![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbot[This is my previous Kuhn 6 thread RESTARTED, since that 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. This doesn't mean that there's nothing to be gained by looking at or joining the previous discussion, but I want to start the conversation anew on this thread, on a different footing: sticking to the topic, going slow.]
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'llsuggest plea, urge, demand that for a while we take baby steps and 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? But I'm limiting us even further, to only part of the question. Kuhn originally used the word "paradigm" to mean "model," but then his usage drifted to broader meanings without his initially being quite aware this was happening, and in effect he ended up using the term in two different ways (think of how "basketball" is both the name of a ball and the name of the game that uses the ball). Once he was aware of the confusion his two uses were causing, he sharply differentiated between the narrow (and he thought more potent) use of the term, which he now called "exemplar," and the broader use of the term, which he now called "disciplinary matrix." Here on this thread we'll concentrate on the narrow, on "exemplar," i.e. "model." I personally prefer the term "model." [EDIT: But see my post entitled "Oh great" in the comments in regard to where Kuhn at one point - inconsistently - differentiates between "model" and "exemplar."]
Since the term "paradigm shift" basically refers to a shift in an overall disciplinary matrix, "paradigm shift" won't be the focus of this thread. I don't say that "paradigm shift" should therefore be off-limits on this thread (unless I change my mind and make it so), since a paradigm shift very much involves, among other things, a change in the models that are used in a disciplinary matrix (so in a paradigm shift, paradigms - i.e., models - shift). But I want you to think about "paradigm" as model, first, and here's how I want you to do it:
I want you to go through Thomas S. Kuhn's "What Is A Scientific Revolution?" (here, pp 13 to 32) and look 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, or various things are assimilated or juxtaposed, or something is an example or a metaphor or a simile, or something is used in an analogy, or something illustrates a point. Look not just for where Kuhn describes scientists using models, examples, etc. but for 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 - by Kuhn's account - paradigms (i.e. models) could be. What you come up with may not altogether match the definitions that Kuhn gives in some of his other pieces, since his definitions always seem half-assed to me. What you come up with may be better.
But stick real real real close to the text. Quote it, and when a phrase or statement seems confusing, look at the sentences right before and after it, or other parts of the essay that seem to be talking about the same subject.
(One reason I decided to start us with "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" is that it doesn't use the term "paradigm," so, without taking the term as a given, we can work out what the term can mean, perhaps with deeper understanding than we'd achieve otherwise.)
And of course you should 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
So, for this thread I want to stay with a single question: what's a paradigm? But I'm limiting us even further, to only part of the question. Kuhn originally used the word "paradigm" to mean "model," but then his usage drifted to broader meanings without his initially being quite aware this was happening, and in effect he ended up using the term in two different ways (think of how "basketball" is both the name of a ball and the name of the game that uses the ball). Once he was aware of the confusion his two uses were causing, he sharply differentiated between the narrow (and he thought more potent) use of the term, which he now called "exemplar," and the broader use of the term, which he now called "disciplinary matrix." Here on this thread we'll concentrate on the narrow, on "exemplar," i.e. "model." I personally prefer the term "model." [EDIT: But see my post entitled "Oh great" in the comments in regard to where Kuhn at one point - inconsistently - differentiates between "model" and "exemplar."]
Since the term "paradigm shift" basically refers to a shift in an overall disciplinary matrix, "paradigm shift" won't be the focus of this thread. I don't say that "paradigm shift" should therefore be off-limits on this thread (unless I change my mind and make it so), since a paradigm shift very much involves, among other things, a change in the models that are used in a disciplinary matrix (so in a paradigm shift, paradigms - i.e., models - shift). But I want you to think about "paradigm" as model, first, and here's how I want you to do it:
I want you to go through Thomas S. Kuhn's "What Is A Scientific Revolution?" (here, pp 13 to 32) and look 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, or various things are assimilated or juxtaposed, or something is an example or a metaphor or a simile, or something is used in an analogy, or something illustrates a point. Look not just for where Kuhn describes scientists using models, examples, etc. but for 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 - by Kuhn's account - paradigms (i.e. models) could be. What you come up with may not altogether match the definitions that Kuhn gives in some of his other pieces, since his definitions always seem half-assed to me. What you come up with may be better.
But stick real real real close to the text. Quote it, and when a phrase or statement seems confusing, look at the sentences right before and after it, or other parts of the essay that seem to be talking about the same subject.
(One reason I decided to start us with "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" is that it doesn't use the term "paradigm," so, without taking the term as a given, we can work out what the term can mean, perhaps with deeper understanding than we'd achieve otherwise.)
And of course you should post those ideas on this thread - or on your own livejournal, or somewhere - rather than, you know, not posting them anywhere.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 07:45 pm (UTC)Here specifically is the First General Comments & Questions Thread for Kuhn matters
Here's the reading list and my introductory spiel
Here in reverse chronological order are all the threads with matters relating to Kuhn (which you can always generate yourself by clicking the Thomas Kuhn tag up at the top of the page)
inventory of models pt 1 p13-23
Date: 2009-02-01 09:06 pm (UTC)i: better not here as LONG
ii: handy for cut-and-paste to discuss particular items here though
iii: i have notes and ideas and explanations but will get to those later
iv: quite possibly not complete --plz to itemise what i've missed
v: keys words in bold (where no bold the whole phrase or sentence seems key)
vi: plz also to say if iim wildly off the point still
inventory of models pts 2&3 p24-32 plus footnotes
Date: 2009-02-02 04:21 pm (UTC)inventory pt3 p29-32 plus foototes
the purpose of these is to provide, without clogging up this thread, a cut-and-pastable repository of a lot -- though by NO MEANS all -- of the models, metaphors, analogies, resemblances and etc (=MMAR&), deployed in thomas kuhn's "what are scientific revolutions?"
glossary: when a quote has more than one bit bolded, it's because i'm indicating what i consider to be the occurrence of POTENTIALLY DISTINCT MMAR& within the same sentence or section -- i have the sense my criteria for listing was changing during this task, which in itself may be of note)
(ps turns out courtesy the snow i had a WHOLE DAY to get on with this after all: however i do now have to get on with something else!!)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 10:53 pm (UTC)"The route I traveled backward [from Newton to Aristotle] with the aid of written texts was, I shall simply assert, nearly enough the same one that earlier scientists had traveled forward with no text but nature to guide them."
Not sure of the significance of this particular model, except that it suggests a two-way road of discovery between models (the Newtonian and Aristotelian), something -- a period of time of discovery, or a collection of ideas drawing from two different models -- that can be charted but is not itself a model. Do I have this right at all: You can track forward or backwards through the development of two models, but can't align one final model to the other; but it is not strictly evolutionary, since there are also these sort of quantum leaps (the revolution part) that happen? (Although it seems to me that there are also "quantum leaps" in other kinds of evolutionary processes...but that's off-topic, as might be the metaphor I'm using here.) (I'll admit I'm still kind of at Dick and Jane myself.)
"In revolutionary change one must either live with incoherence or else revise a number of interrelated generalizations together. If these same changes were introduced one at a time, there would be no intermediate resting place. Only the initial and final sets of generalizations provide a coherent account of nature" (29).
So what are these intermediate points that (I would assume necessarily) have to happen between two models? How long can an intermediate non-model sustain itself before it becomes a new model? How on-topic is this?
no subject
Date: 2009-02-02 12:29 am (UTC)Kuhn is using his backward traveling route as a MODEL for what, going forward, a scientific revolution is. So he's saying, "Just as I, going backwards, had to disarrange and rearrange the pieces, so, going forward, scientists of the past had to disarrange and rearrange the pieces."
As for the rest of your post, I've got scads of notes on the subject, but I think we should either (1) bracket the conversation for later, or (2) go talk about it as soon as we want, but on another thread, such as Kuhn 5: First General C&Q Thread, where
So what are these intermediate points that (I would assume necessarily) have to happen between two models? How long can an intermediate non-model sustain itself before it becomes a new model?
