Methodology as a Normative Conceptual Problem: The Case of the Indian ‘Warped Zipper’ Model of DNA

As Larry Laudan observes, it is ‘widely maintained that the methodology to which a scientist subscribes is really little more than perfunctory window dressing, which is honored more in the breach than in the observance’.¹ This is a view shared by T. S. Kuhn, and common in much post-Kuhnian writing. Kuhn makes it clear why he lacks interest in scientists’ commitments to methodological canons in the following comparatively rare reference to them:

The men who transformed scientific theory during the seventeenth century sometimes talked like Baconians, but it has yet to be shown that the ideology which a number of them embraced had a major effect, substantive or methodological, on their central contributions to science.²