Kuhn 6: Dick And Jane Examine Paradigms
Jan. 31st, 2009 01:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbot[EDIT Feb. 1 12:19 PM Mountain Standard Time: I've posted a new Kuhn 6 thread that is essentially this one RESTARTED, since this one quickly evolved into an off-topic mess, and on the off chance that some of the lurkers decide to start posting, I want them to have a clearer conversation to join. You can still post here in response to specific things said on this thread, but I want the new one to be where you examine the specific passages in "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" where something's being modeled on something else or something resembles something else, etc.]
I thought that, in my discussion with Mark the other day of my six questions, we were trying to dance in the air before we'd learned how to walk. So I'll suggest that for a while we bring ourselves down to the level of "see Spot run" and "1 + 1 = 2." ("See Spot run" was a line in a Scott Foresman primary reader I was taught to read from at age 6. Spot was a puppy dog.)
So for this thread I want to stay with a single question: what's a paradigm? And I'll limit us to only part of the question. Kuhn originally used the word to mean "model," but then his usage drifted to broader meanings without his initially being quite aware this was happening. Here for now we'll concentrate on the narrow, on "model."
I suggest that you go through the article "What Is A Scientific Revolution?" (here, pp 13 to 32) and look for wherever something is said to be or seems to be a model for something else, or someone's action is modeled on someone else's, or something is said to be like something else or to resemble something else to be similar to something else, or various things are assimilated or juxtaposed, or something is an example or a metaphor or is used in an analogy, or something illustrates a point. Look not just for where Kuhn describes scientists using models, examples, etc. but where Kuhn himself uses models, examples, etc. when he's addressing us.
Here are several instances:
"But it is precisely seeing motion as change-of-quality that permits its assimilation to all other sorts of change." (p. 18)
"Roughly speaking, he used probability theory to find the proportion of resonators that fell in each of the various cells, just as Boltzmann had found the proportions of molecules." (p. 26)
"In particular, the [energy element] has gone from a mental division of the total energy to a separable physical energy atom, of which each resonator may have 0, 1, 2, 3, or some other number. Figure 6 tries to capture that change in a way that suggests its resemblance to the inside-out battery of my last example." (pp 27-28)
Also, if you look at the very top of p. 30 you will find the word "paradigmatic."
Once having done this, use what you've read in those pages to come up with your ideas of the various things (note plural) that a paradigm could be. What you come up with may not altogether match the definitions that Kuhn gives in some of his other pieces. What you come up with may be better.
And of course you can post those ideas on this thread - or on your own livejournal, or somewhere - rather than, you know, not posting them anywhere.
I thought that, in my discussion with Mark the other day of my six questions, we were trying to dance in the air before we'd learned how to walk. So I'll suggest that for a while we bring ourselves down to the level of "see Spot run" and "1 + 1 = 2." ("See Spot run" was a line in a Scott Foresman primary reader I was taught to read from at age 6. Spot was a puppy dog.)
So for this thread I want to stay with a single question: what's a paradigm? And I'll limit us to only part of the question. Kuhn originally used the word to mean "model," but then his usage drifted to broader meanings without his initially being quite aware this was happening. Here for now we'll concentrate on the narrow, on "model."
I suggest that you go through the article "What Is A Scientific Revolution?" (here, pp 13 to 32) and look for wherever something is said to be or seems to be a model for something else, or someone's action is modeled on someone else's, or something is said to be like something else or to resemble something else to be similar to something else, or various things are assimilated or juxtaposed, or something is an example or a metaphor or is used in an analogy, or something illustrates a point. Look not just for where Kuhn describes scientists using models, examples, etc. but where Kuhn himself uses models, examples, etc. when he's addressing us.
Here are several instances:
"But it is precisely seeing motion as change-of-quality that permits its assimilation to all other sorts of change." (p. 18)
"Roughly speaking, he used probability theory to find the proportion of resonators that fell in each of the various cells, just as Boltzmann had found the proportions of molecules." (p. 26)
"In particular, the [energy element] has gone from a mental division of the total energy to a separable physical energy atom, of which each resonator may have 0, 1, 2, 3, or some other number. Figure 6 tries to capture that change in a way that suggests its resemblance to the inside-out battery of my last example." (pp 27-28)
Also, if you look at the very top of p. 30 you will find the word "paradigmatic."
