Chapter 13 Constructivism

In one of his fi rst papers, Thomas Kuhn ( 1959 ) addressed the “essential tension” implicit in scientifi c research, i.e., the contrast between convergent and divergent thinking. He considered both to be central to the advance of science. Convergent thinking is what scientists do in their daily “normal research projects,” where the “scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientifi c tradition” ( ibid., p. 234). The convergent mode is “neither intended nor likely to produce fundamental discoveries or revolutionary changes in scientifi c theory” ( ibid., p. 233). As he would describe in greater detail in The Structure of Scientifi c Revolutions (1970), this is because students are already discouraged from developing divergent-thinking abilities, partly because their education is based on textbooks, which “exhibit concrete problem solutions that the profession has come to accept as paradigms... Nothing could be better calculated to produce ‘mental sets’ or Einstellungen ” (Kuhn, 1959 , p. 229). Clearly, from this perspective, mental sets (or “mental inertia”) play an important role in paradigms as they prevent the normal scientist from gazing beyond the limits of her paradigm. Kuhn also emphasized the importance of convergent thinking as “no part of science progressed very far or very rapidly before this convergent education and correspondingly convergent normal practice became possible” ( ibid., p. 237). However, Kuhn also recognized the divergent method because in order to assimilate new discoveries and theories “the scientist