Kuhn 5: First General C&Q Thread

[koganbot]

OK, start talking. This is what I'm calling the First General Comments And Questions (C&Q) Thread. The article under consideration is Thomas Kuhn's "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" which you can find your way to here, pp 13 to 32. I'm asking six questions but you can ask your own as well, and you don't have to answer mine 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 separately in that order (though you can if you want). You should have a good idea how to answer the first three, however. Questions 4 through 6 are generated by the essay (at least in my mind), but they're not specifically asked and definitely not answered in it.

1. Kuhn starts the essay by distinguishing between "normal" and "revolutionary" scientific development, saying that the former is "cumulative" and the latter "noncumulative." He uses the metaphor of the brick: "normal science is what produces the bricks that scientific research is forever adding to the growing stockpile of scientific knowledge." Not sure he isn't mixing his metaphors here, "brick" and "stockpile," since I think he means the brick metaphor to give us a picture of bricks being layered atop one another to build an enduring structure.

What do you suppose he means by "cumulative" and "noncumulative" change? Surely he's not saying that in a science that's undergoing normal change there are no widely believed ideas that turn out to be in error. So what's the difference between a normal correction and a correction that leads to a revolution? What's the difference between a normal new idea and a revolutionary new idea? Is the idea that Pluto is not a major planet a revolutionary idea? How about the idea that the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was not drawn out but was one of the relatively sudden after-effects of a strike by one or more meteors?

2. What's a paradigm and what's a paradigm shift? Kuhn doesn't actually use the terms in this essay; but nonetheless, the revolutions he describes are paradigm shifts. What do you think he means by "paradigm" and "paradigm shift"? (If you click on the "thomas kuhn" tag up above you can find your way to some previous talk on the subject. He uses the term in both a narrow and a broad way, and it's good to be clear on the difference.)

3. What does Kuhn mean by "incommensurability"? This is another term that doesn't appear in the piece, but the concept gets well-described in it. In a different essay he uses the words "residue" and "loss" in association with "incommensurability." What's the residue? What's lost?

4. Is Kuhn's conception of "normal science" a good one? Are there really periods when a science undergoes no noncumulative adjustments, where all the basic terms are at ease with themselves and with each other?

5. Do any of the nonsciences* have equivalent periods, or is what Kuhn is saying is "normal" in normal science not normal elsewhere?

6. If competing paradigms are incommensurable, how does one choose between them? If Kuhn's model is right, an entire field can and sometimes does end up abandoning one paradigm as wrong and embracing another as right. How does it do so? Another way of putting the question - one that obviously doesn't just apply to the sciences - is: if different premises (and their related models and frameworks) generate different "facts," facts that support the premises, how do you go about testing your premises and, when there are competing, incompatible premises, how do you choose one set of premises over another? Is there a rational way of doing so, or is this really just a matter of taste? How would you test the contention that motions or changes must have endpoints, or the competing contention that motions or changes need not have endpoints?

*For example, math, psychology, music criticism, art, politics, situation comedies, girls night out, organized sports, etc. etc. etc.

Comments

further to (5) and (6)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think we have to explore what actually constitutes a "field" here -- kuhn's theory seems to presented as if science as a whole is a field, at the same time that physics-as-a-whole is a field and and biology-as-a-whole is a field and maths-as-a-whole is a field, even though all of physics and all of biology and (arguably) all of maths do not combine to be all of physics

this matters because it's not clear to me that a revolutionary shift in the use of the word "planet" had any implications for biology or maths -- somewhere late in the essay, p.29 in fact, TK says that the first shared characteristic of the kind of scientific revolution he's looking at is that it's "somewhat holistic", where "somewhat" is a giant massive handwave! (haha someone on a popular comments thread just used the phrase "slightly objective" and i think "somewhat holistic" falls in the same category of "we know what it means even tho it's strictly speaking meaningless")

i have a bunch more thoughts to come, some of which will be questions and some answers -- i am intermittently busy today and tomorrow so they will be a bit piecemeal

Re: further to (5) and (6)

[koganbot]

He's most definitely not thinking of all of science as a field. I don't see where you get the idea that he does. Why would anyone expect a change in our concept of the battery to affect paleontology? As a matter of fact, though I'm not going to go into it now, the concept of paradigm can be a challenge to the concept of "science as a whole," since "paradigm" suggests that different fields and subfields have different paradigms and that their isn't a unifying "scientific method" that tells you whether you're being scientific or not.

He uses "somewhat holistic" because "holistic" is a confusing word, since it can imply a change in everything - but I don't even think the notion of "universal conceptual change" is even intelligible. I'm not going to really explain that last concept except to say that I think if we met a previously isolated New Guinean tribe, we'd nonetheless discover that the vast majority of our concepts matched the tribe's and vice versa, so obviously the ones that don't match up haven't caused massive change in the ones that do. And he's not saying that we have no concepts in common with Aristotle. If we and Aristotle didn't have more or less a similar conception of "health," the question as to whether a man's being restored to health is an example of motion would be very difficult to ask.

By "somewhat holistic" he really means "significantly not atomistic." And you can ask "just how nonatomistic does the change have to be to be a revolutionary change?," but actually I don't find that question deeply challenging (it's no more inherently interesting than "How chilly does a climate have to be to be considered a chilly climate?" - that's the sort of comparative judgment call that people make all the time).

Re: further to (5) and (6)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"kuhn's theory seems to presented as if science as a whole is a field" -- mmmmph, what i meant here is "kuhn's theory seems to GET presented as if science as a whole is a field", which i think is more defensible

your response pretty much matches my feeling, that science is more like a looser accretion of disciplines, of different histories and revolutions which don't need to cross from one to another

but i wonder why then it's felt useful to have an overall project of the excloration of "scientific revolutions" -- why maintain a project unity?

