback processes operating within and among paradigms. These positive loops can amplify microscopic perturbations in the environment (the local conditions of science, society, and self faced by the creators of a new theory) until they reach macroscopic significance. Such dynamics are the hallmark of path dependent evolutionary systems."