Once having done this, use what you've read in those pages to come up with your ideas of the various things (note plural) that a paradigm could be. What you come up with may not altogether match the definitions that Kuhn gives in some of his other pieces. What you come up with may be better.
And of course you can post those ideas on this thread - or on your own livejournal, or somewhere - rather than, you know, not posting them anywhere.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 06:00 pm (UTC)I think that a paradigm is the working together of two elements.
Until I started thinking about expressing these clearly -- ie here, and to you -- I thought of them in a quasi-mathematical way. Now that I'm trying to define it more clearly, I have a very obviously Wittgensteinian version of the two elements.
Answer one: a paradigm consists of (A) a set of articulated ingredients within (B) an overall limiting geometry.
More on (A): bears something like the relationship a diagram or a map bears to what it represents (except for the articulation); ordinarily I'd reach for the word "model" for such a thing, but if I do that without caveats here I probably stomp all over your suggestions how to explore how TK uses the word "model" (because I suspect I mean something slightly different by model than you do). All the same, in terms of its relationship to nature, "model" (with its sense of possibly many bits not all present all the time, some of them moveable) feels to me more what I'm getting at than diagram. (Animated diagram?)
More on (B): Overall limiting geometry... well, the problem with this is it's maths-talk. It means the shape of setting in which things can happen, and the rules that such a setting imposes -- rules how how far things can move from each other; what the rules are of route-making...
Anyway the issue of rules and rule-making leads to answer two, copped from Wittgenstein
Answer two: a paradigm is like a boardgame, and thus consists of (C) the board and pieces, and (D) the rules, of how the pieces interact with one another (D1), and how they are allowed to move on the board (D2).
These two answers don't quite map onto each other. (A) is equivalent to (C + D1); (B) to (D2).(Hence D1 is what might be called the "rules of articulation" in A...)
Answer Two allows for a clearer analogy for paradigm-shifts (and for cumulative non-revolutionary additions) than does Answer One.
Analogy for paradigm-shifts courtesy Answer Two: A paradigm-shift occurs when pieces or board or rules are so changed that the game becomes another game: for example, chess is still chess if the pieces are white&black or red&white --- but it's not chess if a rook's rules of movement switch with a bishop's. A cumulative non-revolutionary addition is the equivalent of some determination of the exact facts about colours of squares or pieces on some given chess board...
So the upshot of this -- basically a thought-dump of where I got to prior to your request to stick with idea of 'model', but I hope it gives some sense of where "model" fits into my idea of paradigm.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 08:29 am (UTC)No! I very much do not want you to start with what you think a paradigm is. If I were actually your teacher I'd hand this back with an X through it and say, "Do over. Do the assignment, please." Maybe at some point in the future - most likely not on this thread - I'd want you to come up with what you think a paradigm is, if you think Kuhn's idea needs changing, but right now I want you to forget what you think a paradigm is, just as if we were studying Aristotelian physics I'd want you to set aside Einstein and Newton. I want you to (1) look at the text for wherever something seems to be a model for something else, or someone's action is modeled on someone else's, or something is said to be like something else or to resemble something else or to be similar to something else etc. etc. and work from there to come up with a notion of "paradigm" (in the narrow sense of "model") that is consistent with what is in Kuhn's text and (2) keep the conversation on the basic level of "see Spot run" and "1 + 1 = 2" and work forward in baby steps. I say this because, first, I don't think you do yet understand Kuhn's concept of paradigm, and also, your and my discussions of "theory" or "philosophy," be they on Derrida or on Bloom, while always instructive, always end in failure, so I think we need to do something different.
That doesn't mean that what you just wrote has no value. It means you need to put it in the drawer for the time being.