(i mean, "*we're* looking at the usefulness of the theory OUTSIDE science, so we need a boundaryline for other reasons, but does kuhn ever even need to reach a generalised definition of "scientific revolution"? why can't he just carry on accumulating locally specific example? is this in fact what he's doing?)

Re: further to (5) and (6)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

sorry, bunch of rhetorical questions you mostly answered in the previous post!

there's arguably a paradigm shift in the understanding of how science-as-a-whole coheres, in that -- from sometime in the mid-18th century to sometime in the mid-20th century -- it was widely assumed that the "major" sciences were nested WITHIN one another, very roughly maths >> physics >> chemistry >> biology >> psychology

so that a full scientific explanation of some "law of psychology" would (eventually, given enough science) turn out to be explicable in terms of the laws of maths

Re: further to (5) and (6)

[koganbot]

Btw, Rorty considers Kuhn the most influential* philosopher writing in English in the postwar era, and his reason for assigning Kuhn such importance is that Rorty believes that Kuhn got rid of the idea of a deep ontological difference between science and nonscience (the idea of a field "sharing a paradigm" isn't a deep ontological concept, it just means that the members of the discipline manage to agree more consistently than do members of fields that are nonsciences)(and "when is someone in a field or not in a field" is a q I want to hold off on, though obv it's a question that can be plenty problematic) but that in doing so he also got rid of the idea that philosophy and sociology etc. should be aspiring to resemble physics.

*Maybe there's wishful thinking here. "Most influential on Rorty, and most influential on nonphilosophers, while philosophy tries to resist" might be more accurate, though I don't really have a sense of what philosophy in the '00s actually does, to tell you the truth.

Re: further to (5) and (6)

[koganbot]

kuhn's theory seems to GET presented as if science as a whole is a field

Yes, and Kuhn gets widely misinterpreted, though that's only occasionally (as w/ his original expansion of what he meant by "paradigm") his fault.

Just because there are different histories and revolutions doesn't mean that the revolutions can't nonetheless have a similar structure. There are different species with different ancestry, but that doesn't mean that Darwin's idea of variation and natural selection can't apply to all species change. (That and genetic drift and the like, which wasn't Darwin's idea obv.) Of course, we can question whether scientific revolutions do have similar structures, and when we get to that topic we'll once again run into some circularity: do all scientific revolutions involve a paradigm shift? Well, a scientific revolution is a paradigm shift, so if there's no paradigm shift there's no revolution. How can you distinguish between the hard sciences and the "non" (or "soft") sciences? Well, the nonsciences haven't ever come up with a dominant paradigm. Hence psychotherapy, for example, is not (yet?) a science.

(Btw, is math considered a science? I'm not sure. Usually it's classed in the humanities.) (Next to my asterisk where I listed "nonsciences," the only ones other than math I was thinking might have "normal" periods akin to "normal science" were "organized sports," which nonetheless are easily distinguishable from science - though I wonder whether there might not be games of sorts that run closer to science than basketball does.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"usually classed in the humanities" is probably more related to administrative requirements = "doesn't need labs o fancy equipment, just books"

it's interesting that two of the three examples TK deploys in this essay -- the first and the last -- actually hinge on a shift of attitude to a highly mathematical concept

it's infinity in the first, in newton's highly weird) concept of an infinitely extended rectilinear nothingness in which the world of matter tidily sits, essentially unaffected by the entirety of the nothingness

it's the distinction between continuity and particularity in the third, which was a very fought-over area in 1th-century mathematics (the mathematicisation of continuity involves some fantastically dodgy algebraic tricks, including another fabulous weirdness invented by newton and/or leibnitz, viz the idea that you can divide zero by zero and get a meaningful and precise answer

(i actually have to say i'm not quite sure i understand how the batteries example constitutes a "revolution" -- the word "resistance" changes meaning and useage, with a certain degree of institutional er resistance, but TK doesn't give much of a sense of all the lower-layer bricks which had to be unlaid and tossed aside...

o ffs

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"very fought-over area in 1th-century mathematics" = "very fought-over area in 19th-century mathematics"

[koganbot]

I don't understand much at all about the battery example, though my guess is that one reason he chose it was so that he could use an example where the revolution had a high impact on the people who cared about batteries but that isn't seen by the nonspecialized reader (e.g., me) as world important.

it's infinity in the first, in newton's highly weird) concept of an infinitely extended rectilinear nothingness in which the world of matter tidily sits, essentially unaffected by the entirety of the nothingness

I have no idea about this concept, but I also don't see where it's relevant to the example that Kuhn gives, comparing Aristotelian motion to Newtonian.

Is the idea that motion is change in location only (not change in quality) a mathematical idea? It doesn't seem to be? Nor, unless I'm misunderstanding something, is the idea that an object in motion stays in motion in a straight line until acted on by an outside force.

Which is to say I'm not getting the point you're making.

I think you're right that mathematics played a big role in the discovery of the quantum, but I don't think it had anything to do with the controversy you alluded to in 19th century mathematics, at least not in the account Kuhn gives in this essay. I don't think a commitment to continuity or particularity in mathematics played a role for Planck, Ehrenfest, Einstein, Lorentz et al. (not that I have the least idea, I just note that Kuhn doesn't bring it up here). Stay close to what Kuhn actually says:

The resonators could not be permitted to lie anywhere on the continuous energy line but only at the divisions between cells. [A "cell" meaning a range in the amount of energy.]

