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I am ready to lead once more: Thomas Kuhn 1, Dilettante Research Revived
Am embarking on a project of rereading Thomas Kuhn and so I'm starting a Thomas Kuhn reading group here in Denver. The group so far consists in its entirety of me and my friend David (the fellow who taught the intro to philosophy course I audited last semester) and isn't likely to grow, so I'm adding an online component. As always, I'm open to anyone posting here whether you've done the reading or not and whether you feel "qualified" or not. You'll likely stimulate my ideas even when your own aren't worked out. That said... well, see below.
Believe it or not I find this stuff real easy (about a hundred times easier than figuring out and articulating why I like Cassie's "Turn The Lights Off" and Heidi Montag's "No More"). And what's impressive about its easiness is that Kuhn is addressing himself to the hardest practical topic there is, how to go about understanding a mode of thought that you had not previously been acquainted with.
I'm going to experiment to see if these posts can function as a proto-Department Of Dilettante Research, which means I'll put thought into how to be a teacher, how to stimulate your ideas. So in some instances I'll be asking questions but temporarily holding back my own answers until you've had a chance to start on yours, my belief being that ideas you work out for yourself will stick with you better than ones you simply read or memorize. And this also means that if you want to learn much you're better off doing the reading and doing what I tell you.
The latter will usually be an exhortation to "state the idea, don't just summarize it or allude to it," my assumption being that if you can't state it you don't know it or it doesn't exist. Of course, you don't need to state the idea if you know that everybody else already knows it or, whether or not they know it, understanding it is not crucial to the point you're making. And also, if you're genuinely working your way towards an idea that's new to you, I'm not going to shout, "No, you must explain this in full, now!," given that it probably doesn't yet exist in full. Really, what I'm trying to forestall is people tossing words up in the air in the belief that the words are doing work. Terms like "objective," "subjective," "scientific method," "metanarrative," "appropriation," "deconstruction," "positivism," "pragmatism," "relativism," "postmodern," "discourse," "Popper," "Foucault," "Derrida," etc. etc. etc. aren't self-explanatory, and if left to fend for themselves end up clogging up the works. When an explanation needs 3,000 words, use 3,000 words. And a link is not an explanation.
I'm interested in our developing our own ideas, not just our figuring out Kuhn's. My experience with Why Music Sucks and ilX is that, in discussing "theory," people forget the kindergarten basics of communication, and no one seems to mind this but me. This whole phenomenon is strange - and worth exploring sociologically at some point down the line, to see if we can discover what short-term social rewards people gain from failing to articulate and communicate ideas, and why this dysfunction is so important to "theory": how the dysfunction functions, as it were.
Reading list, in order:
Thomas S. Kuhn, "What Are Scientific Revolutions," 1981 and 1987, which is the first essay in his compilation The Road Since Structure, which you can probably find at most university libraries. It's 20 pages.
Thomas S. Kuhn, "Revisiting Planck," 1984, which was originally in some magazine called HSPS 14(2), and now is available as the Afterword to the Second Edition* of Kuhn's Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. This is 22 pages, but you only really need to concentrate on section 4, which is the last ten pages or so, starting at the bottom of p. 361.
*that is, the one from The University Of Chicago Press, not the earlier one from Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962; Second Edition, enlarged, 1970; it's crucial that you get the Second Edition of this, too, since in the "Postscript - 1969" he disentangles the various different things he'd meant by "paradigm."
Chapter 5, "Copernicus's Innovation," and the Johannes Kepler subsection of Chapter 6, "The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy," in Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution. 1957. (Haven't really thought yet how much of this if any I'm going to talk about.)
While all this is going on, I'll be posting about any old thing Kuhnian I feel like, too, since I've got scads of notes.
You don't have to understand all the science to understand his key points; otherwise I'd be up Shit's Creek.
I'll post some more specific guidance in a few days. My main advice is to set aside everything your other teachers etc. told you about Kuhn.
