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: 2009-02-01 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.