For the limited subject of "paradigms meaning models or exemplars," this is off-topic because I don't think "models" is the right word here. Kuhn is not talking about what's intermediary in time between two models but rather what's intermediary in time between a whole, more-or-less coherent buncha stuff (e.g., Aristotle's physics and cosmology) and another whole, more-or-less coherent buncha stuff (e.g., Newtonian physics and cosmology), of which models (in the plural) are only a part of what also includes theories and formulas etc.
There can be plenty of models in times when there are competing paradigms (as in competing "disciplinary matrices") or in fields where there are no and never have been dominant paradigms (as in "never have been dominant disciplinary matrices"). I mean, there are plenty of things that people can use as models in music and in music criticism, even though there is no single coherent thing that all musicians or all critics do.
But that's for another discussion. For here, in the text of "What Are Scientific Revolutions?," where do we find "models"/"exemplars" and how do they seem to function?
models -- the actual word...
Date: 2009-02-02 10:19 am (UTC)p.16 (middle): "In biology, especially, [Aristotle's] descriptive writings provided models..."
p.24 (middle of text):"To get these results, one must conceive the battery and circuit on a more hydrodynamic model..."
I think both these give a good sense of one (some?) (all?) of the things TK means by "model"
AND PLUS also this third
Date: 2009-02-02 01:05 pm (UTC)(interesting -- possibly significant -- that it's so hard to spot these uses)
Re: AND PLUS also this third
Date: 2009-02-03 09:42 am (UTC)Remember back in Kuhn 5 where you pinpointed an uncharacteristically woolly statement of Kuhn's? "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." The reason for the woolliness is that he's trying to explain something for which you ultimately run out of explanations. Cf. Wittgenstein in the first paragraph of Philosophical Investigations: "'But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word "red" and what he is to do with the word "five"?--Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere." Late Wittgenstein asks us what the rule is for following a rule and on into an infinite regress (his moral being that rules too have to come to an end somewhere); how do you know that when someone points with his finger you are to look forward from his forefinger rather than backward from his elbow or perpendicular from his palm? A child just learning what pointing is may well have such troubles, and if the context isn't enough to point his gaze forward, as it were, you can always demonstrate by having someone go to the forward spot, or giving the child some reward for getting it right, etc. But you can ask the same sort of questions about the demonstration that you did about the pointing, or ask how the child is to understand what in particular in his behavior he's being rewarded for, and such questions can multiply to infinity. At some point, the child just gets it. And so it is with similarity.
Re: AND PLUS also this third
Date: 2009-02-03 09:45 am (UTC)LateR (IN PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS) Wittgenstein asks us
on getting it
Date: 2009-02-03 10:49 am (UTC)Re: models -- the actual word...
Date: 2009-02-04 11:43 pm (UTC)I find this sentence impossibly vague for our purposes on this thread - which isn't Kuhn's fault, since he wasn't writing it for the purposes of this thread. He was quickly making the point that since Aristotle's biology had been so good, it doesn't seem to make sense that his physics was so bad - so therefore, maybe he, Kuhn, needs to look further at Aristotle's physics to see if there's something in it he is missing. But he isn't telling us what Aristotle said about biology or how Aristotle's descriptions were used as models.
Let me speculate as to the types of ways Aristotle's descriptions could have been models: (i) Maybe Aristotle wrote really well about joints in frog's legs, and not only were these useful for anyone interested in frog's legs, it turned out that frog's legs were crucially similar to all other anatomical joints, so his writing about frog's legs became a model for anyone who wanted to write about any joints that were anywhere in a biological creature that had them. (ii) Maybe what Aristotle said in regard to what would make a useful taxonomy was so thoughtful that lots of biologists in the 16th and 17th c's referred to it when constructing their own taxonomies, even though these taxonomies were vastly different from Aristotle's. (iii) Maybe Aristotle's biological descriptions were so accurate and his sense of what was relevant to a description and what wasn't relevant was so exemplary that other biologists strove to match him, though often what they were describing were very different biological processes from the ones Aristotle had described. Anyway, Kuhn's sentence doesn't really help me understand what Kuhn thinks modeling is (and as I said, it wasn't intended to).
But my first imaginary example, the frog joints, can be one kind of modeling, which I'll call other A's are like this A: Joints are a model for all other joints; A is a model for all other A's.
Notice also, though, that there are two things going on in the modeling I described. (a) Something is like something else, and (b) We should model what we do on what someone else did. Person D should do what Person C did. These two types of modeling can be combined as: since A2 is like A1, we can use what person C did with A1 as a model for what we can do with A2.
Kuhn p. 24 To get these results, one must conceive the battery and circuit on a more hydrodynamic model. Resistance must become like the frictional resistance to the flow of water in pipes.
This sort of modeling is analogical: electrical resistance is like the frictional resistance to the flow of water in pipes; B is like A. "A gas behaves like a collection of microscopic billiard balls in random motion" (that's an example that Kuhn gave in 1974 of a "model"). I'd say that these analogies could be either tight (the billiard-ball example, if you get rid of friction and a few other aspects of actual billiard balls) or loose (e.g., saying that electrons orbit a nucleus in the way planets orbit the sun; other than that electrons aren't bound to the nucleus and can be varying distances away, this is not a good description at all, but compared to no model of the atom or the idea that atoms are impenetrable hunks of stuff, this does give a beginning student, for instance, some sense of what an atom is). I don't know enough about electrical resistance to know how tightly it matches the hydrodynamic model.
And what I've just written will set up an agonized post on models (tentatively entitled "Oh great") that I will post at the bottom of these comments sometime between now and when I go to bed tonight, I hope.
Oh great
Date: 2009-02-05 04:36 pm (UTC)So I've been saying that, by Kuhn's more narrow of his two fundamental uses of the word "paradigm," a paradigm is a model, or as he puts it more dully, an "exemplar." And, for instance, in the preface (1977) to his first collection of pieces, The Essential Tension, when he discusses how he came up with the term "paradigm" in 1959 and explains what scientists do with paradigms, he says, "they could model their own subsequent research on them." So there it is, "model" in its verb form, on p. xix.
So then, on pp 297 and 298 of that book, in an essay entitled "Second Thoughts On Paradigms" (1974), Kuhn differentiates among "symbolic generalizations," "models," and "exemplars," telling us that the latter is what he originally meant by "paradigm." So - I don't know if just for the moment, in that essay, or as a more general practice - he's using "model" to mean something different from "exemplar."
Models, about which I shall have nothing further to say in this paper, are what provide the group with preferred analogies or, when deeply held, with an ontology. At one extreme they are heuristic: the electric circuit may fruitfully be regarded as a steady-state hydrodynamic system, or a gas behaves like a collection of microscopic billiard balls in random motion. At the other, they are the objects of metaphysical commitment: the heat of a body is the kinetic energy of its constituent particles, or, more obviously metaphysical, all perceptible phenomena are due to the motion and interaction of qualitatively neutral atoms in the void.
(First definition of "heuristic" from the American Heritage Dictionary (first edition): "Helping to discover or learn; guiding or furthering investigation: 'the historian discovers the past by the judicious use of such a heuristic device as the "ideal type"' (Karl J. Weintraub).")
I'm still not giving you what Kuhn says about exemplars, since I don't yet want that to get in the way of what you think such creatures might be, but when he brings up paradigms/exemplars a few pages later (p. 305) in the very same essay he once again talks of scientists modeling further investigations on paradigms, by which he means examples not analogies.
The Essential Tension, unlike The Road Since Structure and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has an index, so I looked up "model" (at the end of its listing we're instructed to "See also Paradigms, as standard examples" and at "exemplar" the index doesn't even list page numbers but again instructs us to "See Paradigms, as standard examples"). If the index is accurate (which I already know it isn't, since under "model" it leaves out pp 297 and 298), the use of "model" as analogy that he gives us on pp 297 and 298 appears nowhere else in the book, whereas "model" in its verb form, as what scientists do with exemplars - they model subsequent work on exemplars - appears yet more times. (But "model" as analogy does appear once in "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" in that passage Mark uncovered which refers to the hydrodynamic "model" of resistance. I doubt that, in the sense of scientists modeling something on something else, there's a clear distinction to be drawn between how you use an example and how you use an analogy.) And intriguingly, under "model," the index directs us to the passage in 1959 where Kuhn first introduced the term "paradigm," even though that passage doesn't use the word "model."