Believe it or not I find this stuff real easy (about a hundred times easier than figuring out and articulating why I like Cassie's "Turn The Lights Off" and Heidi Montag's "No More"). And what's impressive about its easiness is that Kuhn is addressing himself to the hardest practical topic there is, how to go about understanding a mode of thought that you had not previously been acquainted with.
I'm going to experiment to see if these posts can function as a proto-Department Of Dilettante Research, which means I'll put thought into how to be a teacher, how to stimulate your ideas. So in some instances I'll be asking questions but temporarily holding back my own answers until you've had a chance to start on yours, my belief being that ideas you work out for yourself will stick with you better than ones you simply read or memorize. And this also means that if you want to learn much you're better off doing the reading and doing what I tell you.
The latter will usually be an exhortation to "state the idea, don't just summarize it or allude to it," my assumption being that if you can't state it you don't know it or it doesn't exist. Of course, you don't need to state the idea if you know that everybody else already knows it or, whether or not they know it, understanding it is not crucial to the point you're making. And also, if you're genuinely working your way towards an idea that's new to you, I'm not going to shout, "No, you must explain this in full, now!," given that it probably doesn't yet exist in full. Really, what I'm trying to forestall is people tossing words up in the air in the belief that the words are doing work. Terms like "objective," "subjective," "scientific method," "metanarrative," "appropriation," "deconstruction," "positivism," "pragmatism," "relativism," "postmodern," "discourse," "Popper," "Foucault," "Derrida," etc. etc. etc. aren't self-explanatory, and if left to fend for themselves end up clogging up the works. When an explanation needs 3,000 words, use 3,000 words. And a link is not an explanation.
I'm interested in our developing our own ideas, not just our figuring out Kuhn's. My experience with Why Music Sucks and ilX is that, in discussing "theory," people forget the kindergarten basics of communication, and no one seems to mind this but me. This whole phenomenon is strange - and worth exploring sociologically at some point down the line, to see if we can discover what short-term social rewards people gain from failing to articulate and communicate ideas, and why this dysfunction is so important to "theory": how the dysfunction functions, as it were.
Reading list, in order:
Thomas S. Kuhn, "What Are Scientific Revolutions," 1981 and 1987, which is the first essay in his compilation The Road Since Structure, which you can probably find at most university libraries. It's 20 pages.
Thomas S. Kuhn, "Revisiting Planck," 1984, which was originally in some magazine called HSPS 14(2), and now is available as the Afterword to the Second Edition* of Kuhn's Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. This is 22 pages, but you only really need to concentrate on section 4, which is the last ten pages or so, starting at the bottom of p. 361.
*that is, the one from The University Of Chicago Press, not the earlier one from Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962; Second Edition, enlarged, 1970; it's crucial that you get the Second Edition of this, too, since in the "Postscript - 1969" he disentangles the various different things he'd meant by "paradigm."
Chapter 5, "Copernicus's Innovation," and the Johannes Kepler subsection of Chapter 6, "The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy," in Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution. 1957. (Haven't really thought yet how much of this if any I'm going to talk about.)
While all this is going on, I'll be posting about any old thing Kuhnian I feel like, too, since I've got scads of notes.
You don't have to understand all the science to understand his key points; otherwise I'd be up Shit's Creek.
I'll post some more specific guidance in a few days. My main advice is to set aside everything your other teachers etc. told you about Kuhn.
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There is another, more difficult, problem for experts in this kind of conversation. Not a great parallel, but if I am talking about a cartoonist to another expert (if you'll forgive my claiming that status) I might reference a number of artists they have learnt something from, mentioning the narrative flow and use of light of Eisner and the dynamic anatomy of Gil Kane and the action choreography of Ditko and so on, and the same for writing and for characters and so on, without explaining what I mean by narrative flow in this context or who Eisner is or why he was important or what the similarities are or how the newer cartoonist uses these techniques. Now if I'm talking to someone less expert, I have the choice of not mentioning this at all or explaining all of this. If I'm writing a quick post on LJ, it'll be the former most times. An expert sees so many aspects and tangents and connections, and it can be hard to get the right balance between discussing the ideas reasonably fully without spending days writing thousands of words.
