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

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.