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]

assume a revolutionary shift happens in a scientific field: three things happen

i: the old unrevolutionary field curls up and dies entirely
ii: the old unrevolutionary field is kicked out of science
iii: very VERY occasionally two distinct fields "within" science-as-a-whole emerge, which ay or may not still be tangled up in one another (practical engineering and post-pythagorean geometry way back in the day; relativistic wave mechanics and quantum mechanics in the modern era) <--- this is rare and need not concern us, it's here for pernickety completeness really...

assume a revolutionary shift happens in music
i: the old unrevolutionary "field" (genre?) curls up and dies entirely <--- perhaps this does happen, though it's fairly rare (musics die because whole peoples die or change, but this is a different situation
ii: the old unrevolutionary "field" (genre?) is kicked out of music <--- does this EVER happen? the rhetoric would suggest yes ("x is JUST NOT MUSIC"), but the one being called not-music is just as likely to be the new revolutionary "field" (genre?), if not more (it's rockheads that say rap just isn't music; rappers think rock is music, just boring bad white music!; old-school classicalheads think the darmstadt electronic isn't music, the darmstadters are quite happy accept mozart is music)
iii: generally two distinct genres within music-as-a-whole -- they contest each other's relevance and vale, but not each other's existential status

so is science is that part of culture in which it MATTERS, CENTRALLY, to end up "within science" after a revolution? with eg music, "being cast out of music" is not really seriously at issue

(exercise for reader: does everything fall into one of these two patterns? are other patterns? if so, do they happen?)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the second iii - the music one -- should read:
"iii: generally you end up with two distinct genres within music-as-a-whole -- they contest each other's relevance and value, but not so much (except as provocation?) each other's existential status as music"

[koganbot]

Unfortunately my copy of The Road Since Structure is due in four days, so I may not get around to finding where Kuhn says this, but I do remember that he says he underestimated how often two distinct fields emerge as a result of a revolution, the result being speciation rather than extermination. So may not be so rare as you say, but I wouldn't know.

(And my guess - as someone who doesn't know much about this at all - is that you get new subfields frequently enough, but not as a result of incommensurability or revolution but as a result of a large-sized field with a lot of money being thrown at it and lots of fairly different specialties, so you get different depts. and their own budgets etc. but this isn't a result of incompatible concepts. Yet once they're separated, they may well drift to incompatible concepts.)

Important to remember, though, that when Kuhn talks about a scientific revolution he's not talking about science undergoing a revolution (i.e., science as a whole undergoing a revolution) but a science undergoing a revolution. And the reason this is IMPORTANT to remember is that someone isn't taught to do "science," he or she is taught a particular science, the teaching often involving the use of a number of... um, let me think, the word is escaping me... but different fields and subfields will use different sets of these wetchamacallits, so being trained by means of one science's or subscience's typical wetchamacallits will not necessarily give you the tools to be proficient in another science or subscience.

[koganbot]

Under science, how does ii occur? How can you tell that ii has occurred? The example that leaps to mind is astrology, whose history I don't know, but guessing wildly I'll say that when it was still connected to astronomy it was one of the things that you did with astronomy (figured out where the constellations, planets, etc. would be in order to apply that knowledge to astrological charts) and may - along with navigation - have helped pay the way for astronomy. Whereas after Newton, other ways were found to put physics and astronomy to use. --I have no idea if this is true, or what the other things would be, though physics questions from my high-school textbooks often involved the firing of cannon balls (not the actual firing of cannon balls, but required written responses to questions such as "A cannon ball is fired from a cannon in Topeka traveling at a speed of 45 miles per hour in the direction of Akron and another cannon ball is fired from Akron at a speed of 36 miles per hour in the direction of Topeka..." or something of the sort).

[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.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes i don't disagree with any of that -- but i still think the threat of "being kicked out of all science" is one of the things at issue when any given scientific field is in the throes of revolution (even if the threat isn't as sharp as my scheme has it, because speciation happens more often, hence expulsion or extermination less); and that this issue is not there in (for example) music

HOWEVER (come to think of it) there IS a toughly policed border between Fine Arts and Crafts, with the threat of potential expulsion IN BOTH DIRECTIONS (so this again is unlike science) -- there was a revolutionary shift in the relationship between the two, in the mid-19th century (william morris was an active political revolutionary)

but (not just for the reason in para one of this post) i don't think it's sensible to treat all-of-science as somehow er hierarchically analogous (handwave handwave) to all-of-music; in fact, this is another way of saying the same thing, that the idea of 'all-of-science' has a rhetorical or political signifance to any given science that the idea of all-of-art doesn't have to any given art...

[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

[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]

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.'")

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

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

[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.)

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Not that I was intending to join in on all of this, but the closest thing I can think of in the arts to a genuine paradigm shift would be that prompted by Duchamp's readymades, which seemed to be insisting on a major redefinition of what the visual arts comprised. I am not particularly claiming that this equates to Newtonian or relativistic or quantum physics, just that it's the most major shift that I can think of.

I also wonder if the kind of contention that Frank rightly identifies as the norm in music was the norm before the 20th Century - was the idea of what music should be more unified then? If anyone knows this, I imagine Mark will. I am wondering if there were two incommensurable traditions then, say - classical and folk, perhaps. We get blends between hip hop and rock, and almost any other modern genres, but were there people trying to mix folk and classical, or even talk about them together, 200 years ago?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

depends what you mean by blend, but sit-down composers would often take an "air" -- ie a song they heard someone singing in street or field -- and develop it, so in that sense the answer's yes: john dowland (i think) (and this is more like 300 years ago) wrote a famous fantasiascape on the "cries of london", which were basically the trad melodic salespitches of the oyster-girl or the muffinman

but there were much sharper social-contexutal boundaries -- music for church, music for concert performance, music of the streets, these simply didn't happen in the same places for the same persons for the same reasons...

i actually think a sharper breach within music came with jazz in the 20s, actually; and a second one with rock (not rock'n'roll, i mean in the early/mid 60s)

we'd have to be very much clearer about what we mean by commensurability here: i happen to think there's a case for drawing an incommensurability borderline between, say, the practices and mindset of musicians-as-a-group, and the practices and mindset of writers-as-a-group, but i've never been very successful in getting across why exactly i think this (and there are a handful of strong writers who are also front-rank performers, such as charles rosen)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"i actually think a sharper breach" -- i mean conceptual break as opposed to social-contextual break, though this distinction is a bit fuzzy even in my head (and unexamined on the page as yet!)