Anyhow, I don't think I've steered you wrong by saying that a paradigm, in its narrow sense, is a model. The reason "model" keeps appearing in its verb form when paradigms are mentioned is that "model" is the best available word. But at times Kuhn is trying to hone in on a particular type of model.
Taking Mark's inventory 1
Date: 2009-02-06 05:15 am (UTC)I'd instructed us to "look not just for where Kuhn describes scientists using models, examples, etc. but for where Kuhn himself uses models, examples, etc. when he's addressing us." Mark actually does a much better job of the latter than I'd done in my own notes; this is useful in that he has an eye for where Kuhn uses what I'll call "subterranean" metaphors, meaning that Mark's picking up spots where Kuhn himself isn't necessarily paying all that much attention to the viewpoints that his words may be directing both us and himself to.
P13:
i: "two types of scientific development, normal and revolutionary"
"Revolution" is an apt term for what Kuhn's talking about, and it goes well with his contention that some scientific development isn't cumulative. In any event, the sort of revolution he probably has in mind is something like the French or American or Russian, rather than just a coup d'etat that puts a new general or new tribe in charge but doesn't really change the form of government. So in the French revolution(s) the new democratic form of government didn't, for instance, simply add to the monarchy that preceded it, it also did away with a significant portion of the earlier social practice, and transformed some of the rest.
A disadvantage of the word "revolution" is that it implies something world important on the order of the French or Copernican revolutions, whereas a lot of scientific revolutions affect maybe fifty or a hundred people in a particular profession, according to Kuhn. Another disadvantage is that revolution is so glamorized a concept that it's been taken over by advertising, so we get revolutionary new dish detergents and, of course, rock bands that break the mold, etc., and this has contaminated the phrase "paradigm shift" as well. So, like English lit studies go through paradigm shifts and computers are changing our lives etc. etc.
ii: "a standard image: normal science is what produces the bricks that scientific research is forever adding to the growing stockpile of scientific knowledge... that cumulative conception of scientific development [blah blah]... But scientific development also displays a non-cumulative mode..."
Kuhn's few sentences here are sparse and unsatisfying. The essay began life as three lectures, so maybe he had a time limit, and the subject after all is revolutionary change not normal change, but still, he's expecting the words "bricks" and "cumulative" to carry a whole lot of weight, without his really explaining what "cumulative" development means. It's additive in some way, duh. What he says on the next page about Boyle's law is a lot more useful, and he's good in the negative (the piece gives a good idea what's noncumulative about revolutionary change) but still, he hardly tells us what's cumulative about cumulative development. (A more useful metaphor than "bricks" might be "expansion" and "containment": e.g., if the Copernican Revolution had been cumulative rather than revolutionary, it would have enlarged knowledge, but Aristotle's fundamental concepts and insights would still be contained within the eventual Newtonian synthesis, rather than vanishing from physics and astronomy.)
Taking Mark's inventory 2
Date: 2009-02-06 05:17 am (UTC)i:"a sufficient basis... on which I shall be drawing"
I don't think Kuhn means anything particularly foundational by the word "basis." This is idiomatic, like "you get the basic idea." He's saying that these three examples will give you an idea of where he's starting from and where he will be going in the future with his ideas, some of which he'll be drawing upon later in the piece, "drawing" as in "pulling out from" rather than "copying from."
One word that I paid no attention to on this page and the last is "clues": "clues to a central aspect of scientific knowledge," a vague phrase but evocative, implying a mystery that needs to be figured out and maybe some sense of his not having solved the case yet.
What I myself jotted down was "first by describing three examples of revolutionary change and then briefly discussing three characteristics which they all share. Doubtless revolutionary changes share other characteristics as well..."
So, from these three examples we'll be able to recognize other examples of revolutionary change in science, and these examples have similarities, three of which he's going to point out to us (which will help us recognize other revolutions when we see them and will also tell us something about a "central aspect of scientific knowledge," presumably).
ii: "normal change is... the sort that results in growth, accretion, cumulative addition to what was known before"
Yeah, as opposed to subtraction and elimination and dissolution. I wrote this down too, following up with, "Boyle's law will illustrate what is involved: its discoverers had previously possessed the concepts of gas pressure and volume as well as the instruments required to determine their magnitudes. The discovery that, for a given gas sample, the product of pressure and volume was a constant at constant temperature simply added to the knowledge of the way these antecedently understood variables behave." So, nothing of what was previously understood was tossed away. Key word: "concepts," and now an idea is being delivered. If the concepts remain the same, nothing is lost or shredded. And if the concepts change?... Well, just what does that mean, "concepts change"? That's something the essay tries to answer at the end, I think.
Taking Mark's inventory 3
Date: 2009-02-06 05:23 am (UTC)Interesting word, "within," as if the new discoveries were the jacks popping out of the jack-in-a-boxes that can't contain them. "Assimilate" is interesting too, since it seems as if the alteration is being made by the people making the "discovery," they having to adapt to it in order to absorb it, hence reshaping their concepts; or the discovery and the reconceptualization are the same process. "Range" says both that the change can't be kept too local, since neighboring and even outlying concepts have to adjust to the new reality, but "range" also is a limit: it's a range but it's not the entire conceptual universe. Mark didn't bold it, but the "natural" in "natural phenomena" is very problematic - actually I think it's just clogging up the works, maybe Kuhn pledging allegiance to the concept "nature" by gesture (i.e., by including the word "natural"). Or maybe the word's just there from habit, even though it's irrelevant to his enterprise.
P15
:
i: "discovery (in cases like these "invention" may be a better word)"
This sounds like a potent distinction, "discovery-invention," but I actually don't think anything rides on it one way or another (but that's a cryptic comment of mine that I don't have time to expand on right now).
ii: "the concepts... deployed in that law differed from those in use before the law was introduced, and the law itself was essential to their definition."
I like that word, "deployed," making one think of concepts as armaments. I don't think there's anything particularly significant in Kuhn's using it, however; he may have just been running out of synonyms for "used." But I wrote this sentence down too, not for its use of "deployed" but because of its role in preparing us for what's to come. Kuhn said he was going to give us three examples, and he's starting to tell us what to look for in the examples. So, one thing to look for: new concepts that constitute a new law but are also defined by a new law (as opposed to Boyle's law, where the concepts precede the law and are unchanged by them).
Taking Mark's inventory 4
Date: 2009-02-07 12:30 am (UTC)iii: "a... fuller, but more simplistic example is provided by the transition from [Astronomy P] to [Astronomy Q] "
What he means by "fuller" and "more simplistic" is hardly obvious, is it? "Fuller" will reappear below, however, in circumstances that are more fraught.
iv: "changes in laws of nature but also changes in the criteria by which some terms in those laws attached to nature"
"Nature" and "attach" are pregnant terms, but they won't give birth to anything interesting. Pretend that instead of "nature" Kuhn had said "phenomena" or "stuff" and that instead of "attach" he says "designate" or something equally unevocative. I mean, "nature" as opposed to what? Culture? Are terms forbidden to "attach" to the latter?
Kuhn's point later on in the piece is that some nouns carve out a different species (i.e., what stuff is associated with what other stuff) by following along different lines of similarity, so it's not that the "criteria" are different, but that - whatever the criteria - there's a difference between what gets associated with what.
v: "criteria... in part dependent upon the theory"
"Criteria" seems like a space holder here, actually. "Dependent upon" means that the "criteria" wouldn't exist without the theory. The criterion for being a planet is that you are a material body that orbits a star. But that seems to be a definition more than a criterion.
Also worth noting: "...transition from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy. 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." The point here once again being that something that used to be similar to something no longer is, and something that wasn't similar to something else now is, but this doesn't just change the celestial/noncelestial bodies' associations, it changes what they are. And also, from reading this passage, we're to recognize that a scientific revolution will be like this: something that was similar to something else no longer is, it has become similar to yet something else that it hadn't been similar to before, and this means that it is something different from what it once was believed to be, is a different being and belongs to a different species. And seeing this we will therefore be able to know a revolution when we see it.
vi: "When referential changes of this sort accompany change of law or theory, scientific development cannot be quite cumulative. One cannot get from the old to the new simply by an addition to what was already known."
