Nicholas C. Mullins

The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study.

gence of the role of the scientist and the factors affecting the growth of science within a comparative, historical framework, using material from ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, France, Britain, Germany and modern America. The weakest chapter of the book is the one on modern America, which becomes very like a micro-sociology of American higher education, an approach BenDavid has tried to avoid in the rest of the book. Traditional societies like ancient

A Sociological Theory of Scientific Revolution

The intellectual structure of science is affected by both large and small changes. In his ‘postscript’ Kuhn (1970) moved his conception of ‘revolutionary’ science from its prior focus on the massive and heroic shifts of the Galileian, Newtonian and Einsteinian examples to one emphasizing the aggregation of changes in the ‘paradigms’ held by groups of scientists. This paper investigates the intellectual and social pre-conditions for the aggregation of changes in modern science. It also discusses the processes that allow aggregated, small changes to be perceived by most scientists as a single block of changes — a revolutionary change in paradigm.