Kuhn 13: A Wittgenstein Saves Nine
Mar. 3rd, 2009 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotI'm posting several passages from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations today not only because they are immediately relevant to Kuhn's idea of "paradigm" (in the sense of "exemplar") but because Kuhn himself cites them in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions when he talks about scientists using paradigms rather than rules. And I'll say it's a pleasure to read these Wittgenstein passages again, compared to the vagueness and babble that makes up most philosophy. Not only is Wittgenstein a great writer, he's probably the author of the clearest, easiest, sanest prose ever written by a philosopher. (Not that all of his writings are easy, since you often have to have a sense of what ideas he's reacting against to understand why he makes the points he does; but these passages are clear on that count as well.)
I've added some commentary of my own, some of which - the stuff about "essentialism" not being a force in the world much beyond philosophy, so deconstruction and philosophical anti-essentialism miss the mark, are aimed at men of straw - wanders away from today's topic, but eventually we'll make our way to those other topics as well, and I simply felt like adding my thoughts on them here. And I've included what Kuhn wrote about the Wittgenstein passages, and I added a bit more of my own commentary.
(I went bold with the emphases, but actually they're Wittgenstein's and Kuhn's, not mine (whereas what Mark and I were doing with our Kuhn quotes last month was bolding words that we found of significance to the discussion).)
Imagine someone's saying: "All tools serve to modify something. Thus the hammer modifies the position of the nail, the saw the shape of the board, and so on." - And what is modified by the rule, the glue-pot, the nails? - "Our knowledge of a thing's length, the temperature of the glue, and the solidity of the box." - Would anything be gained by this assimilation of expressions?
...
Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations. - For someone might object against me: "You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language."
And this is true. - Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all - but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language". I will try to explain this.
Consider for example the proceedings we call "games." I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? - Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games'" - but look and see whether there is anything common to all. - For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! - Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences to the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. - Are they all "amusing"? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear.
And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. - And I shall say: 'games' form a family.
...
But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions - namely the disjunction of all their common properties" - I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread - namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres."
...
For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none so far has been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word "game.")
"But then the use of the word is unregulated, the 'game' we play with it is unregulated." - It is not everywhere circumscribed by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one throws the ball in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has rules too.
How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe games to him, and we might add: "This and similar things are called 'games'". And do we know any more about it ourselves? Is it only other people whom we cannot tell exactly what a game is? - But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary - for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! (Except for that special purpose.) No more than it took the definition: 1 pace = 75 cm. to make the measure of length 'one pace' usable. And if you want to say "But still, before that it wasn't an exact measure", then I reply: very well, it was an inexact one. - Though you still owe me a definition of exactness.
"But if the concept 'game' is uncircumscribed like that, you don't really know what you mean by a 'game'." - When I give the description: "The ground was quite covered with plants" - do you want to say I don't know what I am talking about until I can give a definition of a plant?
...
[Marginal note by Wittgenstein: Someone says to me: "Shew the children a game." I teach them gaming with dice, and the other says "I didn't mean that sort of game." Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before his mind when he gave me the order?]
One might say that the concept 'game' is a concept with blurred edges. - "But is a blurred concept a concept at all?" - Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?
Frege compares a concept to an area and says that an area with vague boundaries cannot be called an area at all. This presumably means that we cannot do anything with it. - But is it senseless to say: "Stand roughly there"? Suppose that I were standing with someone in a city square and said that. As I say it I do not draw any kind of boundary, but perhaps point with my hand - as if I were indicating a particular spot. And this is just how one might explain to someone what a game is. One gives examples and intends them to be taken in a particular way. - I do not, however, mean by this that he is supposed to see in those examples that common thing which I - for some reason - was unable to express; but that he is now to employ those examples in a particular way. Here giving examples is not an indirect way of explaining - in default of a better. For any general definition can be misunderstood too. The point is that this is how we play the game. (I mean the language-game with the word "game".)
...
Compare knowing and saying:
how many feet high Mont Blanc is--
how the word "game" is used--
how a clarinet sounds.
If you are surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.
...
When I say "N is dead", then something like the following may hold for the meaning of the name "N"; I believe a human being has lived, whom I (1) have seen in such-and-such places, who (2) looked like this (pictures), (3) has done such-and-such things, and (4) bore the name "N" in social life. - Asked what I understand by "N", I should enumerate all or some of these points, and different ones on different occasions. So my definition of "N" would perhaps be "the man of whom all this is true". - But if some point now proves false? - Shall I be prepared to declare the proposition "N is dead" false - even if it is only something that strikes me as incidental that has turned out false? But where are the bounds of the incidental? - If I had given a definition of the name in such a case, I should now be ready to alter it.