To steer you in the right direction, I'll pose the following question: are there any board games modeled on checkers? If so, are there rules for how you model a new board game on checkers? Is "rules" even the right term here? You might also want to check the text of "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" for what Kuhn says, if anything, about rules.
But don't do any of that before doing an inventory in "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" for where Kuhn himself shows* something being modeled on something else, something resembling something else, etc.
*I use the word "shows" because I don't recall him actually using the term "model" in the piece, though perhaps he did. Be assured he uses it elsewhere, however.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 11:28 am (UTC)heehee anyway, this response is actually quite vividly like responses i got from teachers in school: "very creative i'm sure but NOTHING LIKE THE HOMEWORK I SET 2/20" -- i would show this to my mum and she would be delighted and encourage me, we must have been an insufferable family to be educators for...
will try and do the inventory on the train home as doesn't need a computer or internet, just a print-out and four dfft colours of highlighter
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 07:02 pm (UTC)(1) How important is Kuhn's concept of "natural phenomena" (15) in establishing a paradigm? He's suggesting a fundamental order to the way things work -- I would say "objectively" if I didn't think the word were too loaded, but let's say instead something more like "empirically without much doubt" -- that is natural, and that a paradigm gives us, perhaps, a more accurate understanding of the state of the world as it can be empirically proven. But I'm unconvinced that this concept can be applied to things that are socially determined, like art or politics or business or anything requiring human conversation and acknowledgment to be said to be TRUE.
I just had a long convo with Emily, who was arguing for changes in the American workforce as a paradigm shift; my counter-argument was that this falls into the realm of "normal" evolution, since the most ancient forms of business transaction and the philosophy behind it can coexist with the most modern incarnations of business. Any given stage of development in business (bartering, agrarian self-sufficiency, Fordism, globalization/transnationalization of labor) can coexist, hence are not Kuhnian paradigms.
(2) This means that his paradigm, as he says, is something that cannot be reversed; that is, to accept it, you must throw out a substantial portion of other things linked to it, to get a clearer picture of the natural world. I imagine one example would be the realm of psychoanalysis, whose purveyors claim it is something of a science, but whose tenets could easily be undermined were we to have a better understanding of the actual mechanics of the human brain through, e.g., cognitive psychology or neuroscience. (I bet a lot of medical science is in this sort of unknown age, hesitate to say "Dark Age.") Whereas politics and histories and similar concepts CAN be reversed or changed, given the right argument and right circumstances.
(3) Paradigms can be read as "univocal." This means that discourses that are multivocal -- history comes to mind -- cannot undergo a Kuhnian paradigm shift.
(4) Paradigms are changed when the previous paradigm's premises are shown to be "arbitrary" (re: Aristotelian concept of a vacuum's nonexistence on page 19). However, we often accept arbitrary premises in issues of morality, ethics, politics, and taste. Arbitrariness is not acceptable in science in the way it is in other modes of discussion and thinking.
Those are my thoughts so far, will stop there for now and catch up with your air-dancing.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 07:42 am (UTC)Yes, Kuhn is saying that a sign of a scientific revolution is that something that formerly resembled something else no longer does. They don't have to become polar opposite, however. Falling rocks aren't the polar opposites of acorns growing into oaks, and the correct derivation of Planck's black-body law still has lots in common with the derivation of Boltzmann's that he was copying [presumably; I'm not pretending to know the science]; was just off in one point that was so crucial that physics had to transform itself to accommodate the change.
