But, as I mentioned earlier, I'm not clear on how you determine whether stultification is actually happening. For example, how do you distinguish the undesirable process of stagnation due to the dominance of poor avenues of research, from the desirable process of solidifying science into a rigid body of theory as it gets closer to accurately representing reality?
Or better yet, how do you differentiate between stultification and finding the real answer? Should the state of a scientific field be in flux just for the sake of being in flux even when the models they have work and appear to be the right answer?