One thing that went too far into relativism was Kuhn’s insistence that there is no way to tell in advance which paradigm is going to be successful. His description of this is that you pick “teams” initially for all kinds of not-truth-tracking reasons, and you only figure out many years later whether your new paradigm will be winning or not.
This is a good point, though it’s important to distinguish between assessing whether a paradigm is going to be successful (which may be impossible to say at the beginning of research) and assessing whether it is worthy of pursuit. The latter only means that for now, the paradigm seems promising, but of course, the whole research program may flop at some point. While Kuhn didn’t address these problems in great detail, I linked in my previous comment to some papers that discuss his work with regard to these questions.
the lecturer of the course, a Kuhn expert, seemed to only be asking the question “How does (human-)science proceed?”, and never “How should science proceed?”
It’s a pity this issue wasn’t explicitly discussed in the course you mention because it’s actually really interesting. Some Kuhn scholars try to explain the relationship between the descriptive and the normative dimension you mention by bringing up the analogy with the grammar: just like we formulate a given grammar by looking at descriptive aspects of how the given language is used, this helps us to also formulate the normative aspects of how it should be used. Now, not everyone will agree about what this means when it comes to scientific inquiry, but I would defend the following claim: the normative has to be formulated within the boundaries of how science tends to evolve, where we may find issues that are problematic (for example, we may notice that scientists are insufficiently open-minded at times, or that sometimes they employ inadequate methods, etc.) and in view of which we may formulate some normative suggestions. In other words, the normative can’t be formulated out of the blue, ignoring some important constraints which are hard to get rid of (e.g. the fact that different paradigms may come with different conceptual frameworks).
This is a good point, though it’s important to distinguish between assessing whether a paradigm is going to be successful (which may be impossible to say at the beginning of research) and assessing whether it is worthy of pursuit. The latter only means that for now, the paradigm seems promising, but of course, the whole research program may flop at some point. While Kuhn didn’t address these problems in great detail, I linked in my previous comment to some papers that discuss his work with regard to these questions.
It’s a pity this issue wasn’t explicitly discussed in the course you mention because it’s actually really interesting. Some Kuhn scholars try to explain the relationship between the descriptive and the normative dimension you mention by bringing up the analogy with the grammar: just like we formulate a given grammar by looking at descriptive aspects of how the given language is used, this helps us to also formulate the normative aspects of how it should be used. Now, not everyone will agree about what this means when it comes to scientific inquiry, but I would defend the following claim: the normative has to be formulated within the boundaries of how science tends to evolve, where we may find issues that are problematic (for example, we may notice that scientists are insufficiently open-minded at times, or that sometimes they employ inadequate methods, etc.) and in view of which we may formulate some normative suggestions. In other words, the normative can’t be formulated out of the blue, ignoring some important constraints which are hard to get rid of (e.g. the fact that different paradigms may come with different conceptual frameworks).