But I think you're missing Kuhn's point when you say "historically 'like' but scientifically not at all like." Planck was being brilliantly scientific in seeing the resemblance.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 07:41 pm (UTC)newtonian space --defined as space where it doesn't matter where you start, the results are generalisable -- is very important for our understanding more clearly all kinds of things about all kinds of stuff, but we don't actually live in it (or anything like it)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 08:05 pm (UTC)a non-euclidean description of an orbit is that the copernican planet is travelling in a "straight line" in a space curved by the gravity of the star... the key to this curvature being such that the "straight line" joins up with itself, as it does in certain kinds of "closed" non-euclidean space*)
(saying "we don't actually live in it" is a bit bold, but it is tremendously much more likely that we live in a "closed" geometry, determined by the total mass, and total gravitational effect)
(there are three kinds of space -- euclidean/newtonian, in which parallels never meet, which is infinite in size, a never ending system of notional cubes of space; space in which parallels meet; and another kind of space in which, once you have a line and a point at a distance from that line, there is not just a single line through that point that fails to meet with the line -- as in the parallel case -- but an infinity of lines)
(this is much easier if you draw it)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 07:29 am (UTC)Of course, once we get this conversation going on the subject I envisioned, a question that will come up is why in one circumstance a resemblance links things together (a rock falling towards its place in the center is like an acorn growing into its form as an oak) while in another such a resemblance is seen to be of no import or nonexistent. How is it decided that some resemblances have import and others don't?
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 06:16 am (UTC)OK, to start with, I was recommending up above that on this thread we stick REAL CLOSE to Kuhn's actual text in order to see what's going on here. Maybe I didn't make that recommendation altogether explicit, but I will now: Stick real close to Kuhn's text! I was also recommending that we take this conversation down to the level of "see Scott run" and "1 + 1 = 2," which doesn't necessarily mean that we restrict ourselves to a vocabulary that a six-year-old or even a twelve-year-old already knows, but that we work really hard to ensure that we're communicating with one another and that we're not referring to ideas that seem to come from outside of the text or outside of our discussion and that need further elaboration. And I will say as a fifty-five-year-old I don't know what the phrases "empirically without much doubt" and "empirically proven" mean.
So, how should we try to answer your question: "How important is Kuhn's concept of 'natural phenomena'?" Well, first, I'd ask does Kuhn have a concept of "natural phenomena," and if so, what is it? So far it's only a two-word phrase, and we don't even know if he just tossed it in there with little thought or if it belongs to a strenuously thought-out theory. You say that the phrase "natural phenomena" suggests "a fundamental order to the way things work," so my question here is does anything else in the text support this interpretation? Does Kuhn ever mention anything like there being a fundamental order to the way things work? I'll give a quick answer to that one: No. As far as I can recall, nowhere in the piece does he give an opinion one way or another as to whether there's a fundamental order to the way things work. He may well believe there is such an order, but I wouldn't assume that the two-word phrase "natural phenomena" commits him to a belief that doesn't seem to have much to do with what the piece is about anyway. "Phenomena" means "stuff," not "order."
To explore further, look at the context. Kuhn is saying that revolutionary changes in a science can be distinguished from normal, cumulative changes in that the revolutionary changes "involve discoveries that cannot be accommodated within the concepts in use before they were made. In order to make or assimilate such a discovery one must alter the way one thinks about and describes some range of natural phenomena. The discovery (in cases like these 'invention' may be a better word) of Newton's second law of motion is of this sort. The concepts of force and mass deployed in that law differed from those in use before the law was introduced, and the law itself was essential to their definition." And from there he goes on to describe the changes wrought by the Copernican revolution: Before it occurred, "the sun and moon were planets, the earth was not. After it, the earth was a planet, like Mars and Jupiter; the sun was a star, and the moon was a new sort of body, a satellite." Etc.
And then I'd go to the rest of the essay. "What had been paradigmatic examples of motion for Aristotle - acorn to oak or sickness to health - were not motions at all for Newton. In the transition, a natural family ceased to be natural; its members were redistributed among preexisting sets; and only one of them continued to bear the old name."
Now, the way I read all this is pretty much opposite how you read it. One set of concepts (Aristotelian motion) gives you one world, while another set of concepts (Newton's laws of motion) gives you another world.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 07:00 am (UTC)Wait a cotton-pickin' minute here. Remember, I want us to stick close to the narrow meaning of "paradigm" here, which is "model." Does Kuhn anywhere in the piece talk of there being one thing - the world as it can be empirically proven - and another thing, a model, that comprehends this first thing with clarity? Again, I'll give you an answer: nowhere in the piece is there anything like the concept "the world as it can be empirically proven," and where he's talking about resemblance etc. - this being like that - he never talks about something resembling the world. He talks all over the place about stuff resembling other stuff, but not about stuff resembling the world.
