PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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practitioners and a majority of practitioners subsequently needs to develop a pertaining
body of what they regard as successful practice. Kuhn’s phenomenological evolutionary
scheme described the history of natural science as a progression of periods of so-called
normal science broken by periods of radical and revolutionary change leading to new
paradigms. Science is understood here as a process of searching for fundamental
principles governing cause and effect in the universe, and scientific knowledge is thought
to be attainable via use of scientific methods such as hypothesis building, repeatable
experiments and observation. Yet most researchers ignore that Kuhn’s analysis really
only pertained to the history of the natural sciences, and that the notion of paradigm
cannot so easily transferred to the social sciences. As Muller (1998:287) summarizes:
Disciplines in the natural sciences have illustrated the validity of his paradigmatic
principles by applying those principles to their fields of activity. The rigorous
application of Kuhn’s formulation of in social science disciplines is, however, a
different proposition. The intrinsic attributes of the human sciences are not congruent
with those in the natural science domain, nor – by logical inference – with those of the
paradigm.
Bent Flyvbjerg (2001) equally argues that the case is fundamentally different for
the social sciences. In his recently translated book Making Social Science Matter he
comes to the following conclusion:
The social sciences do not evolve via scientific revolutions, as Kuhn says is the case
for the natural sciences. Rather, as pointed out by Hubert Dreyfus, social sciences go
though periods where various constellations of power and waves of intellectual
fashion dominate, and where a change from one period to another, which on the
surface may resemble a paradigm shift, actually consists of the researchers within a
given area abandoning a “dying” wave for a growing one…. Not paradigm shifts but
rather style changes are what characterize social science: it is not a case of evolution,
but more of fashion.
(Flyvbjerg 2001:30) 15
14 This is particularly true for the case of “communicative rationality” in transport planning. Also see
below.
15 Note that Flyvbjerg is of course employing a very Foucauldian critique here. He even continues the
above paragraph with a quote from Foucault: “Foucault poses the questions of whether it is reasonable at