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

[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