This means that his paradigm, as he says, is something that cannot be reversed; that is, to accept it, you must throw out a substantial portion of other things linked to it, to get a clearer picture of the natural world.
Again, whoa boy! He doesn't use the word "paradigm" in this piece, except for that one use of "paradigmatic" that I quoted. What I'm asking us to do is try to come up with what his concept of "paradigm" is - in the narrow sense of "model" - by looking closely at where he seems to be describing something's being modeled on something else or something resembling something else, etc. I don't know what it would mean to say that something being modeled on something else can't be reversed, or something resembling something else can't be reversed. I can conceive of someone saying that a scientific revolution can't be reversed, but I sure don't remember Kuhn saying that in this article.
Also, I think you probably miswrote your sentence. After a scientific revolution, some things previously associated with or depicted by a word or concept are no longer associated with/depicted by it, and other things not previously associated with/depicted by it now are. Kuhn expresses no opinion as to whether the new concepts are clearer or more accurate than the old, or whether the new ones do better by the world, in some way, than the old does. And the way you've written this sentence is confusing since it seems to be saying that any paradigm (whatever the hell a "paradigm" is) does this clarity thing. And I'll point out that this piece doesn't even bring up the question of how people go about deciding that, say, Newton's concept of motion is right and Aristotle's is wrong.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 07:17 am (UTC)Well, again, he doesn't use the word "paradigm" in this piece. He says that no univocal reading of the word "planet" can make the following sentence true: "In the Ptolemaic system planets revolve about the earth; in the Copernican they revolve around the sun."
While I actually agree with your conclusion here, you're off-topic for what I'm trying to do on this thread, which is to explore what's going on with modeling, resemblance, etc. The phrase "Kuhnian paradigm shift" is for some other thread, probably. Where not there yet.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 07:21 am (UTC)We're not there yet.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 09:11 am (UTC)Not at all. "The premise seems arbitrary" was how Kuhn started the long paragraph (note he says "seems") but the upshot of the discussion is that, far from being arbitrary, Aristotle's perceiving position as a quality was crucial to a whole hunk of the rest of his physics, which would have unraveled if Aristotle hadn't treated position as a quality. He hardly chose the premise at a whim. Or, if his premises are arbitrary, then so are Newton's and Einstein's; in fact, if Aristotle's premise is arbitrary then so is any premise in any discourse.
It's not like Aristotle, Newton, or Einstein, could have just picked any old premise.
And I definitely dispute the phrase "shown to be arbitrary." A result of a scientific revolution is that some premises are replaced by others, but I don't see how that "shows" that the former was arbitrary. (And I'm not just speaking for myself here. I doubt very much that Kuhn would say that Descartes and Newton and crew showed Aristotle's premises to be arbitrary.)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 03:54 pm (UTC)So I guess to get back on track a bit, now that I'm a little more grounded, I would single out the question you went ahead and already asked:
"How is it decided that some resemblances have import and others don't?"
I think that by separating something out that I was calling "historical" versus "scientific" (arbitrarily and perhaps confusingly), I was trying to make a distinction in two kinds of understanding: one is how stuff works and one is how we say stuff works. "If I am right, the central characteristic of scientific revolutions is that they alter knowledge of nature that is intrinsic to the language itself and that is thus prior to anything quite describable as description or generalization, scientific or everyday" (32). So it is decided that some resemblances have import and some don't through a process in which the categories or "taxonomies" of language change. A language system changes so that what once was related to or like something else is no longer in the same category of language.