Kuhn doesn't give the math or the science, just the result, but nothing in the context of that passage makes me think there's a mathematical controversy involved, just that Planck actually didn't do the derivation right, and two other scientists (Kuhn didn't name them in this essay but they're Ehrenfest and Einstein) made the correction. In Kuhn's account, in order to derive Planck's Black Body law they discovered they needed to restrict the possible energy levels of the resonators in a way that Planck hadn't realized.

My point here is that to follow what Kuhn is trying to say, we need to stick close to Kuhn's own words and what he's using his examples to say. I don't think either of those two examples hinges on a shift in attitude to a highly mathematical concept. Rather, one depends on differing conceptions as to what motion is, and the other on what was needed to derive Planck's black-body law correctly.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I have no idea about this concept, but I also don't see where it's relevant to the example that Kuhn gives, comparing Aristotelian motion to Newtonian

pp19-20: "I shall instead conclude this first example with a last illustration, Aristotle's doctrine about the vacuum or void... If there could be a void, then the Aristotelian universe or cosmos could not be finite... [E]xpanding the stellar sphere to infinity would make problems for astronomy, since that sphere's rotations carry the stars above the earth. Another, more central, difficulty arises earlier. In an infinite universe there is no centre--any point is as muc hte cnetre as any other--and there is thus no natural position at which stones and other heavy bodies realise their natural qualities."

Your argument is that the example given depends or hinges only on a change in meaning and use of the word "motion": but this seems problematic in two ways, One is simply that Kuhn does include the above, as a "last iluustration" (unnecessary addition if, as you say, it's irrelevant); two is that we surely have to make a distinction between the (backwards) path Kuhn took (spurred by his recognition that "motion" meant incommensurably different things to different people) and the path that cosmology took, as it moved from Aristotle's paradigm all the VERY long way to Newton's (2000 years!). Surely a key point Kuhn is making here is that a whole bunch of things move around and change -- you can boil it down to the tale of motion for purposes of dramatisation, and to help isolate the (important) fact that certain words seem radically to change their meanings during such a revolution, but this is not the only thing going on, nor (necessarily) the central caustive element in the transformation (in fact it's very likely NOT the central cause: centrality would probably imply change of terminology -- retained words with greatly shifted meanings are very probably words that been dragged from where they once sat by convulsions elsewhere in the revolution).

All this is underlined somewhat the relative rhetorical weakness of the the meaning-change aspects of the second two examples: the battery meaning-change is interesting and very suggestive, but really the old meaning of battery hasn't vanished from the world; and in the third example, he handwaves at a word-substitution, "resonators" for "oscillators", which frankly FAILS to do the work Planck is said to want it to ("oscillators" is hardly disconnected from all possible acoustic analogy, any more than "resonation" is incapable of being used in non-acoustic contexts).

In general my argument is generally going to be that one of the reasons Kuhn's discussion of revolutions sometimes gets very lost in vagueness is because he doesn't pay consistent enough attention to the role that willed change in physical practice* is (always?) playing -- choices made at THIS level may well be just as reasoned (tho doubtless often aren't)** as than choices made at the theoretical or verbal levels...

*as you'll see later i have a slightly eccentric definition of physical practice
**exploring this will be my non-evasive answer to point 6

telling vagueness (p.31)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"If the exhibit succeeds, the new initiates emerge with an acquired list of features salient to the required similarity relation -- with a feature-space, that is, within which the previously juxtaposed items are durably clustered together as examples of the same thing and are simultaneously separated from objects or situations with which they might otherwise have been confused."

This is terribly clumsily written and woolly -- in a piece which is generally vivid -- and I think the reason is, tellingly, that he is attempting a generalised spatial metaphor as opposed to a particular or concrete one (concrete: "hinges on").

Re: telling vagueness (p.31)

[koganbot]

It's clumsily written, but I do understand it; items A, X, and Z are now part of a family and A, B, and C aren't, whereas in the old days A, B, and C were the family, and somehow or other this gets taught, and I - Kuhn - am not really going to talk about that process in this article, just say that it happens.

But in any event, I don't know yet what you think a paradigm is.

[koganbot]

Surely a key point Kuhn is making here is that a whole bunch of things move around and change

Yes, of course, you're right. But it doesn't seem to me that this is a mathematical concept of infinity. (Whether space goes on forever and whether numbers go on forever are different questions, right?) And I'm quite possibly totally wrong about this, but e.g. I don't think Newton's ideas about whether or not the universe was infinite was in any way an essential part of his laws of motion.

But also, we're missing the "see spot run" part of our conversation. Yeah, I'm the one who asked if math is considered part of science, and nonscientific definitions and such, and as far as I'm concerned (and Wittgenstein is concerned, and probably Kuhn is concerned) "physical practice" is inextricable from language - is part of the "verbal." But this all seems to be sketching out what we ought to be talking about down the road. Which is to say I probably should be directing you towards q's 1 through 3, rather than spending time insisting that you don't overlook the basics of q's 4 through 6.

proofreading

[koganbot]

and nonscientific definitions and such

and ABOUT nonscientific DISCIPLINES and such

Re: further to (5) and (6)

[koganbot]

Useful to keep in mind that the question "Do scientific revolutions have common features?" (e.g., holistic, change in what words refer to, broad change in what is seen to resemble what) and "Do scientific revolutions have a common structure?" are different questions.

Re: further to (5) and (6)

[koganbot]

Actually, a good though circular def'n of "how can you distinguish one field or subfield from another?" and "how can you distinguish one scientific community from another?" is "Different communities have at least some (small-p) paradigms that they share with each other but not with the other fields, and therefore each different field/subfield has a different (big-P) paradigm."

Kuhn says in the "Postscript - 1969" he added to Structure:

The term "paradigm" enters the preceding pages early, and its manner of entry is intrinsically circular. A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm. Not all circularities are vicious..., but this one is a source of real difficulties.

