Confessing about Kuhn ...
I use the terms "paradigm" and "revolution" (in relation to paradigms) pretty much in the manner laid out by Thomas Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and latter essays along the same line. My interpretation of the meaning of what Kuhn says is pretty conservative (not surprising to those who know me ... my interpretation of things like Quantum Mechanics and Goedel's Incompleteness theories are likewise conservative).
At the end of the day i do not believe that the word "paradigm" picks out anything real. It is a useful fiction at best. It is a good tool for introducing topics concerning assumptions and cultural norms, though. He does put forth many questions that i take very seriously.
Leading among these is the concern about discussing anything, including hard sciences, across paradigm boundries. [The exact boundries are hard to place, as Kuhn points out in his own book on the Copernican Revolution.] But noting that even base terms like "mass" are significantly different entities in the Newtonion [where it is a constant] and Einsteinian [where it is a variable] frameworks, and then to think about the condition of the less well defined terms, certainly is a thought worth consideration. Analytic philosophers are split on whether this problem is intractable, but i think most Continental philosophers would agree that it is intractable. So i, not believing it is visciously so, fall into a minority camp on this issue. By that i mean that, although there will be places we cannot go with our thought, there are many useful places we can go ... and may the gods grant me the understanding to know the difference.
One of the "useful" places for an analytic philosopher in the world today, and a task my mentor George E. Smith takes on from time to time, is to sit down amongst competing schools of scientific thought (at their behest) and figure out how they are using terms to help them to not just "talk past one another" when debating issues ... that is ... roughly ... to set up a translation, a Rosetta Stone, between the competing paradigms.
That is a case, though, where the paradigms are close to one another. It is not obvious that we can do the same thing in comparing, say, ancient Chinese skepticism to modern French skepticism ... and such book titles as "The Tao of Physcis" (F. Capra), as well as the content, drive me nuts. I think any interesting comprisons between those sets are thoughts are pretty well intractable.
Where does the line sit? I don't know. I feel comfortable comparing spots within modern and even contemporary science, but pre Newton (physics) and Lavoissier (chemistry) it starts getting dicey for me. It is always dicey for me in the non-mature sciences (everything outside physics and chemistry pretty much) ... though when parties are agreed toward finding some common language, I think progress can be made.
The issues that crop up between paradigms are similar to the issues of language translation, and even of "translation" across language dialects, and the same language group over different times. That is, i'll "get" more of Twain than of a Balzac translation ... but i think i get something of both and i'd rather read Grimmelshausen's "Simplicisimus" over DeLillo's "White Noise" any day. In the history of science there is also the advantage in avoiding the study of the new in that we can see how the struggles turned out ... where as in the debate over, say, string theory, that has yet to be worked through. The loss via "translation" is less than the loss invoked by still being in the middle of the fray. (That and, the point of the study is ikely to be pertaining to how not to be so lost in the middle of the fray in the first place.)
Ih Kuhnian theory revolutions are driven by knowledge and questions. The old paradigm is no longer answering new questions. New assumptions are given a chance and, if they seem to work well on the new important questions of the day, the younger generation runs with them. Paradigms that are still answering big questions, though, are not succeptable to revoltion ... only those that have gone stagnent.
It is important to note too that the new paradigm, at the highest point of the debate between the old and the new, is usually inferior in many or even most ways to the old. The younger generation has faith that the problems will be fixed AND the new hard questions will be answered. The old generation almost never admit they were wrong, they merely die off. Also, often, the critic of the new paradigm by the old guard is never answered successfully ... the questions merely become irrelevent. (Newton never answered the mechanist's main objection that his theory of Universal Gravity never told us what gravity is, there is and can be no working model of his force. Newton not only overturned the mechanistic theories of earthly and celestial gravity, he made their way of thinking about the problem irrelevent rather than answered, directly, their critique.)
I think revolutions are driven, outside science too, by pushing where the cracks are. No matter how right one is, if the rest of the population does not see a problem, you can argue until you are blue in the face (and strung out on caffeine from writing essays all night) with no affect. But when society senses the problem and is looking for a new angle, then even half-thought-out notions may get their hearing.
