Chapter I: A Role for History
Kuhn begins by addressing the idea at the center of the entire book: What are we supposed to do exactly with "received science?" This leads to a discussion about the concept called "normal science." Long story short, he basically says that it's tempting to treat current scientific ideas with religious sincerity, but if anything, science is constantly shifting our point of view, so we should feel confident that we do NOT understand the world correctly, but perhaps we are making progress.
Chapter II: The Route to Normal Science
This chapter is Kuhn explaining his desired outcome for "normal science," where scientists happily refer to past achievements, without every assuming that they are necessarily correct. Therefore, science should be kept objective and open-ended.
By studying past achievements, discoveries, and tests, and by using one's imagination to consistently challenge and correct assumptions (and by avoiding confirmation bias) a function can be found for "normal science," says Kuhn.
Chapter III: The Nature of Normal Science
Here, Kuhn continues his discussion of scientific normalcy, this time focusing on the psychological idea of a paradigm. A paradigm is a collection of interconnected beliefs that form a synthesized whole. We use paradigms to understand the world, but as Kuhn notes, this is a limited process.
This leads to his conclusion that we must consistently "mop up" our paradigms to ensure that we are not falling prey to delusion.
He says that we must be very careful in our concept of "fact," "theory" or any strict scientific discussions that imply a paradigm is necessarily correct.
Chapter IV: Normal Science as Puzzle-Solving
This chapter title pretty much captures Kuhn's idea. Instead of viewing the world as an object to be discovered, Kuhn says that normal science should be regarded as a complicated, infinitely complex game, where we are asked to solve riddles by testing one hypothesis at a time.
He mentions again that a big part of effective puzzle-solving is to hold discoveries and skepticism in tension with one another.
Chapter V: The Priority of Paradigm
This chapter is a lengthy attempt to rigorously defend Kuhn's first argument about paradigm, that it is part of how we interpret reality. Therefore, even when we are not invoking paradigmatic terms in our science, Kuhn says that paradigms are still ruling our perception, so we must be skeptical first and foremost with ourselves, if we seek to perceive reality open-mindedly.
Chapter VI: Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries
This chapter aims to explain the synchronous phenomenon of "anomalies" which is when nature is observed by a human in an unexplainable, paradigm-shifting way, leaving that person to support their new understanding, then presenting it the scientific community.
Chapter VII: Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories
Basically, this chapter says this: Sometimes, we are forced to throw away scientific ideas that are comfortable to us, because the problems they attempted to fix were not fixed.
This focuses on the utilitarian function of science, to produce realistic solutions to problems that humans face.
Chapter VIII: The Response to Crisis
When a serious crisis arises, there are many challenging aspects of how the scientific community responds. For instance, Kuhn says that most scientists are least willing to change their perception when crisis begins, because their anxieties make them unlikely to throw away their assumptions.
This chapter is also where Kuhn explains the progressive evolution of anomaly to trend to full blown scientific crisis. As this begins, he says that the paradigm will become blurred as people seek to expand their orthodox views outward into creative, new directions.
Here are the three ways Kuhn says a crisis can end:
1. The crisis is resolved within the paradigm of already-accepted "normal science."
2. The problem is categorically explained, but without the technology needed to test through the ideas fully. The community decides to resume their inquiries in the future, when technology has progressed sufficiently.
3. A new proponent arises that changes the paradigm. A war of paradigms arises as competing views are fleshed out, and the community sorts through the new paradigm, in tension with the old view.
Chapter IX: The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions
This is a lengthy, technical chapter of scientific philosophy attempting to prove systematically that scientific revolutions are actually necessary, and that a paradigm shift is a scientific revolution.
The conversation is a bit "in the weeds" so to speak, but essentially, the main argument is that to understand paradigm shifts in light of the communal nature of science, one can use political revolution as an analog. He explains further ways in which scientific revolution and political revolution are systematically similar.
Chapter X: Revolutions as Changes of World View
Because of how we use science to shape our beliefs about nature and reality, every development in the scientific community corresponds to a potential shift in world view, especially to those who understood the past paradigm being replaced.
Essentially what he says is that the locus of experience shifts, much in the same way objects can sometimes be misleading about their nature, like an animal using camoflage, or like an optical illusion.
Chapter XI: The Invisibility of Revolutions
This chapter is Kuhn's argument that because normal science is the commonly held conclusions of the community, that when scientific revolutions occur, they are invisible, hard to detect, but ultimately, they are of crucial significance.
Chapter XII: The Resolution of Revolutions
This chapter treats the issue of group beliefs and identity. What are the things that will compel a person to change their mind about a scientifically held belief from an old paradigm?
The answer is simply repeated testing. This chapter sees skepticism as a necessary, helpful part of scientific progress.
Chapter XIII: Progress Through Revolutions
The idea of progress gets treated in this last chapter. Kuhn is answering the Modernist riddle here, trying to figure out whether these sequences of scientific enlightenment and revolution are necessarily driven by progress, or if progress is a side-effect of some other process.
This ends the book on an open-ended note, because the discussion ends up becoming a philosophical treatment of "truth," which is just about as hypothetical as it gets, but he answers it at length.