[koganbot]

My thought here is, assuming we can get the conversation going, that we talk about "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" (and wherever the convo leads us) over the next couple of weeks, but in about a week I'll start giving you guidance and questions for your reading of the next "assigned" piece, "Revisiting Planck." In a couple of days I'll start giving some of my own responses to the six questions (some responses'll be more full-scale than others), but I want to let you guys do some talking first.

For the reading list, go to the first Kuhn post and scroll down.

(Btw, do we have a terminology that distinguishes between a livejournal post and a post on a livejournal comments thread? It's kind of a pain to try to figure out how to make it clear which, in different circumstances, I mean.)

[koganbot]

Also, for people who have a question they think we should be asking or a comment they'd like everybody to consider but worry that it will get lost if presented on a (quickly old and no-longer-looked-at) comments thread: you can either ask the question/make the comment on your own journal and ask me to link it, or email me (edcasual at earthlink dot net) and I'll post the question or comment as a new post on my livejournal.

some very rough and hurried answers (1-2)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

1. What's the difference between cumulative and noncumulative change?
Kuhn starts the essay by distinguishing between "normal" and "revolutionary" scientific development, saying that the former is "cumulative" and the latter "noncumulative." He uses the metaphor of the brick: "normal science is what produces the bricks that scientific research is forever adding to the growing stockpile of scientific knowledge." Not sure he isn't mixing his metaphors here, "brick" and "stockpile," since I think he means the brick metaphor to give us a picture of bricks being layered atop one another to build an enduring structure. What do you suppose he means by "cumulative" and "noncumulative" change? Surely he's not saying that in a science that's undergoing normal change there are no widely believed ideas that turn out to be in error. So what's the difference between a normal correction and a correction that leads to a revolution? What's the difference between a normal new idea and a revolutionary new idea? Is the idea that Pluto is not a major planet a revolutionary idea? How about the idea that the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was not drawn out but was one of the relatively sudden after-effects of a strike by one or more meteors?

I would parse this thus: An error during cumulative change require the change of content of the single brick currently being laid; not of an brick lower in the wall, which would require the displacement and replacement of other bricks level with but distinct from the current brick. So cumulative means never having to go back a layer; non-cumulative means you have to go back a layer -- or at least demolish and replace more of the current layer than the brick in which error was discovered. Pluto's relabelling is revolutionary if it requires us to rethink the celestial mechanism as a whole; not if it just means we relabel some of the bodies based on better observation of where they;re go (round what etc); the meteor strike is revolutionary if fast-extinction changes our undersanding of eg what is descended from what, how descent works, but not if it simply means we have to redraw the dating of extinctions. Revolution -- in terms of the "brick" metaphor -- means having to pull out bricks that other bricks were on top of.

2. What's a paradigm and what's a paradigm shift?
Kuhn doesn't actually use the terms in this essay; but nonetheless, the revolutions he describes are paradigm shifts. What do you think he means by "paradigm" and "paradigm shift"?

I'm not sure your collapse (on an earlier thread) of paradigm and model (the former a "fancypants" word for the latter) is helpful, though it's entirely defensible by ordinary usage. Model comes from "modello", which straps a diminutive onto the latin-italian (modus/modo) for the noun "a measure"; a model would thus something physical that you can keep on your desk-top (or imaginably equivalent to same). Paradigm (from the greek, to show beside) was originally *grammatical*, a verbal exemplar to demonstrate rules of language: Kuhn uses it -- incorrectly considering its root but usefully -- to mean the "system we are operating in; the system whose coherence is being threatened or validated"... just as the exemplar as a synecdoche for the language it sits within and demonstrates. Kuhn is correct I think that small p-paradigms and large p-paradigms sometimes get confused with one another; or moved up off the "small p" onto the "large p"and vice versa -- but I think that at any given moment, the model and the paradigm will be pointing the pupil or researcher in different directions, the one towards a simplified or neatened or pocket-size version so that specific relationships or characteristics are more easily graspable; the other towards a sketch of the system that "everything" (ie everything pertaining to the relevant discipline) operates with in. So a paradigm shift would be when the discipline changes in a significant way. (You can of course have a model of a paradigm; can you have a paradigm of modelling?)

Re: some very rough and hurried answers (1-2)

[koganbot]

I'm going to give incomplete responses, hoping that others will come in and give their own.

1. Not sure the brick metaphor can apply to the concept of revolutionary science. Seems that we're not only going to different layers but redesigning the structure so that it may be something else, and rethinking the building material so that they do something else. Or reweaving whole new parts of the garment, perhaps giving the garment a different shape and a modified purpose.

2. Actually, Kuhn himself got the word "paradigm" from the grammatical use, but in using "model" and "paradigm" I'm sticking to modern usage, where most certainly "model" isn't restricted to physical objects but applies to events and behavior as well, so Demi Lovato can model her approach to singing on Pat Benatar's, you can model your experiment on someone else's experiment, Planck can model his derivation on Boltzmann's derivation, etc.

Kuhn is correct I think that small p-paradigms and large p-paradigms sometimes get confused with one another

What happened was that Kuhn's own usage drifted, so he used the word originally for one and then for the other as well. And only then did he realize that he needed to keep the usages differentiated.

Don't know what you mean by "pupil" and "researcher" but I don't think examples work for the latter differently from how they work for the former. Sticking to Kuhn's examples, "falling stone was like the growing oak," "Planck's resonators were like Boltzmann's molecules," etc. Seems to apply no matter what role you play.

