Citation

Douglas JD. Arch. Eur. Sociol. 1966; 7(2): 249-275.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1966, Cambridge University Press)

DOI

10.1017/S0003975600001430

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The history of ideas demonstrates conclusively that certain ideas can become so pervasive and central to the thought of a culture that over many centuries the members of that culture unquestioningly apply these ideas in many different ways to new fields of experience (1). Such ideas are what we shall call metaphysical ideas. Such metaphysical ideas normally form the ground for common-sense discourse. The history of ideas has shown that they also form the ground for, and frequently constitute much of the substance of, serious intellectual works. Though science in the western world was born and developed partly as an explicit revolution against all such unexamined, "unempirical" ideas, recent work in the history of science has led to the conclusion that scientific thought is largely the result of and partly constitued by just such metaphysical ideas (2). Moreover, more recent work in the history of science has led to the conclusion that once scientific ideas have been accepted by the members of a scientific discipline, these ideas in turn come to form the unexamined ground and substance of the normal scientific works within that discipline. Though these ideas thus have far more in common with common-sense and humanistic discourse than most scientists would ever care to admit, there are some important differences which are taken into consideration by giving the established, unexamined ideas of sciences a different name--that of paradigmatic ideas (3).

Language: en