What's added here to what Kuhn has said before is the word "referential." When a word refers to some things it hadn't previously, and no longer refers to some things it had, this is a way that change is not cumulative. So if you're wearing the word, so to speak, you live within one family of similarities and have been sundered from some members of your previous family, those who no longer bear the word and so are now different, where before they had been similar.
Taking Mark's inventory 5
Date: 2009-02-07 12:34 am (UTC)viii: "the two attach to nature differently"
ix: "univocal reading"
I noted this same passage in toto, blissfully failing to notice the words "attach" and "nature." "Consider the compound sentence, 'In the Ptolemaic system planets revolve about the earth; in the Copernican they revolve around the sun.' Strictly construed, that sentence is incoherent. The first occurrence of the term 'planet' is Ptolemaic, the second Copernican, and the two attach to nature differently. For no univocal reading of the term planet is the sentence true." I glumly remarked, "That the reading can't be univocal doesn't make the sentence incoherent; otherwise no sentence that used contested terms and tried to show anything about the contest would be 'coherent.'" I'm sure when I dive into my pile of old Kuhn stuff I'll find that I elaborate for pages and pages on this point, that multivocal writings and readings are a fact of everyday language and basic linguistic competence.
x: "Only a small part of it... can be considered here, and even about it I shall be schematic."
Ah! But the two sentences right before this are even more crucial:
"No example so schematic can more than hint at what is involved in revolutionary change. I therefore turn at once to some fuller examples...
In other words, definitions and abstractions and schema and lists of attributes will FAIL us here. What we need here are EXAMPLES, adequate examples, or we will not get it.
xi: "My account will invert historical order and describe [what is] required to reach [a concept]."
xii: "The route... travelled backward with the aid of written texts... [the route] travelled forward with no text but nature to guide..."
So traveling backward involves a revolution [in understanding] just as much as traveling forward does, and if you travel backwards with me this can provide you with an example or model or whatever of what a scientific revolution is.
Taking Mark's inventory 6
Date: 2009-02-08 06:23 am (UTC)i: "clearly in mind"
ii: "admired codifier of logic" --
iii: "emergence of the modern biological tradition"
iv: "talents have deserted him so systematically"
v: "Aristotle stumbled... totally collapsed"
vi: "Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves in a new way, and fell into place together."
vii: "... egregious mistakes now seemed... near misses within a ... successful tradition."
I find p. 16 totally inspiring, though I don't have a lot to say about it in regard to the purposes of this particular thread - our exploration of similarity and all that - except for saying OK, how do we use Kuhn as our model here? How can we be good readers of others in the way that Kuhn is a good reader of Aristotle? How did Kuhn do it? The phrase "fell into place together" is a place to start. Aside from what it tells us about paradigm shifts/scientific revolutions, it also tells us why Kuhn believed his new reading of Aristotle was right: the new reading held together.
Note that he says the fragments that he was re-sorting were in his head. His metaphors are visual, but the space we're dealing with is a "space" populated by concepts or connections or something. E.g., say you're looking at the stars in the sky, and you've been taught to see the standard constellations. Then you start drawing your own constellations, taking the same specks of light but relating them differently to each other: what had once indicated skin is now an eyeball, stars that had formerly belonged to the same figure now belong to separate ones, etc.
Taking Mark's inventory 7
Date: 2009-02-08 06:23 am (UTC)i: "the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way"
Kuhn continues: "...is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples." So the examples should share this particular characteristic, the characteristic of there being a sorting out and a coming together in a new way; and if we are uncertain just what he means by "sorting out" and "coming together," the examples are to help us understand.
ii: "Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemeal, one step at a time. Instead, it invokes some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux suddenly sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before."
"Flux" is, like "nature," a word that seems to come from some deep sense of just where it is that we're looking or what we're looking at when we see or create a transformation, but actually it's a word that we can safely ignore. A word that we can't safely ignore is "sudden." An overall reconfiguration certainly took place from Aristotle to Newton, but did Galileo and Descartes and Kepler and Newton experience sudden reconfigurations in their ideas about motion? Probably, but the reconfigurations weren't as massive as the one that Kuhn's own understanding of Aristotle underwent in reverse. In The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn - in a chapter entitled "Recasting The Tradition" - talks of a sixth century commentator John Philoponus who challenged Aristotle's concept of motion with his own partial impetus theory (impetus theory being an ancestor of Newton's concept of momentum), which Philoponus assigned to the Hellenistic astronomer Hipparchus; according to Wiki a subsequent version of the impetus theory was developed by Avicenna in the 11th century; and Kuhn discusses in detail the theories of impetus and motion contained in commentaries on Aristotle by Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme - a couple of 14th century Aristotelians - which according to Kuhn amounted to a "substantial modification" of Aristotle's theory. So that's a long stretch on the way to Newton in the late 17th century; this may explain the word "relatively" in the phrase "relatively sudden."
I copied down "Let me now illustrate some of what was involved in my discovery of a way of reading Aristotelian physics." So when Kuhn says that for Aristotle motion is change in general, not just change in position, this illustrates what Kuhn saw that was different from what he'd expected.
Taking Mark's inventory 8
Date: 2009-02-08 06:28 am (UTC)iii: "... though Aristotle recognizes that the various subcategories are not alike in ALL respects, the basic characteristics relevant to the recognition and analysis of motion must apply to changes of all sorts. In some sense that is not merely metaphorical; all varieties of change are seen as like each other, as constituting a single natural family."
So, beyond just change in place, Kuhn presents us other "subcategories" (subfamilies, we can say) of change, each with an example: "growth (the transformation of an acorn to an oak), alterations of intensity (the heating of an iron bar), and a number of more general qualitative changes (the transition from sickness to health)."
iv: "Aristotelian physics inverts the ontological hierarchy of matter and quality..."
"...that has been standard since the seventeenth century." So this is the second feature that Kuhn hadn't expected, the "inversion" of course being in relation to Kuhn's expectations.
P18:
i: "this neutral substrate, a sort of sponge, is sufficiently impregnated with qualities like [list of examples] to give it individual identity. Change occurs by changing qualities, not matter, by removing some qualities from some given matter and replacing them with others."
I jotted down "I shall work towards the points that concern me from these two [aspects]" (i.e., (1) motion being change in general and (2) a motion being a change in quality).
ii: "... these and other aspects of A's viewpoint... begin to fit together, to lend each other mutual support, ... to make a sort of sense collectively that they individually lack"
I noted down: "Position is thus, like wetness or hotness, a quality of the object, one that changes as the object is moved." Yes, I'm belaboring the point, but seeing similarities and recasting similarities is a good deal of what Kuhn's essay is about. And if all goes well two questions were bubbling up while you were reading it: (a) how does one see similarities, and (2) why is the notion of similarity so important to Kuhn? What problem is the notion of similarity meant to address and what ideas is that notion meant to replace? ("Similarity," "resemblance," whatever term we want to use here.)
iii: "But it is precisely seeing motion as change-of-quality that permits its assimilation to all other sorts of change."
Followed by "That assimilation is the aspect of Aristotle's physics from which I began, and I could equally well have traveled the route in the other direction." So one leads to the other or entails the other.
iv: "The conception of motion-as-change and the conception of a qualitative physics prove deeply interdependent, almost equivalent notions, and that is a first example of the fitting or locking together of parts."
That's two different points that he's running together, that the concepts are "interdependent" (and hence fit together) and that they're "almost equivalent." ("Parent" and "child" are interdependent concepts, but that doesn't make them identical concepts.)
Taking Mark's inventory 9
Date: 2009-02-08 06:33 am (UTC)(I doubt that it matters for our purposes, but the word "voluntarily" jumps out at me. Presumably it accurately communicates a concept within Aristotelian ideas, a concept that I don't immediately understand.)