You say:

towards a simplified or neatened or pocket-size version so that specific relationships or characteristics are more easily graspable

I'm not following you here. This is what Kuhn says:

The juxtaposed items are exhibited to a previously uninitiated audience by someone who can already recognize their similarity, and who urges that audience to learn to do the same. (p. 31)

Re: some very rough and hurried answers (1-2)

[koganbot]

the model and the paradigm will be pointing the pupil or researcher in different directions, the one towards a simplified or neatened or pocket-size version so that specific relationships or characteristics are more easily graspable; the other towards a sketch of the system that "everything" (ie everything pertaining to the relevant discipline) operates within.

I misread this when I first commented on it, since "one" and "other" could be read with different antecedents, "one" being "pupil" and "other" being "researcher." But what you meant, I think, is "one" is "model" and "other" is "paradigm." Right?

In any event, Kuhn doesn't ever distinguish between "model" and "paradigm." What he eventually decides is that he gave "paradigm" two crucially different uses, and so he distinguishes between what I'm calling small-p and big-P paradigms, except that's not what he called them: he gave them altogether different names, which I'll give you when we get to them.

My advice in this instance is to set aside the word derivations and look at the text. Given what Kuhn says in "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" what do you think he means by "paradigm"? (This has two answers.) E.g. is there anything in the text that corresponds to "a simplified or neatened or pocket-size version so that specific relationships or characteristics are more easily graspable"?

some very rough and hurried answers (3-4)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

3. What is incommensurability?
What does Kuhn mean by "incommensurability"? This is another term that doesn't appear in the piece, but the concept gets well-described in it. In a different essay he uses the words "residue" and "loss" in association with "incommensurability." What's the residue? What's lost?

In the example we discussed -- the isoceles right triangle -- the residue turned out to be the bit that would always be left behind; whatever whole number you assigned as length to the shorter sides, whatever unit of measure derived from this, there would be a little piece of length left over. It's the gap between measurement as bridge-builders (and space-rocket builders) define it, which rwhen you come eright down to it always has a "good enough for jazz shimmy; and measurement (or number) as it functions within mathematics. The latter has given the former all kinds of tricks to get the engineer's estimate incredibly exact - logarithms, to cite something you and i are old enough to have learnt to use via printed tables -- but the latter still exists in a different realm of thought. Maths is (with certain cranky caveats) a realm where infinity is a real thing, for example. For other paradigm shifts, what's "lost" is possibly better defined as "what can no longer be observed".

4. Is Kuhn's conception of normal science a good one?
Are there really periods when a science undergoes no noncumulative adjustments, where all the basic terms are at ease with themselves and with each other?

I would hesitate to periodise this so strictly: it's not a matter of TIMES when science is non-normal, it's a matter of PLACES. Obviously in an abstract sense the "basic terms are no longer at ease with one another" across the board once they are ill-at-ease anyway, but in practice this unease spreads gradually, not instantaneously. (The danger I think is assuming we have a place to stand, above the fray, where we can see the different projects and zones clearly and make perfectly rational-managerial distinctions: there is in fact no such place... )

a redherringvolk of bad analogies

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

For other paradigm shifts, what's "lost" is possibly better defined as "what can no longer be observed". -- ok this is (or may be) a better definition, sez me, but it's just as adly misleading as "lost"... the thing that's "missing" (the "residue") is really an artefact of an early, no-longer-used observational or documentary or calculating technology...

(the paradigm-shift between engineering and post-pythagoras mathematics seems to be different in type than other revolutions: since both fields contined to exist and evolve in tight embrace -- the "residue" isn't lost in this instance, it just stays hovering between the two fields, a bit of exact but unmeasurable number that one system can work with and the other just throws away)

some very rough and hurried answers (5-6)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

5. Do any of the nonsciences have periods equivalent to a science's normal periods?
Do any of the nonsciences* have equivalent periods, or is what Kuhn is saying is "normal" in normal science not normal elsewhere?
*(For example, math, psychology, music criticism, art, politics, situation comedies, girls night out, organized sports, etc. etc. etc.)

Paradigms aren't periods really -- they're more like territories; they have location in space as well as time, and their placing in time is determined by their placing in space (which lab the revolution starts in, and what its relationship is to the other labs). Those who fail to accept -- or be accepted by -- the new paradigm don't necessarily vanish from the world; and, as they continue to use the tools of observation or documentation (or creation) that others have rejected, the nature and the purpose of their practice shifts, or is shifted.

6. How does one choose between incommensurable paradigms?
If competing paradigms are incommensurable, how does one choose between them? If Kuhn's model is right, an entire field can and sometimes does end up abandoning one paradigm as wrong and embracing another as right. How does it do so? Another way of putting the question - one that obviously doesn't just apply to the sciences - is: if different premises (and their related models and frameworks) generate different "facts," facts that support the premises, how do you go about testing your premises and, when there are competing, incompatible premises, how do you choose one set of premises over another? Is there a rational way of doing so, or is this really just a matter of taste? How would you test the contention that motions or changes must have endpoints, or the competing contention that motions or changes need not have endpoints?

I'm not sure that "one" does choose between them; almost better to say "they choose between us". We pick the tools we favour and the companions we prefer -- which would include the language and the mythologies -- the problems we tell ourslves we're solving, as opposed to the effects we're actually having -- and how language and mythology are used "within the field". By doing so, we open ourselves to the shaping energies of the paradigm -- old or new, if that's a distinction -- the full extent and implications of which we may not have any grasp of, yet. Also, to "different premises (and their related models and frameworks)", I would append "different technologies of observation, comparison and documentation": I think paradigms are cultured round practice, and practice is a matter of physical as well as mental tools and skills. A seamstress can see facts that a metallurgist can't, and vice versa. Does an "entire" field ever abonadon a paradigm? More usually I think the field splits into two: the two then drift away from one another, sometimes a very long way, in terms of cultural status and usefulness (astrology and astronomy, for example).

can't draw = can't think

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

it occurs to me that the way i -- intuitively -- distinguish between a science-y zone of near-each-other paradigms and an arty zone of near-each-other (haha) para-paradigms is actually somewhat to do with the likely geoemtry of nearness -- the former having a tree-ish type connectivity (which could be modelled with bricks); the latter very likely not (and couldn't)

whether i can explain this without a picture i don't know

Re: some very rough and hurried answers (5-6)

[koganbot]

Don't restate what I'm saying so much that you lose the force of the question and that you avoid trying to answer it - which you don't need to do tonight, but eventually I want you to genuinely try.

