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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.
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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.