Since the appearance of T. S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scholars from various fields have sought to evaluate their disciplines in the light of Kuhnian criteria for scientific change. In this paper I argue that a new paradigm seems needed in high energy physics, and that there is no more reason to say that matter is made of elementary particles, than to say that it is not. My argument, that high energy physics is approaching a state of crisis, (...) and that a new paradigm is needed, is based on an examination of two events which, according to Kuhn, presage a conceptual revolution: (1) the "old" paradigm of normal science becomes unclear; and (2) this paradigm fails to support normal problem solving research, and scientists begin to use it as if it were merely definitional. After examining the elementary particles paradigm in the light of these two criteria, I conclude that high energy physics is moving from "normal science" to "extraordinary science." I argue neither that a new paradigm has been found, nor that a return to normal science is imminent; instead I attempt to briefly outline some of the conceptual problems in high energy physics to which Heisenberg, Feynman, and others have alluded, but which so far have not been spelled out in any great philosophical detail. No attempt is made to argue about what the specific consequences of these difficulties might be, but merely to begin to clarify the problems facing scientists dealing with elementary particles. (shrink)

What is an epistemological crisis? Consider, first, the situation of ordinary agents who are thrown into such crises. Someone who has believed that he was highly valued by his employers and colleagues is suddenly fired; someone proposed for membership of a club whose members were all, so he believed, close friends is blackballed. Or someone falls in love and needs to know what the loved one really feels; someone falls out of love and needs to know how he or she (...) can possibly have been so mistaken in the other. For all such persons the relationship of seems to is becomes crucial. It is in such situations that ordinary agents who have never learned anything about academic philosophy are apt to rediscover for themselves versions of the other-minds problem and the problem of the justification of induction. They discover, that is, that there is a problem about the rational justification of inferences from premises about the behaviour of other people to conclusions about their thoughts, feelings, and attitudes and of inferences from premises about how individuals have acted in the past to conclusions expressed as generalizations about their behaviour - generalizations which would enable us to make reasonably reliable predications about their future behaviour. What they took to be evidence pointing unambiguously in some one direction now turns out to have been equally susceptible of rival interpretations. Such a discovery is often paralysing, and were we all of us all of the time to have to reckon with the multiplicity of possible interpretations open to us, social life as we know it could scarcely continue. For social life is sustained by the assumption that we are, by and large, able to construe each other's behaviour - that error, deception, self-deception, irony and ambiguity, although omnipresent in social life, are not so pervasive as to render reliable reasoning and reasonable action impossible. But can this assumption in any way be vindicated? (shrink)