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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

re how ii happens, i'll try and think of some 19th-century examples -- "race science" is possibly a good one (bcz actually still contentious) (and bcz i know a little about it)

the issues in evolutionary science and biology: darwnism vs lamarckism (= the inheritance of acquired chacteristics -- if i work out a lot and gain excellent musculature, i can pass this actual musculature along in my genes)

the issue of the funding and administration (and small- and large-p politics) of vast educational institutions is much more significant now than it was in the 19th-century, in regard to the actually existing shape of disciplinary fields: but possibly these effects can be separated from the ones we're discussing?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

accurate astronomy -- the kind that needed telescopes - proved tremendously much more valuable to shipping than astrology did: i imagine there was a period when experts in both were consulted before or even brought on board during long dangerous voyages; with a handy darwinian effect in terms of who came back! (actually lamarckian, in the sense that cultural evolution can include inheritance of acquired characteristics; if you learn something, you can tell someone else... you don't have to fail to propogate as a result of not learning it)

so astronomy (in the uk) was demanded and funded by the royal navy, and shifted upwards in status and respectability as a result of the relevant success: astrology's status-shift is funded and shaped by the people who buy and read their stars in tabloid newspapers

this doesn't answer how or when the latter got chucked out of "science-as-a-whole" -- though i suspect it provides a pretty good diagram of relevant socio-political elements of the process

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

(incidentally you were the person who taught me that kuhn describes a machinery that functions as a darwinism of ideas)

[koganbot]

Minor point, but Darwin, not knowing anything of genetics, actually thought - though he wasn't certain (and I'm not certain about what I've just written, since I've read almost now Darwin and this is something I remember from some second-hand source whose name I've forgotten) - that living beings could pass along acquired characteristics. But would Lamarckianism be a field that was thrown out of evolutionary biology or would it just be an idea that evolutionary biology abandoned (though w/ a lagtime where Lamarckianism fit in w/ govt ideology, e.g. the Soviet Union)?

Yeah, I was just being completist when I was talking about departments being created and such.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes the issue ircc is that evolution is driven by darwinian rather lamarckian inheritance -- and if lamarckian inheritance existed, it would be some minor blurring of or addition to the darwinian machinery

but they are called darwinism and lamarckism for reasonably solid reasons: darwin proposed the mechanism of darwinism (give or take wallace) and did far the major work on it; he may not have excluded lamarckism as a possibility but he didn't think it played a dominant or even a necessary role in evolution and speciation

(incidentally, since this last term is now in play, the definition of a species is that creatures can't mate across a species barrier and have offspring... can this be transferred to the cultural discussion?) (i think the answer is NO!)

[koganbot]

(1) Not related to your question, but I think Darwin is a crucial influence upon Kuhn, not in the sense that Kuhn is applying a principle anything like "natural selection," but... well, I don't want to give it away, since it's what a lot of the next reading is about (even though that reading doesn't mention Darwin; but the last four pages of The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions do (last four pages not counting the Postscript, that is)).

(2) OK, by good luck I looked for and quickly found the passage I referred to earlier (p. 120 in The Road Since Structure, in an essay called "The Trouble With The Historical Philosophy Of Science"):

But in addition to the destructive element in revolutions, there's also a narrowing of focus. The mode of practice permitted by the new concepts never covers all of the field for which the earlier one took responsibility. There's always a residue (sometimes a very large one), the pursuit of which continues as an increasingly distinct specialty. Though the process of proliferation is often more complex than my reference to speciation suggests, there are regularly more specialties after a revolutionary change than there were before. The older, more encompassing modes of practice simply die off: they are the fossils whose paleontologists are historians of science.

OK, this is rich but just a sketch; my guess as to how to fill it in would be: (a) part of the old is wiped out altogether (I know he doesn't say this, but I'm sure not all of the residue is taken up by the "increasingly distinct specialty"; I'd guess that a whole hunk of the old is gone for good, given what was done to Aristotelian motion and Ptolemaic epicycles); and (b) what's left can be one or more specialties (two, three, many?) where there had previously been one. Kuhn goes on:

The second component of my return to my past is the specification of what makes these specialties distinct, what keeps them apart and leaves the ground between them as apparently empty space. To that the answer is incommensurability, a growing conceptual disparity between the tools deployed in the two specialties. Once the two specialties have grown apart, that disparity makes it impossible for the practitioners of one to communicate fully with the practitioners of the other. And these communication problems reduce, though they never altogether eliminate, the likelihood that the two will produce fertile offspring.

I really wonder if that last line is true, given that - for instance - DNA analysis and dating by radioisotopes are playing a role in paleontology. But maybe that's a false example. Car mechanics probably play a role in paleontology too, in that they help get the paleontologists to that Chinese desert where they uncover all those bones; but that doesn't mean the language of car mechanics and the language of paleontology can merge to form a new offspring. Of course, a paleontologist can also learn car mechanics himself and thus have no trouble communicating with a car mechanic, and some members of new discipline 1 can learn to also practice new discipline 2, and vice versa, and so those members of each who've learned the other have no trouble communicating with each other; but that doesn't mean they're bringing the practice of the two disciplines closer any more than someone who can see the Necker Cube in both ways can see it more than one way at the same time. If Kuhn is right, that is.)