Some practices and vocabularies come to the fore while others are obliterated or shuffled far away. Kepler as a young man became a Copernican. Can all that's said about this is that he had a predilection for heliocentrism, or did he have reasons?

Let's say you're an evolutionary biologist; one day, a proponent of intelligent design tells you you'd do a better job - do better science - if you adopted the idea of intelligent design. Now, you can't tell by looking at the fossil record that there is or there isn't a designed-in purpose or direction to (for instance) giraffes' growing their necks long any more than you can tell by examining a man recovering his health that Aristotle is wrong and that this isn't an example of how to conceive of motion. Nonetheless, if you reject the intelligent-design guy's suggestion, you will have reasons, as he would have reasons for making the suggestion. What are your reasons?

Does an "entire" field ever abandon a paradigm? More usually I think the field splits into two.

I think both happens. But some paradigms are gone from the world, and others are gone from science, even if they hang on elsewhere, e.g. astrology. Again, don't use what you've just said as an excuse to duck the question, which - I'll be repetitive here - could be something like this: you can't tell by simply looking at the evidence that intelligent design is wrong. If you're asking yourself whether to accept or reject intelligent design as a premise, how is it that you're going to make that decision? "We pick the tools we favour and the companions we prefer." And what are your reasons for picking the tools and the companions? Are some tools and companions better than others, or is it just a matter of taste?

restating

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

fair enough (esp. for (6)): my intention was to get SOMETHING said before i got diverted into a superbusy three weeks, so we actually start a discussion at all instead of it tailing off into you posting six questions and no one responding for months on end (particularly aggravating as i am on a two-month cycle busy-unbusy which is too long for anyone not me to carry in their heads)

Re: restating

[koganbot]

(Yes. Appreciated.)

Re: restating

[koganbot]

Question (for you and for lurkers, if any): Might it work better, given the mass of Mark-Frank words on this thread, if I start a new thread for each of questions 1, 2, and 3 (or 2 and 3, anyway)? For instance, I still don't know what you think Kuhn's concept of paradigm is (that was the game I was trying to start, can one figure out what he means by "paradigm" from this article that doesn't actually use the word).

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

maybe with two and three -- but restate them according to this now non-secret agenda: viz "based on the information in this essay, can we say what ______ means"

[koganbot]

????

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/102119.html

Kuhn is best known for the concepts "paradigm shift" and "incommensurability." I'm starting us with "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" because it does a good job of presenting both. Interestingly enough, the piece uses neither term. "Paradigmatic" occurs once, and "incommensurable" and its variants not at all.

So a good exercise would be to try to figure out from this piece what Kuhn means by "paradigm."

(But may be several hours before I get to this.)

see spot SIT

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

sorry, i was being a bit flippant -- i know you'd suggested that earlier exercise ("exercise: definition of a project you are advised to do but also in fact secretly excused from doing, like practicing scales") but when tuesday came you posted these six quite big questions, which actually seem to be nudging the answerer in another direction -- i'm bad enough as it is (as you know) at hurtling off onto my own tangents and jumping way ahead of where we should have got to and dragging bizarre semirelevant roadkill in from other unrelated sprees -- so really all i meant it, keep asking really direct questions, it may help me stay focused

Re: some very rough and hurried answers (5-6)

[koganbot]

(I'm not saying you're wrong to think of companions and mythologies and materials and practices etc. as part of the story of "choice"; but choices do get made or otherwise changes wouldn't get made; the cumulative model would be "they tested and they checked their ideas against the evidence" and if you're committed to that model any other story would seem to be (to you) "They had no rational basis so they were going on taste and inclination." Which I think is not the case, but then I have to say why some things other than checking against incontrovertible evidence are rational, how one does or many do make good choices.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'll be able to comment on this tonight -- might take it to my own LJ for repost if my thoughts end up being substantial enough.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm going by my own feel for these words first, before analyzing Kuhn's text (which in any case I'm finding difficult to do within the parameters you laid out ^^;): to me a "paradigm" is a trick of the mind, where a "model" is external - I won't use the word objective... An open cube made of sticks is a model. A Necker Cube drawing is also a model, but the brain's interpretation of the Necker Cube's conflicting perspective is paradigmatic. The corner points either inward or outward; it's not merely difficult to hold both views at once but actively inpossible. The mind is trapped by its own design, a biological computer optimized to match input with preexisting stored patterns... IOW I almost feel like the usefulness of the word is more in describing the scientist than in the science, that if there were no mental conflict (i.e. in periods of cumulative change where what came before can be assumed) there would be no need for the concept at all. The battery example fits with my definition, I think, because it pretty much is an optical illusion. (A misnomer, as they have nothing to do with optics.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Also: this is how I would generalize the concept to social sciences as well, and to the arts. Psychology and economics certainly have/had paradigms... With art it is a little different, less axed on theories re: what is happening than on systems/hierarchies of value judgment, perhaps... i.e. I wouldn't want to call the rise of abstraction in the visual arts (say) a paradigm shift so much as a change in an entire nexus of beliefs concerning originality, intellectual property, tradition, progress...