I noted: "The same asymmetry should be characteristic of local motion, and it is. The quality that a stone or other heavy body strives to realize is position at the center of the universe; the natural position of fire is at the periphery."
vi: "They are realising their natural properties just as the acorn does through its growth."
vii: "Another... part of the A doctrine begins to fall into place."
viii: "locking individual bits of A physics into place in the whole"
ix: "lend each other mutual authority and support"
I think the phrase "lend each other mutual authority and support" is more crucial than is "locking individual bits into place," the former better communicating that the concepts of Aristotle's physics can't flourish individually, on their own, in isolation. (Which is why a change in one concept can have an effect on a whole, can potentially cause a revolution.)
x: "the status of, say, a square circle"
A question that jumps out at me, from this analogy, is how do you - how did they, successfully - challenge an idea that's axiomatic, or that is true by definition?
xi: "The argument has force..."
xii: "If there could be a void, then the Aristotelian universe or cosmos could not be finite."
Even though Kuhn doesn't use the metaphor of "family" here, I can think of it as having a second application. The first application is that acorn to oak, sickness to health, heavy object to its place in the center, etc. form a family, the Motion family, based on their perceived similarity. A second application is that motion being change, change occurring by changing qualities not matter, change being asymmetric, qualities and matter being inseparable, a vacuum being impossible, the cosmos being finite, there being a center and there being natural places, etc., are all related, all interdependent, hence in that sense they're all a family, too, not by resembling each other but by being crucially indebted to each other.
Taking Mark's inventory 10
Date: 2009-02-08 06:36 am (UTC)i: "In a void a body could not be aware of the location of its natural place. It is just be by being in contact with all positions in the universe through a chain of intervening matter that a body is able to find its way to the place where its natural qualities are fully realised. The presence of matter is what provides space with structure."
My guess is that "in contact" here is not metaphorical for Aristotle.
ii: "There is no way to 'correct' A's view of the void without reconstructing much of the rest of his physics."
iii: "the way in which A physics cuts up and describes the phenomenal world"
"the phenomenal world" = "the [buzzword] world." See my comments on "nature," "attach," and "flux." I'm not so sure about "cuts up," either, though it does go along with "pieces sorting themselves out and coming together," e.g.:
iv: "how pieces of that description lock together to form a whole, one that had to be broken and reformed on the road to N mechanics"
Mixing metaphors, are we, Thomas?
v: "so-called 'piles' (of coins)"
P21: (nothing noted)
Taking Mark's inventory 11
Date: 2009-02-08 03:25 pm (UTC)P22:
i: "the unit cell consists of the two pieces of metal in contact"
According to Kuhn this is a realization that will "suddenly" come to those of us who know "even the most elementary physics" and who recognize a "difficulty" in Volta's drawing. Ha! I had to read this section on the battery about ten times before I had any sense of what was going on.
What's striking here - but what I hadn't even noticed until Mark pointed out Kuhn's use of the actual word "model," above - is that "unit cell" started life as an analogy, and through steady use the term "cell" then came to be a literal part of a "battery." I recall Richard Rorty once mentioning that bottles weren't always said to have necks and that rivers weren't always said to have mouths. Looking at my American Heritage Dictionary, I see that the English "cell" derives from cella, the Latin word for storeroom and chamber, though I don't know if "cella" was the Italian word in Volta's time or, whatever the word, what its standard usage was. Monks lived in cells, right?
ii: "the source of an electrical tension"
iii: "generating a contact potential, which would neutralise the initial effect"
(So does this mean that Volta thinks the liquid is acting as both a connector and an insulator?)
I didn't note much on this page myself, but I should have pounced on "Pursuing Volta's text still further, one realizes that he is assimilating his new discovery to electrostatics." Whatever "electrostatics" means. (Am. Her. "Electrostatic: Of or pertaining to stationary electric charge." "Electrostatics: The physics of electrostatic phenomena.") So presumably, among physicists in Volta's time, there is a coherent set of ideas about electrostatics, and so Volta's conception of the cell ("two pieces of [different] metal in contact") is meant to be compatible with that coherent set. (Hence Volta's discovery would initially have seemed to be "cumulative," as adding to contemporary knowledge rather than overthrowing it, right? I wish Kuhn had spelled this out.)
iv: "The bimetallic jar is a condenser or Leyden jar, but one that charges itself"
v: "The pile of coins is, then, a linked assemblage or "battery" of charged Leyden jars, and this where, by specialisation from the group to its members, the term "battery" comes from in its application to electricity."
So the term "electric battery" began life as a metaphor, too.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-08 03:37 pm (UTC)vii: "Why does Volta include two half cells? (...) In Volta's diagram there are no half-cells."
viii: "The cells themselves are the bimetallic horseshoe strips."
Something else I should have noted: "As in the previous example, the consequences of this way of looking at the battery are widespread." So, like Aristotle's conceiving of position as quality, Volta's thinking of the unit cell as two pieces of different metal in contact isn't an isolated assumption but one that connects to and is interdependent with a whole bunch of other ideas about the battery.
ix: "reverses the direction of current flow"
x: "a process like turning the latter inside out"
xi: "what was previously current flow internal to the cell become the external current and vice versa"
xii: "in the modern diagram both the direction of flow and the polarity are reversed"
xiii: "Far more important conceptually is the change in the current source..."
So here Kuhn is doing what he didn't do in the Aristotle-Newton example, which is that he's actually both describing and showing (Figure 2) a rearrangement of pieces - before, during, and after. Question: Kuhn is using the term "flow" for conceptions both before and after the revolution; but wouldn't the term really only pertain to after? "Electrostatics" isn't about flow, is it, but contact? But I suppose if the liquid is considered some sort of connector, there must be something that it connects. I'm completely ignorant here, actually. Did Volta use the term "current," which walks arm in arm with the concept of "flow," and probably also began life as a metaphor? (Or maybe they swim cheek to cheek.)
P23:
i: "When both viewpoints were briefly in the field at once, the first was known as the contact theory, the second as the chemical theory of the battery."
Mark could have bolded "viewpoint" as well. The contact theory and the chemical theory could be considered competing paradigms in the broader sense of "paradigm" - not an example but a disciplinary matrix. So: competing paradigms would be matrices that are competing for dominance of the discipline, or at least jostle each other uncomfortably when they share the same discipline. Of course, for our purposes, we can see "contact theory" and "chemical theory" as Kuhn giving us examples of competing paradigms, with the switchover from one to another being an example of a scientific revolution (of a shift from one disciplinary matrix to another, hence of a paradigm shift).
ii: "the electrostatic view of the battery"
iii: "what we would think of as an external circuit is simply a discharge path like the short circuit to ground that discharges a Leyden jar"
Not knowing anything about Leyden jars, I can't tell if Volta conceived of his cells as like Leyden jars (so, he'd be drawing an analogy) or if he thought of them as equivalent to Leyden jars, the cells and the Leyden jars being essentially the same thing.
Taking Mark's inventory 13
Date: 2009-02-08 10:01 pm (UTC)P24:
i: "an electrostatic concept of resistance" (following sentences expand on this concept)
ii: "one must conceive the battery on a more hydrodynamic model. Resistance must become like the frictional resistance to the flow of water in pipes. The assimilation of Ohm's law required a noncumulative change..."
No matter how we look at it, "hydrodynamic model" is an analogy (or metaphor or simile), hence a "model" as Kuhn happened to use the term in the passage I quoted upthread under the heading "Oh great." But, on the other hand, if I get this correctly (which I may not, since I don't know the physics), the "electrostatic concept of resistance" says that resistance is electrostatic resistance; it's not merely like electrostatic resistance (unless I'm wrong). So we'll probably want to think of the "electrostatic concept of resistance" as a model only if we think that it might not be true or at least think of it in comparison to some competing concept of resistance. This would make "the electrostatic concept" the second type of "model" as Kuhn was using the word in that instance I quoted in "Oh great": the type of model that Kuhn was calling "an object of metaphysical commitment."
(Except that I really think Kuhn was wrong to use the word "metaphysical." The electrostatic model is an assumption - one that turned out to be wrong - about what resistance is, but "assumptions about the way things are" is an awfully lax definition of "metaphysics." Actually, I don't know what the current usage is - I would have assumed that "metaphysics" was reserved for "first or necessary principles" or something of the sort, in which case I'd think we don't need metaphysics.)
