Can You Teach an Old Dogma New Tricks? When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.

discussed the resistance of science to embrace new concepts. He described how fields of scientific research are guided by dominant paradigms. He used the term “paradigm ” to mean “normal science ” or “accepted examples of actual scientific practice. ” As Kuhn noted, the benefits of a paradigm in defining and directing research in a particular field are in-evitably coupled with a tendency to disregard those ideas that fall outside its purview. He wrote: “No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit in the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others. Instead, normal-scientific research is di-rected to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.