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Since I can jump ahead and speculate wild 'n' recklessly here, I should just state flat out that one reason my readings haven't been super close so far is because I keep thinking about how to or not to apply this stuff to not-science. (A teacher of mine once told me, "You always jump straight to the end. What must your girlfriend think?") Specifically to discussions of culture -- my feeling so far is that Kuhn's ideas of revolutionary change aren't applicable to matters of culture, because the nature of the change in cultural matters is always cumulative, and there are no systems of understanding (through language) that are "violated" in order to include some new idea. (I like Kuhn's use of "univocal" to describe our understanding of a given word or concept in only one way, so that the Ptolemaic planet and Copernican planet can't coexist as one word, "planet," with one meaning in the same sentence.)

Social ideas co-exist, if not peacefully, then at least in ways that aren't categorically incompatible. But I am encouraged by how wrong I have been so far and haven't given up hope that I may well be quite wrong now, too. I say "hope" because I would LIKE to be able to (1) understand Kuhn better and then (2) apply to stuff that, frankly, I like talking about anyway. But I'll try to keep Dick 'n' Janing it for the time being...

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm also a jump-straight-to-the-end-then-fill-in-the-middle type! That's why the start-with-basic-definitions approach is hard for me.

Mmm I see what you mean... I admit the examples I was considering when I wrote the above have nothing to do with progress/change, per se, but rather cultures/value systems coexisting in time if not space. (And that by analogy only with the process of discovery described by Kuhn, going from superficial "wrongness" - "Why are you being knowingly rude to me?" - to a realization of fundamental and systematic differences - "Oh, it's not that you don't respect my property, it's that we don't have the same definition of ownership or what causes it to be transferred.") But this was the idea I was groping at in my comments anyway: that a "paradigm" can only be recognized/defined insofar as it comes into conflict/contrast with another. Otherwise you're fish trying to describe water. Aristotlean physics only came into existence as the destruction was underway... I think the idea that social paradigms can coexist when scientific paradigms cannot is a paradigmatic belief in and of itself, i.e. that when one is able to hold both social models in one's head (and move between them) it makes them both somewhat/possibly true, whereas understanding both scientific models doesn't make them both true. But both the relativism of the former statement and the objectivism of the latter are modern ideas.**


** I'm likely to have sinned here in using words without being certain about their meanings, as koganbot has previously griped. XD;

[koganbot]

because the nature of the change in cultural matters is always cumulative, and there are no systems of understanding (through language) that are "violated" in order to include some new idea

I don't understand this, and I can't make sense of your use of "cumulative." I'd say that what Kuhn means by science not being cumulative is that something of significance is lost: old meanings of words, old ways of behaving and connecting ideas, old ideas of what is like what, etc. This is every bit as true in matters of culture. E.g., when you go out dancing, you don't become the vehicle for supernatural spirits called "moas," do you? So something is lost in the "translation" from the dance's African antecedents* to your own dance. Wiki: "Alternatively, a language is said to be extinct if, although it is known to have been spoken by people in the past, modern scholarship cannot reconstruct it to the point that it is possible to write in it or translate into it with confidence (say, a simple dialogue or a short tale written in a modern language)." That certainly seems to be a case of cultural loss. And Kuhn's got a section of one of his essays where he talks about concepts in French that have no equivalent in English, so something is lost in translation. And Native American culture wasn't absorbed fundamentally unchanged into modern North American culture, was it? Whole social forms were obliterated, belief systems, etc. And where the beliefs have survived, they're not necessarily compatible with Christianity and atheism and so forth. Just because ideas exist at the same time as others and that some - a few - people are willing to understand the ones they don't subscribe to doesn't make the ideas compatible. And though astrology still exists, its ideas have been "lost" by modern astronomy. And if you want to say, "Oh, but astronomy is a science, but astrology hasn't been lost to the culture," this doesn't make a point. Astronomy is part of culture too, but astrology isn't part or astronomy. I'm an atheist, and atheism isn't a science (or an ism, actually), but astrology isn't part of my beliefs. Unless your criterion for "cumulative" is "exists on the same planet at the same time," I don't see how culture gets to be any more cumulative than science (and even there, lots of culture is no longer part of the planet).

I think you're confusing (1) conflicting ideas may nonetheless coexist within a field or enterprise (which I think is probably always true in all fields and enterprises that aren't sciences), and (2) those conflicting ideas therefore aren't incompatible, since they co-exist (this is false), (3) nothing is lost as such fields and enterprises change over time, since conflicting ideas can coexist within those fields (this is false too, since the fact that some ideas coexist doesn't mean either that those particular ideas will continue to coexist or that there aren't other ideas that haven't coexisted or can no longer coexist, etc.).

*I'm not saying that all the antecedents are African, just that the dance has some African ancestry.

[koganbot]

Astronomy is part of culture too, but astrology isn't part or astronomy

Astronomy is part of culture too, but astrology isn't part OF astronomy

[koganbot]

I wouldn't want to call the rise of abstraction in the visual arts (say) a paradigm shift so much as a change in an entire nexus of beliefs concerning originality, intellectual property, tradition, progress...

Why wouldn't you call that a paradigm shift? This depends what you mean by "paradigm shift," of course. But look at what Kuhn says about Aristotle's concepts in physics. They seem to belong to a nexus as well. Get rid of one belief - motion as a change in quality - and the whole thing unravels.

Bear in mind that for Kuhn, "paradigm" as in a "model" or "exemplar" doesn't mean the same thing as "paradigm" as in a "disciplinary matrix," and it's a broad shift in the latter that he's calling a "paradigm shift" (though obviously in a scientific revolution the former will undergo change as well).

