Yet some astronomers, Kuhn found, were also Renaissance Neoplatonists and Neopythagoreans, believing that mathematics was the basis of all truth and beauty. For them, the simpler calculations that Copernicus theory permitted were enough to make a strong case for its truth. Kuhn s own experience as a physicist bore this out. Scientists, like other people, have to make decisions about what projects to pursue and how to allocate their time. Younger scientists have to decide which research projects will get them tenure or grants or control of a laboratory.
Older scientists have their reputations to defend.
In addition, scientific articles are taken seriously only if published in certain journals, so research is constrained by what the editors of those journals will accept. Kuhn realized that because science textbooks were more useful if they just taught the conclusions and methods of science without all the false starts and theories discarded along the way, the story science told about itself ignored the ambiguity of its actual practice. Kuhn thought that these sociological factors explained why scientists would not divide up into the warring schools that marked other disciplines. Scientists don t just conduct experiments to collect raw facts, but to prove or disprove some hypothesis. The hypothesis determines which variables to isolate and which to ignore, and they limit the acceptable explanations of the results.