Abstract

Thomas Kuhn claims that all scientific discoveries share the same characteristics: namely, an awareness of anomaly and an emergence of observational and conceptual recognition leading to a change of paradigm categories and procedures. He does not, however, discuss how new hypotheses or explanations are formed or invented. Paul Feyerabend claims that scientific progress results from a range of sociological factors which work to promote politically convenient notions of how nature operates. In this paper, I argue that science can benefit from revolutionary social circumstances; that the social circumstances in force at the time that, for instance, Johannes Kepler developed his theories of planetary motion, created an environment which encouraged, albeit indirectly, revolutionary scientific thinking; that there is no Kuhnian scientific revolution without revolutionary hypotheses; and that the formation or invention of these revolutionary hypotheses is a creative act that requires an environment that encourages creativity.