"there were a lot of weird ideas (fluids, etc.) about in those days for what electricity was, but that's just because the set of observations was very limited, thus expanding the space of hypotheses beyond what we consider reason these days"
That's pretty much what Kuhn means by pre-paradigm science: when scientists don't know enough about an area to have come up with general principles to guide their research. And Kuhn certainly doesn't think pre-paradigm science is better than science within a paradigm. He's primarily interested in trying to describe how science operates, rather than saying I way of doing science is better than another, but he's pretty clear that most of what scientists accomplish happens when they are working within paradigms.
> That's pretty much what Kuhn means by pre-paradigm science: when scientists don't know enough about an area to have come up with general principles to guide their research.
Isn't this extremely post-hoc reasoning? If you're on the bleeding edge, you'll formulate theories based on whatever context you have -- and experiment with that. I don't see how the idea of a "paradigm" helps here. It's what everybody does all the time.
Maybe I'm just confused about the definition of "paradigm".
... which Kuhn does define, but it's a definition just fuzzy enough that it's pretty easy to argue either way on any given area of science.
EDIT: Basically, I think more of a fan of the David Deutsch school of knowledge.
>Maybe I'm just confused about the definition of "paradigm".
Well, as the article points out, Kuhn himself never fully defined it. However, I think we can get a productive account out of reading it as "overhypothesis"[1].
That's pretty much what Kuhn means by pre-paradigm science: when scientists don't know enough about an area to have come up with general principles to guide their research. And Kuhn certainly doesn't think pre-paradigm science is better than science within a paradigm. He's primarily interested in trying to describe how science operates, rather than saying I way of doing science is better than another, but he's pretty clear that most of what scientists accomplish happens when they are working within paradigms.