But then, bear this in mind too: Aristotelian physics is gone, is history, is done for. Whereas representational painting did and does exist in fine art painting at the same time as abstract painting does. Yet, e.g., though astrology still exists, it's no longer remotely a part of astronomy. But cookery and botany still not only coexist in near and cheerful proximity, cooks draw on knowledge gained from botany and biology, while still considering a tomato a vegetable and not a fruit for the purposes of cuisine.

(Not sure what point I'm making, except that certainly models exist in the nonsciences and nexuses exist in the nonsciences as well, and broad shifts exist too, and incomprehension across different discourses. And the shifts may be just as great and disruptive. But I don't think (though I don't want to say this dogmatically, since I don't know) that we get anything remotely like scientific revolutions, where one matrix/nexus has complete consensus, and concepts are fundamentally stable, then there's the period of revolution, with one nexus unraveling but another not fully formed, and competing incompatible ideas, etc., and then after the revolution we're back to consensus, stable concepts (but many of them different from what you had before), a new matrix, nexus, etc. but with enough precision of concepts and measurements so that when enough anomalies occur that can't be explained away they can set off a crisis and possibly provoke a new revolutionary period. [Of course, it's not necessarily true that we get this in the sciences, either, just because Kuhn says that we do.])

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I think you misunderstood my sentence, but only because it was constructed terribly. XD; It really should have been something like

I wouldn't want to call the rise of abstraction in the visual arts (say) a "paradigm shift", so much as I would reserve the term for a change in an entire nexus of beliefs concerning originality, intellectual property, tradition, progress - a coherent example of which is not currently coming to mind.

I am only groping toward what I really mean here. Something along the line of: the appearance of abstract painting in Western fine arts is only a symptom, what really changed was the system of values underlying the artists' work, i.e. the definition of what it means to "paint" (or create art) changed, and thus the activity and its goals naturally broadened to take in strategies unavailable under the definition that previously held sway.

[koganbot]

We're almost up to 49 comments, after which the fuckers at lj start collapsing responses so you have to click all over the place to see what anyone is saying, which I hate, so in a few minutes I'm going to be posting an all new freewheeling dance-in-the-sky Kuhn q&c thread so that we can continue the discussion there.

[koganbot]

You win an award for clairvoyance.

Necker Cube


Not quite Necker Cubes, but the same principle

[petronia.livejournal.com]

W00t! XD

[koganbot]

(take two)

but the brain's interpretation of the Necker Cube's conflicting perspective is paradigmatic

Yes! But this applies every bit as much to the open cube made of sticks, if that cube made of sticks is being used as a model - i.e., if it is being used as a representation of something else or a prototype that can be used to create something else. Which is to say, if you point to the cube made of sticks and say, "Use that as a model," with no elaboration, the person you're instructing will either have to already know what you mean, on the basis of past interaction with you or on the basis of the standard practice among her and your social set or her and your profession of what cubes of sticks are models for and how to apply them, or she will have to make an educated guess or a wild guess. How to use a model isn't written into the model's physical features. And even if the person you're talking to is a structural engineer and she knows that the cube of sticks is part of a scale model of some structure she's supposed to build - say the cube is to be a structure on the front lawn of The Institute - what materials to use and how to construct them for an object that's 20 feet by 20 feet rather than 3 inches by 3 inches is something she'll only know from training and experience.

I think you're creating an unnecessary problem for yourself in your distinction between "internal" and "external." Are social practices internal or external? - my point here being that using something as a model is almost always a social practice, the result of specific training with that particular model or something like it, or a skill you've picked up in the course of your life. It's a matter of culture, and I don't think it's useful to worry about whether culture is internal or external. It starts external, when you're a baby, but you have to internalize it; but you haven't successfully internalized it if you can't recreate it in your observable behavior, in the world.

(Even if, let's say, you're the first person to model your derivation of your law of physics on someone's derivation of his law of physics, this comes from your experience of doing derivations and of your knowledge of yet other people modeling their derivations on someone else's derivations, etc.)

[koganbot]

it's not merely difficult to hold both views at once but actively impossible

Kuhn has made this exact point, probably referring to a duck-rabbit or something of that sort rather than a Necker Cube, but the point is the same. An analogy to the Necker Cube would be this:

Let's say an Aristotelian points at an apple falling from a tree and says, "That is an example of motion; use that as a model and go point to other examples of motion." And let's say a Newtonian points at an apple falling from a tree and says the same thing. Each will expect different behavior, will see the apple falling as representing a different set or species of phenomena and expect you to see (or to learn to see) what he sees. The Aristotelian will want you to be able to identify an apple growing into an tree and a man being restored from sickness to health as examples of motion, similar to the apple falling towards its place in the center, whereas a Newtonian would not. And of course one can learn both, learn to see what an Aristotelian sees and learn to see what a Newtonian sees, just as one can learn to see the Necker Cube as tilted diagonally down from right to left or diagonally up from left to right, but one can't see the same cube doing both at the same time. And you can't apply the falling apple as a model in a Newtonian way and an Aristotelian way at the same time to the same phenomenon.

(At least I don't think you can. I don't want to be dogmatic about this. A botanist and his student can be in the produce section of a grocery store and the botanist can point to the tomato and explain why in botany the tomato is considered a "fruit," and can explain this in terms of the tomato's role in plant reproduction, and at the same time be musing to himself about the price of the tomato and how it seems to match last week's price and so the price of vegetables seems no longer to be rising - he looks at the broccoli and this seems to confirm his hypothesis - whereas the price of fruit (he's looking at oranges and bananas) does seem to continue to be going up. One can walk and chew gum at the same time. But I'd say here he is compartmentalizing his thoughts, applying one set of criteria with one part of his mind to one problem and another set of criteria with another part of his mind to another problem.)