[another uncompleted thought]
At the end of the day i do not believe that the word "paradigm" picks out anything real. It is a useful fiction at best. It is a good tool for introducing topics concerning assumptions and cultural norms, though. He does put forth many questions that i take very seriously.
Leading among these is the concern about discussing anything, including hard sciences, across paradigm boundries. [The exact boundries are hard to place, as Kuhn points out in his own book on the Copernican Revolution.] But noting that even base terms like "mass" are significantly different entities in the Newtonion [where it is a constant] and Einsteinian [where it is a variable] frameworks, and then to think about the condition of the less well defined terms, certainly is a thought worth consideration. Analytic philosophers are split on whether this problem is intractable, but i think most Continental philosophers would agree that it is intractable. So i, not believing it is visciously so, fall into a minority camp on this issue. By that i mean that, although there will be places we cannot go with our thought, there are many useful places we can go ... and may the gods grant me the understanding to know the difference.
One of the "useful" places for an analytic philosopher in the world today, and a task my mentor George E. Smith takes on from time to time, is to sit down amongst competing schools of scientific thought (at their behest) and figure out how they are using terms to help them to not just "talk past one another" when debating issues ... that is ... roughly ... to set up a translation, a Rosetta Stone, between the competing paradigms.
That is a case, though, where the paradigms are close to one another. It is not obvious that we can do the same thing in comparing, say, ancient Chinese skepticism to modern French skepticism ... and such book titles as "The Tao of Physcis" (F. Capra), as well as the content, drive me nuts. I think any interesting comprisons between those sets are thoughts are pretty well intractable.
Where does the line sit? I don't know. I feel comfortable comparing spots within modern and even contemporary science, but pre Newton (physics) and Lavoissier (chemistry) it starts getting dicey for me. It is always dicey for me in the non-mature sciences (everything outside physics and chemistry pretty much) ... though when parties are agreed toward finding some common language, I think progress can be made.
The issues that crop up between paradigms are similar to the issues of language translation, and even of "translation" across language dialects, and the same language group over different times. That is, i'll "get" more of Twain than of a Balzac translation ... but i think i get something of both and i'd rather read Grimmelshausen's "Simplicisimus" over DeLillo's "White Noise" any day. In the history of science there is also the advantage in avoiding the study of the new in that we can see how the struggles turned out ... where as in the debate over, say, string theory, that has yet to be worked through. The loss via "translation" is less than the loss invoked by still being in the middle of the fray. (That and, the point of the study is ikely to be pertaining to how not to be so lost in the middle of the fray in the first place.)
Ih Kuhnian theory revolutions are driven by knowledge and questions. The old paradigm is no longer answering new questions. New assumptions are given a chance and, if they seem to work well on the new important questions of the day, the younger generation runs with them. Paradigms that are still answering big questions, though, are not succeptable to revoltion ... only those that have gone stagnent.
It is important to note too that the new paradigm, at the highest point of the debate between the old and the new, is usually inferior in many or even most ways to the old. The younger generation has faith that the problems will be fixed AND the new hard questions will be answered. The old generation almost never admit they were wrong, they merely die off. Also, often, the critic of the new paradigm by the old guard is never answered successfully ... the questions merely become irrelevent. (Newton never answered the mechanist's main objection that his theory of Universal Gravity never told us what gravity is, there is and can be no working model of his force. Newton not only overturned the mechanistic theories of earthly and celestial gravity, he made their way of thinking about the problem irrelevent rather than answered, directly, their critique.)
I think revolutions are driven, outside science too, by pushing where the cracks are. No matter how right one is, if the rest of the population does not see a problem, you can argue until you are blue in the face (and strung out on caffeine from writing essays all night) with no affect. But when society senses the problem and is looking for a new angle, then even half-thought-out notions may get their hearing.
[another uncompleted thought]
posted by Thomas F. Schminke at 4:48 PM
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