Kuhn 7: All New Freewheeling Dance-In-The-Sky Kuhn C&Q Thread

[koganbot]

We're almost up to 49 comments on the previous Kuhn Q&C thread, and after 49 the dear people at lj start collapsing responses so you have to click all over the place to see what anyone is saying, which I HATE HATE HATE HATE, so I'm continuing the discussion here. I'll be pasting in some comments from there into the comments here, so that I can comment on the comments (obv); and you can paste and comment as well. Anyhow, I'll start with this from petronia:

I wouldn't want to call the rise of abstraction in the visual arts (say) a "paradigm shift", so much as I would reserve the term for a change in an entire nexus of beliefs concerning originality, intellectual property, tradition, progress - a coherent example of which is not currently coming to mind.

I am only groping toward what I really mean here. Something along the line of: the appearance of abstract painting in Western fine arts is only a symptom, what really changed was the system of values underlying the artists' work, i.e. the definition of what it means to "paint" (or create art) changed, and thus the activity and its goals naturally broadened to take in strategies unavailable under the definition that previously held sway.

What I'm about to say isn't a direct response to that, but one of the reasons it's hard to transfer Kuhn's model from the sciences to something like music conversation (I'm saying "music conversation" rather than "music criticism" because I want to count everything that people say or write or post about music, not just what professional critics do) is that in the normal course of the music convo you don't just have, say, values and beliefs and standard practices and agreed-upon ways of using terms, you always have contested terms, the genre names being the chief among them. So in physics in the 16th century, when "planet" became a contested term, that put physics into a revolution (by Kuhn's account, anyway) and the convo kept going until "planet" was no longer a contested term. Whereas in the music convo - this is what I think, anyway - "hip-hop" and the discussion of, e.g., whether Soulja Boy is too pop to be real hip-hop etc., and what real hip-hop is, all this is the normal discussion, and my theory is that with words like "hip-hop" and "punk" we jigger how we use the terms so that they'll stay contested so that we can carry on a lot of other social contests with them (the words are social markers, and we don't want to all mark ourselves as the same), and in some cases jigger the terms so that potentially nothing will be good enough anymore to be considered a real hip-hop song or a real punk band etc. As I said, this I'm considering the normal state. So I'd think a SHIFT in the music convo (I'm not calling it a paradigm shift since who's agreeing on a paradigm anyway?) wouldn't be - or wouldn't just be - a shift in values and beliefs and word usage but a shift in the fights that we have over values and beliefs and usage. I don't altogether know what I mean here, but a high-school analogy might be useful: the social structure of, say, an '80s high school was "jocks vs. burnouts," so a shift would be a shift to something other than "jocks vs. burnouts."

(What I just wrote under the cut assumes that "science" does things differently from nonscience, at least does things differently from what's done in conversations about music, but I want to ask if we're right to continue to consider sciences as fundamentally different from nonsciences, given that - perhaps - Kuhn has shot down the idea that a science can test its theories against a domain of facts that are independent of the theories.)

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Still kind of struggling with this, but here goes once again...in part, having just read what you wrote above, paraphrasing some ideas above, in part figuring out what I think I mean.

Continuing from the previous thread, in which I mucked things up a bit by saying cultural matters are "cumulative": I guess I'm suggesting that there are no quantum leaps or comparably massive breakthroughs in cultural understandings that fundamentally change the way a given category ("dance" and "beliefs" being two examples before) is understood by everyone. Incompatible things coexist and can be simultaneously acknowledged within the same category.

Something's being "lost in translation" or rendered dead from non-use is not the same as its being categorically incompatible with something else. I'm not a vehicle for supernatural spirits called "moas," but there are still similar traditions of dance (ritual trance, say) that can coexist with mine without our two concepts of dance being so much in conflict that one will be replaced by the other. The word "dance" has no single meaning -- we can conceive of different versions of dancing (even if they're extinct) simultaneously without endangering our current (or perhaps past) understanding of what dancing is. Dancing just expands to include more ideas, some incompatible (you probably can't do air guitar and ritual trance at the same time) some more compatible.

And anyway, we don't have to agree on things like beliefs or definitions of social practices for them to be practicable as recognized and legitimate. If you are an Aristotelian physicist, you could not be recognized as participating in physics according to a Newtonian (via agreed-upon ways one can do physics), whereas if you are a moa-vehicle or a guy who likes to do air guitar in his underwear, either way you're allowed within the category of agreed-upon ways one can dance.

[koganbot]

Yes, this makes much more sense, since by getting rid of the word "cumulative" we're no longer forced to say "democracy is built upon a foundation of monarchy, just as a higher layer of bricks is built upon a lower." But we nonetheless can make sense of the phrase "constitutional monarchy." (Speaking of which, the U.S. papers still aren't paying much attention to what's been going on in Canada over the last couple of months. I suppose if there'd been a vote of no confidence and Harper were gone, then it'd gotten into a lower level headline somewhere, but I actually don't know if Harper is still hanging on.) (Ah, OK, I just went to Wiki: "On January 28, 2009, the Liberals agreed to support the budget as long as it included regular accountability reports, and the Conservatives accepted this amendment. This ending the possibility of the coalition, so Layton said 'Today we have learned that you can't trust Mr. Ignatieff to oppose Mr. Harper. If you oppose Mr. Harper and you want a new government, I urge you to support the NDP.'")