Taking Mark's inventory 14
Date: 2009-02-08 10:10 pm (UTC)i: "it then also broke radically with tradition. Ultimately that break spread through and caused the reconstruction..."
ii: "conceived as a collection of many tiny molecules, moving rapidly about within a container, and colliding frequently" (following sentences expand on this concept)
Well, "molecules" and "container" and "colliding" are literal, not metaphoric, even if Boltzmann was conducting a thought experiment. And "many tiny molecules moving about" is what gases are considered to be, right? - but in the late nineteenth century this was not a given, that gases were made of molecules, so we might well want to consider this a "model." (Wiki: "During the 1890s Boltzmann attempted to formulate a compromise position which would allow both atomists and anti-atomists to do physics without arguing over atoms. His solution was to use Hertz's theory that atoms were 'Bilder,' that is, models or pictures.")
My guess here is that Mark is bolding "conceived" and "container" because they or similar terms reappear when we come to Planck, and "molecule" because Planck is to try to come up with something that he can treat similarly to how Boltzmann treats the molecule.
What I noted down: "Boltzmann reached the answer by a new route, from probability theory, and that route was fundamental for Planck, since whose work it has been standard." So a route to solving a problem became someone else's route for solving another problem, and since then, that route has become standard - that is, it is a... well, what's the word I'm looking for?
iii: "he mentally subdivided that energy into little cells or elements of size e... distributing the molecules at random among these cells... the last cell (energy E)... the first cell (energy 0)..."
None of the words Mark bolded inherently have anything to do with similitude or metaphor, so again I suspect that Mark is bolding them in anticipation of Boltzmann's work becoming a something-or-other for Planck and these same words therefore reappearing in Planck's work. (I guess calling subdivisions "cells" could be metaphoric (it's coincidental that Volta called something very different a "cell" in the previous example).)
P26:
What I noted down: "That way of solving the problem was invented in 1877, and twenty-three years later, at the end of 1900, Max Planck applied it to an apparently rather different problem, black-body radiation."
i: "To analyze that situation, P imagined a container or cavity filled with radiation, that is, with light, heat, radio waves, and so on. In addition, he supposed that the cavity contained a lot of what he called 'resonators' (think of them as tiny electrical tuning forks, each sensitive to radiation at one frequency, not at others)."
Except for "tiny electrical tuning forks" there's nothing metaphoric about any of these words either, but bolding them highlights that what Planck is doing is conceiving a way to make the black-body radiation problem resemble Boltzmann's problem about the entropy of gases and the velocity distribution of their molecules, since by doing so Planck therefore believes he'll have a method for solving the black-body radiation problem.
ii: "Roughly speaking, he used probability theory to find the proportion of resonators that fell in each of the various cells"
And I kept going with the sentence: "just as Boltzmann had found the proportion of the molecules.
iii: "cell size e"
iv: "an infinity of satisfactory values"
Don't know Mark's thought in including these in particular, though he's probably highlighting the reappearance of "cell size." "Infinity of satisfactory values" points out a feature of Boltzmann's derivation that Planck discovered had to be different in his own, where there could only be one cell size.
Taking Mark's inventory 15
Date: 2009-02-08 10:32 pm (UTC)(Mark's note: para that goes over page expands on a model, or perhaps a 'collision' or 'negotiation' of different models)
I'd go with "expands on a model," since according to Kuhn - and I don't know if Kuhn's interpretation has been generally accepted or rejected or not noticed - Planck so far has simply made a revision in his use of Boltzmann's derivation without yet including or realizing that for the derivation to work energy needs to be restricted to particular, discontinuous levels. It's only the latter that makes the model into a new being, something that could be collided with.
P27: i: "all the standard laws of classical physics"
ii: "The resonators could not be permitted to lie anywhere on the continuous energy line but only at the divisions between cells... When a resonator changed energy it did not do so continuously but by discontinuous jumps of size e or a multiple of e"
iii: "P's argument was both radically different and very much the same"
iv: "Physically, the entities to which the derivation refers are very different"
I like "entities" for its vagueness, since it doesn't commit to what these entities would be. (I assume, without knowing much at all about it, that once physics accepted that the energy of the "resonators"/"ocillators" could only jump up or down to specified levels, a question became, "What sort of entities could this be true of?")
v: "The element e has gone from a mental division of the total energy to a separable physical energy atom"
"Atom" is a strange word choice, though I suppose Kuhn didn't want to use "quantum" as that was a term whose introduction he was going to make a big thing of on the next page.
PP27-28:
i: "Figure 6 tries to capture that change in a way that suggests its resemblance to the inside-out battery of my last example"
Yes!
P28:
i: "the transformation, difficult to see"
ii: "Already the resonator has been transformed from a familiar sort of entity governed by standard classical laws to a strange creature the very existence of which is incompatible with traditional ways of doing physics" (rest of par switches to a meta-discussion of the sociology and history of similar changes in "the field")
iii: "changes in the way in which terms like 'motion' attached to nature"
iv: "highlights those features... that the revolution had made prominent"
v: "discontinuity had come to stay"
vi: "element" --- "energy 'quantum'"
vii: "Also in 1909 P abandoned the acoustic analogy" (following sentences expand on change of analogy -- "resonators" to "oscillators" and why)
viii: "For those who believed that energy changes discontinuously, 'resonator' was not an appropriate term."
As Mark says several threads ago, the advantage of the new terms in relation to what they replaced is hardly obvious ("element" seems as indivisible as "quantum," actually), but I'd say that the point here is that Planck felt he had to change terminology, since he'd reconceived what he was dealing with.
PP28-29:
i: "Revolutionary changes are somehow holistic. They cannot, that is, be made piecemeal, one step at a time, and they thus contrast with normal or cumulative changes..."
I wish the word in general usage for "not atomistic" wasn't "holistic" but just "hunkastuffistic" since the latter doesn't imply that you necessarily get giant wholes or coherent integrated mechanisms but just that when something changes other things change with it. But engaging in a campaign to alter usage here would not be a good use of my time, I'm afraid.
Taking Mark's inventory 16
Date: 2009-02-11 05:59 pm (UTC)P29:
i: "In normal change, one simply revises or adds a single generalisation, all others remaining the same. In revolutionary change one must either live with incoherence or else revise a number of interrelated generalisations together. If these same changes were introduced one at a time, there would be no intermediate resting place. Only the initial and final sets of generalisations provide a coherent account of nature."
One thing that's important here goes back to the concept "cumulative," which is not the most communicative word in Kuhn's piece: here Kuhn is saying that you can revise your ideas - so you can subtract something and put something else in its place - and still be "cumulative" if the subtraction/revision doesn't significantly change a lot of other ideas that surround it.
As for what this passage has to do with similarity, I'd point to the idea that normal science provides a "fundamentally coherent" account of whatever it is an account of - meaning that problems and revisions don't cause a cascading series of other problems and revisions - whereas the revolutionary period features unlivable "incoherence" that creates just such a cascade. So, if we're trying to identify whether something was a scientific revolution, we want to see coherence followed by incoherence followed by coherence. And if we have incoherence in a science then we're in a revolution.
OK, now to jump beyond the topic of this particular thread for a second, I'll advise us as we read further pieces to keep our eye on the issue of living with coherence versus not living with coherence. It seems to me that people do a very good job of living with incoherence unless there are immediate negative consequences for doing so (e.g., the checkbook doesn't balance), and with abstract thinking there's no strong incentive to work to make one's ideas consistent. One way to live with incoherence is simply not to notice contradictions, or to speak so vaguely that no contradictions have a chance to take shape. Just look at political discourse, blogs, music discussion. And some fields that aspire to becoming "sciences," such as psychology and economics, still fail to pull themselves together, despite at least some of its practitioners' discomfort with incoherence. And the conflict between impetus theory and Aristotle's concept of motion existed for hundreds of years without people going into emergency mode and saying, "We better solve this FAST." And as we shall see, Copernicus himself, while creating a small improvement in the harmoniousness of cosmology, actually created vast incoherence everywhere else (physics, religion) for anyone who took him seriously. So the question arises as to just when and in what circumstances does "incoherence" become a problem that must be dealt with. A thought here is that there are puzzles - sudoku and crossword puzzles, for instance - where striving for coherence is the point of the game, provides the fun. So, perhaps in the middle ages there was no strong reason to revise cosmology or to get rid of the problems caused by impetus theory, and there was no professional community set on pulling physics together. So, whatever the coherence games that were being played in 1350, "motion" wasn't a critical part of them. Whereas circa 1908 there was a community of physicists that prized coherence and was therefore ready to jump into the problems caused by the quantum.
