To an alarming degree, science is not self-correcting

Here is an analogy to a trivial situation. Which is more convincing?

Positive result: By following the steps in the documentation, I installed MS Word on my computer. Therefore, MS Word can be installed on my computer.

Negative result: I followed the steps in the documentation, but MS Word still doesn't work on my computer. Therefore, MS Word cannot be installed on my computer.

If you're like me, you barely pause after reading the positive result, but the negative one brings to mind piles of questions: did you have the right version for your OS? Do you have enough disk space? Does your computer work properly in other respects? A really tricky problem could take ages to figure out. At some point it's probably going to seem wiser just to abandon the problem, and get a different computer or a different program.

So, as a scientist, when you're faced with a negative result, you know you have a battle ahead of you. If you don't think anyone will care very much about your result, moving on to the next project may seem to be the right choice. It's a tough situation, and I sympathize with anyone facing it. And is it the right choice for science as a whole? Sometimes it isn't, but sometimes it is.

[1] For one such example, check out the Eotvos experiment and its many descendants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eötvös_experiment

For example, water has certain properties based on the conditions surrounding it. These properties exist whether you know about them or not. If you can, through observation and/or measurement, discover these properties, you have discovered truth. If you never discover these properties, it does not affect the existence of the properties.

Something they can point to to rebuke scientific studies because they don't believe the scientific study is valid.

I too didn't understand the point of this article. Nor how it showed that science is not self-correcting. To me it just talked about some issues with scientific research but didn't support it's headline at all. I've never heard anyone claim that science was self-correcting in the short term, these things take decades and sometimes even centuries to self-correct.

And honestly that's ok. Science is all about having the best answer we can have, not the right answer. It's impossible to know we are right beyond the shadow of a doubt. We need to scrutinize how we research and improve our methods as we figure out how to but that doesn't mean science has some major issue. That's jut how it works and how it has historically worked as far as I know.

But they aren't always thrown out in a paradigm shift; that's the point. Newtonian physics was not thrown out in the paradigm shift to relativity. Our understanding of why Newtonian physics works as well as it does within its domain of validity changed; but the fact that it does work within its domain of validity did not change.

Kuhn picks a number of examples where that was not the case--where the old model did get thrown out (for example, the paradigm shift from Aristotelian physics to Galilean/Newtonian physics, and the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican model of the Solar System). But he tried to apply particular features of those examples to all paradigm shifts, which doesn't work.

Ideally, the new model resulting from a paradigm shift supercedes the old model while modeling the edge cases that the older model was unable to account for.

In the case of relativity, it did account for edge cases that Newtonian physics couldn't; but it didn't supersede Newtonian physics, as I noted above. We still use Newtonian physics where its predictions are accurate enough for our purposes, which is most of the time. It's only in particular domains (such as GPS, to pick an example ordinary people are familiar with) that we need relativity to get accurate enough results.