Obviously I am in the equivalent position, in this discussion, of never having heard of Ditko or Eisner or having a clue what many of the specialist terms mean - perversely, this can mean a tendency to overuse some of the ones I have some grasp of, but it mostly means I soon get lost when the specialist terms start taking over, which I think they did on your ILX Kuhn thread.
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*hyphens, classic or dud?
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Also, I misstated a few things about Aristotle (I should have talked about a general concept of change, rather than calling everything "motion"), none of which harm the point I was making at all.
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Re: incidentally
"the road since structure" here
"black body theory" here
"copernican revolution" here
"structure" not previewed :(
bah
Re: bah
Re: incidentally
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i'll see if i can get hold of some of the texts in the next few days; i imagine at least a few of them will have been typed up by some mentalist philosophy student and flung onto the internet; if i find any online, i'll post the links in a comment here in case other people want them.
incidentally
i'll skim it to see if we can get anywhere re commensurability and music...
Re: incidentally
Scroll down to see my response to
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On the bright side there are definitely non-academics out there who are paid to think, I've now met lots of them. XD; Normally it is a mission-based mode: "I come to you with a problem, you think up a solution (or teach me how to think up a solution) that makes me money." But then patterns emerge, and side avenues present themselves for investigation.
Would what I'm trying to do with this class count as DDR?
* this acronym means "Dance Dance Revolution" to me, but this is by no means a bad mental association
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Kuhn himself was multidisciplinary: trained in physics, contemplated jumping to philosophy, then actually jumped to history, but then also did philosophy and insisted on getting simultaneous departmental appointments in history and philosophy. But he actually was fairly pessimistic about the value of a lot of interdisciplinary efforts, both across different scientific disciplines and across the three fields he'd studied. Am rereading a piece of his right now about how wrenching it is to go from historical to philosophical thinking, and how important it is that the types of training be kept distinct (not that one person can't try to do both, obv). And reading it I'm reminded that for all his virtues he was still a stick-up-the-butt academic. He was saying that in observing historians and philosophers trying to work together in understanding a thinker of the past, the historians were concerned with getting the thinker right, whereas the philosophers, while thinking (often incorrectly) that they were getting the thinker right, were actually testing themselves against the thinker in order to work out what their own philosophy would be. This smacks way too much of Kuhn saying that you can't walk and chew gum at the same time, i.e., you can get the object of study right or you can live your life but you can't do both at once, that there's an inherent incompatibility between "matching" and "making," etc. Whereas as a music critic I'm trying to do it all at once, and I don't see why the various roles wouldn't augment each other. Music criticism is by its nature "multidisciplinary" in that I can think about (1) what the musicmakers think they're doing, (2) what I think the musicmakers are doing, (3) what the audience thinks its doing with the music, (4) what I think the audience is doing with the music, (5) what I'm doing with the music (how I use it as source material for my writing, how I use it in my social life (of which my writing life is a part), how I can use it as a musician (except I'm not doing much musicmaking anymore)), (6) what can be done with the music that isn't yet being done, etc. And of course there is always more than one musicmaker and more than one audience, some of whom may be working at different or cross-purposes. Now there's nothing that says that to do 5 or 6 well you have to do 1 well, since how I use something shouldn't be limited by the manufacturer's intent, and getting the intent wrong doesn't preclude my doing something interesting with the music. But getting the intent right doesn't preclude my doing something interesting either, and doing something interesting via the music (using it as a social marker, conversation piece, etc.) doesn't preclude getting 1 through 4 right. And there's no way that what I say about music and the style in which I say it aren't social markers, no matter whether I want them to be or not. And given that a HUGE amount of the conversation about music has as its subtext or blatant text the writers/speakers denigrating music and audiences they don't understand, I'd always want to at least think about doing 1 through 4 well.
Also, as for what "intellectual disciplines" are being deployed in doing 1 through 6, I'd say they constitute a hodge podge.