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Most scientists in most periods have been “normal scientists”. They are involved
with puzzle-solving. Only if there were many anomalies in opposition to the current
paradigm a crisis appeared and a scientific revolution could happen. Later, Kuhn
introduced the notion “disciplinary matrix” to replace “paradigm” because of many
criticisms for having used the notion “paradigm” extremely loosely.
When Sadegh-Zadeh said 'Goodbye to the Aristotelian Weltauffassung', he used
this new Kuhnian terminology. After a brief sketch on Popper's, Fleck's, and Kuhn's
views on theory dynamics in science he concluded to think that “all of these con-
cepts are still too vague and inadquate to be very useful.” Then he summarizes:
“Science does not progress continuously and by accumulation knowledge. It does
not add to an antecedent knowledge or theory
T
i
a subsequent knowledge or theory
T
i
+
1
of the same type such that one could reasonably consider science as the open,
ordered series of related theories
T
1
,
T
2
,
,
T
i
+
1
. Scientific ideas, theories, and
worldviews evolve discontinuously in that a body of knowledge or theory,
T
i
,which
is held over a particular period of time, is dislodged by another body of knowledge
or theory
T
j
because the disciplinary matrix whithin which the foremer theory
T
i
had
grown, changes to another disciplinary matrix which gives rise to the new theory,
T
j
, that is incompatible and incommensurable with its predecessor
T
i
. For example,
the Hippocratic andf Galenic humoral pathology rooted in the pre-anatomical era of
antiquity considered illness as an imbalance of four humours in the body, i.e. bile,
phlegm, blood and urine, and lasted until the eighteenth century. After Andreas
Vesalius' anatomy,
De Humanis Corporis Fabrica
(1543), and the then-emerging
early empiricism conceptualized by Francis Bacon and John Locke had made a
novel, empirical-anatomical disciplinary matrix abvailable within which illness ap-
peared to have something to do with solid parts of the body, humoral pathology was
replaced with the localized pathology of
De Sedibus et Causis Morborum
(1761) by
Giovanni Battista Morgagni. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was comple-
mented by Francois Xavier Bichat's tissue pathology. After the development of the
microscope had enabled Theodor Schwann to discover the animal cell around 1838,
localized pathaology was replaced by Rudolf Virchow's
cellular pathology
(1858),
which considered diseases as cellular changes and disorders. With some alterations
and additions, this view has been dominating medicine since. We are curretnly
witnessing the emergence of a competing
molecular pathology
, e.g. genomics and
pathobiochemistry, which explains and treats diseases as molecular processes in the
body. Maybe our descendants will encounter
quantum pathology
or something like
that in the near future ...” [69, p. 3f]
“Thought styles” or “paradigms” or “disciplinary matrices” represent scientific
'world views' (Weltanschauungen) but we have to consider their range of valid-
ity. Most of them root in just one scientific discipline (e.g. pathology, physics, or
chemistry), they correspond to a self-contained excerpt of knowledge. Therefore,
we have to cosinder what is the coverage of these thought styles or disciplinary
matrices. As we mentioned already above, Sadegh-Zadeh identified the concept
of two-valuedness as a disciplinary matrix of higher generality; he stated more
precisely: “At the highest level of generality we presently encounter, to our sur-
prise, a particular disciplinary matrix which has been nourishing all sciences and
...