And this can be expressed like this: I use the name "N" without a fixed meaning. (But that detracts as little from its usefulness, as it detracts from that of a table that it stands on four legs instead of three and so sometimes wobbles.)
I think that Wittgenstein is actually driving at an even stronger point: not just that a word can be as useful when it's wobbling as it is when fixed by a definition, but that in many instances wobbling is more functional than being fixed. "Fixed" is really the wrong word here, since a word that's not "fixed" by its definition strides forth and can meet many circumstances, whereas if it were "fixed" it would stumble at the first instance where there were circumstances for which the definition were unprepared. And the analogous point that Kuhn makes is that scientists solve new problems that they see as similar to previous problems, the previous problems and their solutions being the paradigms that the scientists follow - and the scientists do this rather than applying rules that tell them how to solve all such problems. This is directly analogous to Wittgenstein's not having at hand a definition that tells him when to apply or not apply the name "N" to someone, but nonetheless being able to apply the name N where he thinks he needs to.
And now here's the diversion I promised in my introduction:
As Wittgenstein himself would have pointed out, the ideas I've just quoted don't have any consequences one way or the other for how you yourself might use the words "tool" and "game" and "language," don't argue for preserving standard usage or modifying it, expanding it or narrowing it. And the usage of those words doesn't suddenly get a new freedom or recklessness once we read Wittgenstein and discover that our use of those words isn't and never was directed by explicit definitions that instruct us how to use them.
What Wittgenstein's trying to do, among other things, is to walk us away from a certain philosophical assumption (call it "essentialism," the idea that there must be a common feature or set of features and that these common features must be not only what's most important about whatever it is that a term like "game" designates, but indispensable where all other features can be jettisoned) and a certain philosophical problem (call it "the problem of universals"). But he's not announcing a philosophical counterprinciple either. That is, he's not saying that games (or anything else) can't have features that are common to all, or that some features can't be more important than others, or indispensable. E.g., think of the term "scientific revolution," as Kuhn uses it. He's identifying features common to all scientific revolutions, in fact isn't just describing scientific revolutions but creating the concept for us by way of his description.
Wittgenstein also isn't making a comment on the viability of concepts like "essence" and "fundamental," if you take the everyday - rather than the philosophical - usage of those words. (E.g., "I didn't get upset when he called me a crusty, since I knew that he was essentially a sweet kid"; "fundamental to Sam's character was his love and concern for his friend Frodo.")
But I draw from Wittgenstein's example an added sociological point: that, at least as regards current usage in English and German of the words "game" and "tool," the essentialist assumptions that he's trying to walk us away from actually don't intrude on our use of the words "game" and "tool" at all. This sort of essentialism is simply not in effect, is not a force in the world when it comes to these words. And I'm going to extrapolate from those two examples the general idea that essentialist assumptions have little or no impact on everyday life. So it's only in special circumstances (the circumstances probably go only a little beyond "when doing philosophy"; they're not widespread) that such assumptions have any presence in the world, and the assumptions don't jump from those circumstances into the rest of life.
So, attacks on the idea of "essentialism" are often misfires in that the "essentialism" that philosophers and deconstructionists etc. know how to dissassemble isn't the essentialism of, say, a man who says a woman's essence is to be a mother (this man not necessarily even having an opinion as to whether, e.g., "woman" and "mother" are relational terms or whether or not for every noun there must be a common element to all that the noun denotes). Philosophy keeps trying to change the conversation back to what it knows how to talk about rather than what really is at issue. - The social questions of whether women should receive equal pay for equal work etc. and whether there is or isn't behavior that's innate by gender aren't even addressed by one's opinion as to whether or not all the things a noun designates must share features in common.
Back to Kuhn. This is the passage in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed. pp 44-47) where he cites Wittgenstein:
In the absence of a competent body of rules, what restricts the scientist to a particular normal-scientific tradition? What can the phrase 'direct inspection of paradigms' mean? Partial answers to questions like these were developed by the late Ludwig Wittgenstein, though in a very different context. Because that context is both more elementary and more familiar, it will help to consider his form of the argument first. What need we know, Wittgenstein asked, in order that we apply terms like 'chair,' or 'leaf,' or 'game' unequivocally and without provoking argument? [Footnote: Wittgenstein, however, says almost nothing about the sort of world necessary to support the naming procedure he outlines. Part of the point that follows cannot therefore be attributed to him.]
