![]() Eventually, the old paradigm is abandoned and the vast majority of scientists adhere to the new one. ![]() To the extent that evidence about the superiority of the new program accumulates, the community of followers of the new paradigm grows at the expense of the old paradigm. As long as this revision process leads to novel predictions, the paradigm is “progressive.” If only ad hoc explanations are achieved, the program is “regressive.” Maverick scientists therefore start to search for a new progressive program to replace it. Lakatos proposed that Science organizes itself in “research programs.” The community of scientists that participate in a particular program defend its hard-core hypothesis from the appearance of anomalies by continuously revising its auxiliary hypothesis. Yet they differed on their understanding of the scientific activity and its achievements. Lakatos and Feyerabend, influenced by Kuhn, also considered futile any epistemological exercise that neglected the underlying scientific communities. However, as these anomalies accumulate, it becomes more likely that a genial maverick will posit an alternative paradigm that will prevail over the old paradigm, in spite of the resistance that the “moppers” of the old paradigm might exercise. During this period, anomalies and phenomena for which the paradigm cannot account–or that directly contradict it–are often ignored. Within the latter framework, Kuhn argues that, once indoctrinated into a paradigm, scientists devote themselves to “mopping up” this paradigm by solving puzzles whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm. Within the former framework, Silverberg and Verspagen analytically show that the accumulation of complementary inventions can explain radical change in the evolution of technology. In order to investigate the underlying mechanics of the non-linear dynamics that characterize the evolution of knowledge, one can linger either on the structure of the technology space itself or, alternatively, focus on the structure of the learning and discovery process of the community of researchers involved in the creation of knowledge. These radical transitions or paradigm shifts involve both a change in the activity of the members of the scientific community and in knowledge itself. The dynamics of scientific progress and technological evolution involve a sequence of periods of stagnation (deadlocks) and marginal, incremental change followed by brief periods of radical increase in performance accompanied by a swift adoption of a new and superior paradigm. However, social influence is not strong enough to seriously hamper individual discovery, and can act so as to empower successful individual pioneers who have conquered the new and superior paradigm. For this parameter region, nevertheless, a conservative force is exerted by the representatives of the current paradigm. The occurrence of a paradigm shift becomes more likely when each member of the community attaches a small but positive weight to the experience of his/her peers. The efficiency of the search process is heavily dependent on the weight that agents posit on social influence. We find that the combination of these two forces together with random experimentation can account for both i) marginal change, that is, periods of normal science or refinements on the performance of a given technology (and in which the community stays in the neighborhood of the current paradigm) and ii) radical change, which takes the form of scientific paradigm shifts (or discontinuities in the structure of performance of a technology) that is observed as a swift migration of the knowledge community towards the new and superior paradigm. In the proposed model, agents learn in a physical-technological landscape, and weight is attached to both individual search and social influence. We develop here a multi-agent model of the creation of knowledge (scientific progress or technological evolution) within a community of researchers devoted to such endeavors.
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