The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks

INTRODUCTION: METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL ARGUMENT Thomas Kuhn's concept of 'paradigm" has attracted a lot of attention from sociologists and historians of science. In particular, some recent work has involved the search for groups of scientists which are taken to be the social analogue of this idea. I will argue here that the boundaries of those 'social circles' of scientists which have been found are not likely to correspond with the boundaries of groups sharing a paradigm unless the term be construed in a restricted sense. This is because the research methods used in most cases are unsuitable for the investigation of cognitive specificity and discontinuity. But it is precisely because paradigm groups are seen as conceptually homogeneous and bounded that the idea has excited interest in the sociology of science as a branch of the sociology of knowledge. An impressive number of studies2 have been published which try to show