Re: "similar to" and "opposite of," my point isn't that all "metaphor-like juxtapositions" are at all like polar opposites, but rather that Kuhn seems to be suggesting that the net result of such juxtapositions, though important in the process of discovery, is the same: "only after that acquisition or learning process has passed a certain point can the practice of science even begin." I take him to mean here, basically, something more like "we can't understand each other until we agree to the new language rules that describe new knowledge" (31). So it's not that what were previously similar are now different, but what were previously similar are now in a completely different category of understanding and (subsequently?) language. Even if you understand how the process of inventing baseball with a few friends in a park (or maybe developing a battery based on what you believe are electrostatic principles) is like baseball or like a hydrodynamic battery, if you did it in a baseball game or used it to describe what you've actually created (a hydrodynamic battery), you wouldn't necessarily be "playing baseball" (though perhaps this feature or that feature is identical, others would be completely alien to the sport).
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 04:54 pm (UTC)That's not a confusion. Revolutionary changes are paradigm shifts, assuming the revolution is successful. Where your confusion lies was in not recalling that I'd said that "paradigm" started with one meaning of paradigm - paradigm as model - but then the term drifted to a broader meaning so that in effect Kuhn was using the term in two different ways, and what I wanted was for you to restrict yourself to the question I was asking at the start of this particular thread, which is that you try to understand "paradigm" in the narrow sense of "model" by looking real closely at the passages where Kuhn talks about things resembling other things and where he seems to be describing one thing being modeled after another thing, etc., in order to come up with an idea of what this sort of modeling is (or what "these sorts of modelings are," maybe) and the various ways that such models work....
...the confusion being that the word "paradigm" in the term "paradigm shift" is not necessarily the narrow term "paradigm" meaning "model," i.e. the concept that I want us to examine in this thread. --I'm saying "is not necessarily" rather than saying flatly "is not," period, since models do shift, e.g., one model of motion can be replaced by another, hence you've shifted models, or how a model works can shift, e.g., a stone falling to earth can remain a model of motion but the other phenomena that it resembles - the other phenomena it is a model for - change, so the phenomenon "rock falling to earth" is different from what it once was seen to be, and therefore what it resembles is different. And models changing is quite obviously one thing that's going on in a paradigm shift. So I don't want to make "paradigm change" strictly off-limits on this thread (or the restarted thread, when I create it, but I want you to look at "paradigm as model" first.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 05:41 pm (UTC)(2) "I was trying to make a distinction in two kinds of understanding: one is how stuff works and one is how we say stuff works." Not sure what this distinction is, since how we say stuff works is how we think stuff works. Both scientists and historians are concerned with the same thing here. Or is the distinction you're drawing between how stuff works in general and how a particular category of stuff - "language" being the category - works; how saying works, in other words. Again, don't see where science and history try to do things differently here. Or maybe your distinction is between describing how stuff works and describing how we come to develop the language that we use in describing how stuff works.
(3) But you misunderstood what Kuhn meant by the sentence "only after that acquisition or learning process has passed a certain point can the practice of science even begin." What he's talking about here (middle of p. 31) is how someone being trained in science - a student - comes to acquire scientific language, hence can begin his or her own practice of science.* What you're talking about is people inventing new language, whereas he was talking about people acquiring language that already exists. "We can't understand each other until we agree to the new language rules that describe new knowledge." Be VERY careful here. Kuhn doesn't use the word "rules." "Model" and "rule" are different concepts. In any event, whether or not people understand each other until they agree on a common language**, people such as Kepler and Galileo were working during a period of revolution in astronomy and physics, which means that, according to Kuhn, there wasn't consensus as to the meaning of some basic concepts (e.g. "motion" and "planet"), and some people working on problems in astronomy and physics most likely did not understand each other, but Kepler and Galileo were scientists nonetheless.
*There can be an analogy - I don't know how good - between (a) a student learning the language of a science and (b) something that is not yet a science becoming a science. Not that the two processes are similar. One involves picking up language and the other inventing language/creating consensus on it. But a scientific revolution would be something different.
**Are people who disagree as to whether Taylor Swift is country or not failing to understand each other? I'd think they can understand each other very well, if they take the time, and this understanding doesn't require them to agree on what "country" means.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 05:45 pm (UTC)I mean, a revolution in an already established science, such as astronomy.