Taking Mark's inventory 17
Date: 2009-02-11 06:05 pm (UTC)ii: "the most nearly cumulative"
iii: "resonators, in any normal sense of the term, cannot behave as these do"
iv: "to permit the new behaviour, one must change, or try to, laws of mechanics and of electromagnetic theory"
v: "An integrated picture of several aspects of nature has to be changed at the same time"
For our purposes here, what I'd also point out about this passage is the way Kuhn has three features of his examples line up in parallel. So: (1) "even in my last example... one cannot simply change the description of the energy element e. One must also change one's notion of what it is to be a resonator, for resonators, in any normal sense of the term, cannot behave as these do. Simultaneously, to permit the new behaviour, one must change, or try to, laws of mechanics and of electromagnetic theory." (2) "Again, in the second example, once cannot simply change one's mind about the order of elements in the battery cell. The direction of the current, the role of the external circuit, the concept of electrical resistance, and so on, must also be changed." (3) "Or still again, in the case of Aristotelian physics, one cannot simply discover that a vacuum is possible or that motion is a state, not a change-of-state. An integrated picture of several aspects of nature has to be changed at the same time." So, either of these three sets of changes can be an example of "holistic" change, and if we see the similarity among the three examples, we presumably can then see other examples in scientific history as well, other revolutions. So we can model how we see situations D, E, and F on how Kuhn saw situations A, B, and C.
vi: "meaning change and... change in the way words and phrases attach to nature, change in the way their referents are determined"
vii: "A newly discovered property... may... be called upon (usually with others) to determine the presence of [list of various phenomena], and thus to pick out the referents of the corresponding terms... Such discoveries need not be and usually are not revolutionary."
viii: "Normal science, too, alters the way in which terms attach to nature. What characterises revolutions is not, therefore, simply change in the way referents are determined, but change of a still more restricted sort."
Another way to highlight this sentence is: "What characterises revolutions is not, therefore, simply change in the way referents are determined, but change of a still more restricted sort." So Kuhn's alerting us that there's something else that his next examples should be examples of.
ix: "criteria by which terms attach"
P29-30:
i: "The distinctive character of revolutionary change in language is that it alters not only the criteria by which terms attach to nature, but also, massively, the set of objects or situations to which those terms attach. What had been paradigmatic examples of motion for A - acorn to oak or sickness to health - were not motions at all for Newton. In the tradition, a natural family ceased to be natural; its members were redistributed among pre-existing sets; and only one of them continued to bear the old name."
"PARADIGMATIC EXAMPLES"!!!! And we can highlight in this way, too: (1) "What had been paradigmatic examples of motion for A - acorn to oak or sickness to health - were not motions at all for Newton. In the tradition, a natural family ceased to be natural; its members were redistributed among pre-existing sets; and only one of them continued to bear the old name." And so from there (2) "Or again, what had been the unit cell of Volta's battery was no longer the referent to of any term forty years after his invention was made."
Taking Mark's inventory 18
Date: 2009-02-13 10:15 pm (UTC)i: "What characterises revolutions is, thus, change in several of the taxonomic categories prerequisite to scientific descriptions and generalisations... (intervening sentences also pertinent)... [T]his sort of alteration is necessarily holistic. That holism... is rooted in the nature of language, for the criteria relevant to categorisation are ipso fatso the criteria that attach the names of those categories to the world."
ii: "Language is a coinage with two faces, one looking outward to the world, the other inward to the world's reflection in the referential structure of the language."
I wish Mark hadn't combined all of i into one, since Kuhn is actually changing subject midparagraph when he starts talking about "the nature of language" - is venturing stupifyingly vague and incoherent opinions on a matter he could safely ignore. So I think you can safely ignore anything Kuhn says on that subject - or maybe I should say it's dangerous not to ignore it. But we probably shouldn't ignore such things if we want to understand Kuhn, since he surely believed he had good reasons for bringing them up.
But crucially, I think you can simply have no opinion on "the nature of language" and nonetheless discuss anything interesting you ever want to discuss about paradigms and paradigm shifts and incommensurability and scientific revolutions. That is, you - or I, at any rate - can dismiss the phrase "referential structure of language" as an impossibly opaque buzzword while nonetheless getting the point from what Kuhn says earlier that Aristotle's concept of motion gives you a taxonomy (that, you know, organizes objects and events and stuff) that differs from the taxonomy given by Newton's concept.
(As for "the whetchamacallit structure of whatever": should there be actual confusion as to what a particular conversation ought to be about, there can be specific instances when we might want to ask "what is being structured here?" E.g., a business organization structures power relations in a firm, beams can provide the structure of a building, a class schedule structures your school day, one-way streets can direct traffic flow, the common structure of scientific revolutions is that they seem to all follow particular stages, etc. And you can ask such a question without ever having a general opinion as to what it is that is "structured" by language as a whole.)
As for why I think Kuhn is wandering into an unnecessary tangle here, that's a subject I'd like to bracket and bring up at some other time. But I'll point out now that he's actually contradicting what he says elsewhere - e.g., back in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions he says that people with different paradigms live in different worlds, which is itself a problematic statement but it's very much not the same as saying that the world is reflected by the referential structure of language.
Taking Mark's inventory 19
Date: 2009-02-13 10:24 pm (UTC)iv: "repay further exploration"
v: "All of my examples have involved a central change of model, metaphor, or analogy -- a change in one's sense of what is similar to what, and what is different."
(Back upthread Mark and I examine this passage a bit; see the posts headed "models -- the actual word...," "AND PLUS also this third," "on getting it," and "Oh great," and their respective subthreads.)
vi: "Sometimes, as in the A example, the similarity is internal to the subject matter. Thus, for As, motion was a special case of change, so that the falling stone was LIKE the growing oak..."
vii: "the pattern of similarities that constitutes these phenomena [is?] a natural family, that places them in the same taxonomic category" [note missing verb supplied is a guess]
Mark, you don't need a verb, though Kuhn should have put "as" where you put "is" to forestall the misreading. Think of him as saying "This is the X (1) that constitutes these phenomena as a W, (2) that places these phenomena in Y, and (3) that had to be replaced." (I.e., X had to be replaced.) Or more simply, "this is the X that does A, that does B, and that had to be C'ed." So I would read this sentence as saying (with verbs corresponding to "does A," "does B," and "had to be C'ed" bolded) that "This is the pattern of similarities (1) that constitutes these phenomena [as] a natural family, (2) that places them in the same taxonomic category, and (3) that had to be replaced in the development of a Newtonian physics."
What he means by "internal" is "internal to the taxonomic category." Oddly, what he called the SECOND feature of scientific revolutions is "change in several of the taxonomic categories," and here, as the first form that the THIRD feature of scientific revolutions takes, is a change in a taxonomic category. So the second feature is one of the forms of the third feature.
The similarity in the "internal" patterns of similarity isn't via analogy or metaphor. A falling stone is like a growing oak, and they're both like a person recovering from illness, because they are all types of motion. They're different examples of the same thing: motion. So A is like A.
viii: "Elsewhere the similarity is external."
ix: "Thus, P's resonators were LIKE B's molecules, or V's battery cells were LIKE Leyden jars, and resistance was LIKE electrostatic leakage."
