Beware the Community Structure of Science

"A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men* who share a paradigm," according to scientist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'.

"A scientific community consists of the practitioners of a scientific speciality. To an extent unparalleled in most other fields, they have undergone similar educations and professional initiations; in the process they have absorbed the same technical literature and drawn many of the same lessons from it... The members of a scientific community see themselves and are seen by others as the men* uniquely responsible for the pursuit of a set of shared goals, including the training of their successors. Within such groups communication is relatively full and professional judgements relatively unanimous."

"The study of paradigms... is what mainly prepares the student for membership in the particular scientific community with which he will later practice. Because he there joins men* who learned the bases of their field from the same concrete models, his subsequent practice will seldom evoke overt disagreement over fundamentals. Men* whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are the prerequisites for normal science, ie. for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition."

The shared values and norms of the scientific community form a barrier to out-of-paradigm phenomena and concepts. Kuhn says normal science aims to 'force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all.'

All this suggests that Carbon Farming will meet staunch resistance from the scientific establishment because it is out-of-paradigm. In the face of this resistance we should be 'unreasonable'. In the words of George Bernard Shaw,
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

*Kuhn's paradigm of the gender structure of science is a reflection of the date at which he was writing.