You ain't seen nothing yet. I don't get mad, I get even.

You've been warned not to fuck with me.

The point of Kuhn's work is to explain that scientific progress is discontinuous. Most of the time, science is "normal": additional information adds up to what already exists. Kuhn wrote that this normal science is mostly "cleaning"*: the original paradigm needs its predictions to be refined, applied to all of the areas concerned, etc.

But, from time to time, when something unexplainable appears in plain sight, there is a difficult operation: a change of paradigm. This is what really matters to Kuhn, because this is where his work brings in something new in epistemology. These changes of paradigm are "scientific revolutions" (hence the title: the structure of scientific revolutions, and not the structure of normal science). A change of paradigm implies a progress, but it also implies a dramatic refoundation of the world in which the scientific works. (I must admit that I have only read one/third of the book so far, but it's pretty straightforward from what little I have read...)

The first reason why I mentioned Kuhn's book is that it is a much different way to look at scientific progress (compared to the common belief that scientific progress is continuous, with sometimes great minds making an important discovery, but using the same methods and applying them to the same objects). Hence showing that indeed, "joe and jane" don't know much about what science actually is; and trying to provide a reference to some relatively recent work (still about 50 years old ) about what science actually is.

The second reason is that I think that Kuhn's paradigms can easily be applied to everyone's acquisition of knowledge (which is the theme this thread)... From time to time, you discover something that you can't deal with without changing your view of the world. For example, a kid can suddenly realize that good people don't always win : his world vision will be deeply affected in many areas (notably, morality), and he will have to change dramatically the way he apprehends a lot of issues. The same applies to someone who loses or acquires a strong belief in God, to someone who suddenly realizes that his dualist or mecanist vision of the world is wrong or uncertain, etc, etc. In each of this cases, there is a process of adaptation in order to apprehend the world according to the new paradigm (a revolution in our heads)... and then we can start again to accumulate information (normal acquisition of knowledge).

* That said, Kuhn doesn't say that it is boring or pointless...

__________________
Client: In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!
Tailor: But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look at the world, and look at my trousers.
(Beckett)

In ways of course. It's odd how seemingly unrelated subjects become related the more you learn about ALL of them.

Sometimes learning one new item in one area ends up updating many items in many other areas.

Yes, he/she does.

And his/her aggressive attitude motivates, me at least, to move straight past anything he/she says because it's consistently nasty and aggressive and in no way encouraging of civil dialogue.