OK, now what Kuhn's calling "external" to the subject matter is metaphoric or analogic. Aristotle's subject matter was motion, but Volta's subject matter wasn't leakage but electrical resistance, which merely could be usefully modeled on the idea of electrostatic leakage. (I don't know if what I just said is right, because I don't know what I just said, basically, and Kuhn's text is so ambiguous back on p. 24 that I couldn't tell if it was Volta or Ohm who thinks of electrical resistance as like the frictional resistance of water in pipes, though Google tells me it's Ohm. In any event, that analogy of electric current being like water in pipes is indeed an analogy, but I'm not so sure the idea of electrostatic leakage is. That is, if you believe it, you might think that resistance is - not "is like" - electrostatic leakage.) In any event, if this is analogic, the form that similarity takes here is It's useful to think of A as like B.
x: "In these cases too, the old pattern of similarities had to be discarded and replaced before or during the process of change."
Taking Mark's inventory 20
Date: 2009-02-13 10:43 pm (UTC)i: "All these cases display interrelated features familiar to students of metaphor. In each case two objects or situations are juxtaposed and said to be the same or similar. (An even slightly more extended discussion would have also to consider examples of dissimilarity, for they, too, are often important in establishing a taxonomy.)"
OK, in the phrase "said to be the same or similar," let's say that when you're saying "the same" your similarity is what Kuhn calls "internal," and when you're saying "similar" your similarity is what Kuhn calls "external" - but both "internal" and "external" are under the heading "similarity," since "the same" doesn't mean "identical" (a man being restored to health isn't identical to a falling rock) but rather "similar enough to be in the same species, as it were."
We could say that "internal" similarity is about establishing a taxonomy and "external" similarity is about coming up with more or less useful models. But we can also note that each - taxonomic and analogic similarity - is similar enough to the other to merit the same term ("similarity"). So for the purposes of Kuhn's passage they themselves belong to the species "similarity" - and so, since for Kuhn similarity is a big hunk of the subject matter in these paragraphs, both "internal" and "external" similarity are internal to Kuhn's subject of similarity (rather than merely being similar to something that's only similar to similarity) in the way that the similarity of the various types of motion for Aristotle is all internal to the subject of motion.
P31:
i: "Whatever their origin -- a separate issue... -- the primary function of all these juxtapositions is to transmit and maintain a taxonomy."
Wait! Wait! Wait! Kuhn here has changed the subject midparagraph without telling us and maybe without quite being aware of it. For Volta and Ohm and Planck in the examples given,* the purpose of the juxtapositions is not to transmit a taxonomy but to figure out what is going on, their method being to create (not transmit) either taxonomies or analogies (I'd say [in my ignorance] that in Volta's case, he's maybe adding to or elaborating on a taxonomy or model or analogy that already exists, whereas Ohm and Planck are usefully comparing some things to others in order to figure out how to proceed further but not trying to create a taxonomy).
As the paragraph started, the subject matter was still "what changes in a scientific revolution?" the answer being "the thing that changes is which stuff gets juxtaposed with which." Now, suddenly, the subject matter has become "how are taxonomies, models, and analogies transmitted and maintained."
*For Ohm I'm going back to p. 24 and the analogy between electrical resistance and the frictional resistance of water in pipes.
ii: "The juxtaposed items are exhibited to a previously uninitiated audience by someone who can already recognise their similarity..."
Exhibited by whom? You see, all of a sudden the subject is instruction, not revolutionary change.
Taking Mark's inventory 21
Date: 2009-02-13 10:43 pm (UTC)Translation: if the instruction** works, the instructees now associate stuff they'd previously not associated, and differentiate stuff they'd previously not differentiated.
**I say "instruction" because "demonstration" is a poor word for what Kuhn actually thinks goes on in scientific instruction, as is "exhibit" below. Or at least, the exhibits and demonstrations are of no avail unless the instructees learn to apply them.
Taking Mark's inventory 22
Date: 2009-02-13 10:48 pm (UTC)v: "metaphor-like juxtapositions... are... central to the process by which scientific and other language is acquired."
vi: "the production and the explanation of generalisations about nature" (para that follows is details but important)
vii: "In much of language learning these two sorts of knowledge -- knowledge of words and knowledge of nature -- are acquired together, not really two sorts of knowledge at all, but two faces of the single coinage that a language provides."
In other words, when you learn a language you also learn a world, though I think that Kuhn is putting this very clumsily and he's leaving out one thing I'd have expected him of all people to emphasize, which is that in learning language you learn how to behave using words, and in learning a scientific language you learn how one behaves in the conduct of that science.
PP31-32:
i: "The reappearance of the double-faced character of scientific language provides an appropriate terminus"
P32
i: "If I am right, the central characteristic of scientific revolutions is that they alter the knowledge of nature that is intrinsic to the language itself and that is thus prior to anything quite describable as description or generalisation, scientific or everyday."
The word "prior" is really really really problematic, but what I think Kuhn means to get at is that in learning to use words in this way or that some decisions about what the world is like have already been made for you (to use an example that isn't loaded with ideas about "language" attaching to "nature": if you learn what the command "stop" means, you're also learning that the world contains situations in which you can be commanded to stop), so that when told to describe A or B, your language will already have opinions on the matter (e.g., that A can be differentiated from B, whereas various A's may form a category).
ii: "To make the void or an infinite linear motion part of science required observation reports that could only be formulated by altering the language with which nature was described. Until those changes had occurred, language itself resisted the invention and introduction of the sought-after new theories. The same resistance by language is... the reason for P's switch from 'element' and 'resonator' to 'quantum' and 'oscillator'."
If anything, the Planck example of language shift is a counterexample, since nothing in the story shows Einstein or Lorentz or Ehrenfest or Planck being held back by the words "element" and "resonator"; in fact they all had embraced discontinuity before Planck created the new terminology (I'd think that sticking the adjective "indivisible" in front of "element" could have achieved the same thing as replacing "element" with "quantum," anyway), and the quantum revolution was lightning fast as such things go. And somehow the concept of the solar system has withstood the continued use of the words "sunrise" and "sunset." Basically, I think new ideas can be expressed very well, assuming you have 'em, and the reason people resist them isn't that language inhibits their expression or reception but that people aren't much interested in hearing ideas that contradict their own. Except for the people who have reason to be interested. (This doesn't negate the point that we're taught a world along with being taught a language.)
iii: "Violation or distortion of a previously unproblematic scientific language is the touchstone for revolutionary change."
Taking Mark's inventory 23
Date: 2009-02-13 10:56 pm (UTC)p14 footnote 2:
i: "the distinction between observational and theoretical terms"
Here, lounging around in a footnote, Kuhn is talking in jargon that he doesn't explain to us. But I'd think the distinction between observational and theoretical terms is exactly the distinction that has trouble maintaining itself when there are competing paradigms - e.g., in the midst of a scientific revolution, or in most everyday discourse, which rarely unites unequivocably under a paradigm.
ii: "the notion of an antecedently understood term is intrinsically developmental or historical"
iii: "areas of overlap"
iv: "traditional approach"
v: "elegant apparatus"
vi: "concept formation"
vii: "intimate association"
viii: "A more systematic way of preserving an important part [of a distinction]... by embedding it in a developmental approach..."
ix: "a hierarchy of theoretical terms, each level introduced within a particular historical theory"
x: "The... picture of linguistic strata shows intriguing parallels"
xi: Metaphors deployed within cited booktitles: "Aspects of ..."/"Logical structure..."/"Structure and Dynamics"/"Archeology"
These are all interesting, but I've kind of pooped out here. My major thought about these is that the logical empiricists, about whom I know very little, fetishized the appearance of precision, hoping that if the language seemed technical enough their concepts would cooperate by being precise. Phrases such as "concept formation" appeal to people who find nouns more comforting than verbs. But now I'm just being bitchy. And I'm running out of gas.
p17 footnote 3:
i: "a concept of change that is broader than that of motion. Motion is change of substance, change from something to something. But change also includes coming to be and passing away, i.e. change from nothing to something and from something to nothing..., and these are not motions."
My guess is that for Aristotle none of these would be analogic, though of course learning to recognize what an Aristotelian considers "coming to be," "passing away," "nothing to something," and "something to nothing" might involve learning what for an Aristotelian those words juxtapose with what else, if for an Aristotelian the juxtapositions are significantly different from ours.
p19 footnote 4:
i: "Place, for A, is always the place of body or, more precisely, the interior surface of the containing or surrounding body."