koganbot | Kuhn 5: First General C&Q Thread

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.