0000
Written
2003
Addressed to
2010s

Viewed within a multiparadigmatic framework, cognitive psychology may be the most likely of the existing schools to move psychology to the Kuhnian stage of normal science. However, the apparent emergence of the neuroscientific school allows us to question how long the cognitive school will remain dominant, and it is possible that within the next decade the two schools will directly compete for transcendence.

Jessica L. Tracy, Richard W. Robins, Samuel D. Gosling

Tracking Trends in Psychological Science

Annotation

Neuroscience did surge in prestige and funding through the 2010s, but its bid for paradigmatic dominance was undermined by the replication crisis: fMRI studies proved particularly unreliable, and when seventy independent teams analyzed the same neuroimaging dataset, they used seventy different analytical pipelines and reached substantially different conclusions. The two schools did not so much compete as merge into cognitive neuroscience, making the Kuhnian horse race Tracy, Robins, and Gosling anticipated somewhat moot.

What Actually Happened

Neuroscience surged in prestige and funding through the 2010s — the US BRAIN Initiative (2013) and the EU Human Brain Project (2013) poured billions into the field. However, the replication crisis hit neuroscience hard: fMRI studies proved particularly unreliable, and a 2020 study showed seventy independent teams analyzing the same neuroimaging dataset reached substantially different conclusions using different analytical pipelines. The two schools merged into cognitive neuroscience rather than competing for dominance, making the Kuhnian framework largely inapplicable.

Related Entries

1980
expires0000

Why did I pick on the next nine years instead of the next 900 for finding a solution to the population crisis? One answer is that the world is rapidly running out of food. And famine, of course, could be one way to reach a death rate solution to the population problem. In fact, the battle to feed humanity is already lost, in the sense that we will not be able to prevent large famines in the next decade or so.

Dr Paul R. EhrlichCulture & Society
1981
expires0000

In twenty years, the USSR will be producing almost twice as much industrial output as is now produced in the entire non socialist world.

The 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet UnionCulture & Society
1888
expires0000

At present weapons are being changed every ten years, and even more frequently. In another fifteen years or so, people will use for shooting not rifles but some kind of lightning, some sort of a machine emitting a holocaustal electrical stream. Tell me: what can we invent in this line so as to surprise our neighbors? What if in fifteen years every great power will have secretly stored away one such surprise for any kind of eventuality? Alas, we are merely capable of imitating and purchasing ammunition from others, and—at best—of repairing it at home. To invent such machines we should have to have our own independent, and not purchased, science, not an imported but a free one—one that has taken root in our soil. As yet we do not possess such a science, nor do we even have a purchased one.

Fyodor Mikhailovich DostoevskyCulture & Society