Richard F. answered • 02/19/20
Cornell Ph.D with teaching experience from MS/HS through Ph.D.
This is a big topic - and you seem to have cut-and-pasted a question, so I can't know what "your field of study" is. But the basic idea is simple enough.
First: stereotypically, in "normal science" we adjudicate between two or more conflicting theories by setting up an experiment or other investigation in which the theories predict different outcomes - and choose what to believe based on what's a match and what isn't. Classic case: Newton vs Einstein on where Mercury should show up during an eclipse. (Most science is way less neat than this example!)
However, *very* large changes in underlying outlook and theoretical commitments (scientific revolutions) make this kind of test impossible, according to Thomas Kuhn anyway. The followers of Aristotle thought the "sublunary" (Earth-bound) and celestial worlds were fundamentally different - actually made from different substances, and following different laws; Newton offered an entirely new "paradigm" in which they were the same and followed the same laws, notably of gravitation. You don't just set up one experiment to choose Newton over Aristotle; you choose Newton because he's offering a wholly new way to conceive of the world - in which the very terms, like mass and energy, mean different things - and his "paradigm" offers a more unified and powerful set of general explanations.
In short: if the paradigms are different, the key terms don't even mean the same thing, so simple comparison is impossible. This is one reason why "the scientific method" as taught in schools is at best a cartoon version of the truth. But it does NOT imply, as so many half-baked Kuhn groupies believed, that one paradigm doesn't represent progress over another.
