koganbot | Taking Mark's inventory 3 (Reply)

From:

P14-15: "discoveries that cannot be accommodated within the concepts in use before they were made. In order to make or to assimilate such a discovery one must alter the way one thinks about and describes some range of natural phenomena."

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).