That question is very old and has generally been answered by saying that we must know, consciously or intuitively, what a chair, or leaf, or game is. We must, that is, grasp some set of attributes that all games and that only games have in common. Wittgenstein, however, concluded that, given the way we use language and the sort of world to which we apply it, there need be no such set of characteristics. Though a discussion of some of the attributes shared by a number of games or chairs or leaves often helps us learn how to employ the corresponding term, there is no set of characteristics that is simultaneously applicable to all members of the class and to them alone. Instead, confronted with a previously unobserved activity, we apply the term 'game' because what we are seeing bears a close "family resemblance" to a number of the activities that we have previously learned to call by that name. For Wittgenstein, in short, games, and chairs, and leaves are natural families, each constituted by a network of overlapping and crisscross resemblances. The existence of such a network sufficiently accounts for our success in identifying the corresponding object of activity. Only if the families we named overlapped and merged gradually into one another - only, that is, if there were no natural families - would our success in identifying and naming provide evidence for a set of common characteristics corresponding to each of the class names we employ.
OK, I'm going to interrupt Kuhn here to say that I'm really glad that he added that footnote above, since Wittgenstein has absolutely no opinion as to whether there are natural families, and I'm damned if I can figure out why Kuhn thinks that, if "games" actually did overlap with, say, entertainments, amusements, pasttimes, sports, puzzles, contests, competitions, charades, gambling, hunting, exhibitions, etc., this would mean that our success in identifying and naming provides evidence for a set of common characteristics. All it means is that we almost always can tell from context where someone is extending his use of the word "game." I mean, jeeesh, is it maybe, slightly, actually possible that human families overlap and merge gradually into one another? Sometimes I think this guy Kuhn is a retard. Anyway, he continues:
Something of the same sort may very well hold for the various research problems and techniques that arise within a single normal-scientific tradition. What these have in common is not that they satisfy some explicit or even some fully discoverable set of rules and assumptions that gives the tradition its character and its hold upon the scientific mind. Instead, they may relate by resemblance and by modeling to one or another part of the scientific corpus which the community in question already recognizes as among its established achievements. Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms. And because they do so, they need no full set of rules. The coherence displayed by the research tradition in which they participate may not imply even the existence of an underlying body of rules and assumptions that additional historical or philosophical investigation might uncover. That scientists do not usually ask or debate what makes a particular problem or solution legitimate tempts us to suppose that, at least intuitively, they know the answer. But it may only indicate that neither the question nor the answer is felt to be relevant to their research. Paradigms may be prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them.
...
Scientists, it should already be clear, never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves. Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start encountered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications. A new theory is always announced together with applications to some concrete range of natural phenomena; without them it would not be even a candidate for acceptance. After it has been accepted, those same applications or others accompany the theory into the textbooks from which the future practitioner will learn his trade. They are not there merely as embroidery or even as documentation. On the contrary, the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like 'force,' 'mass,' 'space,' and 'time,' he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution.
I've added some commentary of my own, some of which - the stuff about "essentialism" not being a force in the world much beyond philosophy, so deconstruction and philosophical anti-essentialism miss the mark, are aimed at men of straw - wanders away from today's topic, but eventually we'll make our way to those other topics as well, and I simply felt like adding my thoughts on them here. And I've included what Kuhn wrote about the Wittgenstein passages, and I added a bit more of my own commentary.
(I went bold with the emphases, but actually they're Wittgenstein's and Kuhn's, not mine (whereas what Mark and I were doing with our Kuhn quotes last month was bolding words that we found of significance to the discussion).)
Imagine someone's saying: "All tools serve to modify something. Thus the hammer modifies the position of the nail, the saw the shape of the board, and so on." - And what is modified by the rule, the glue-pot, the nails? - "Our knowledge of a thing's length, the temperature of the glue, and the solidity of the box." - Would anything be gained by this assimilation of expressions?
...
Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations. - For someone might object against me: "You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language."
And this is true. - Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all - but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language". I will try to explain this.
Consider for example the proceedings we call "games." I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? - Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games'" - but look and see whether there is anything common to all. - For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! - Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences to the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. - Are they all "amusing"? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear.
And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. - And I shall say: 'games' form a family.
...
But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions - namely the disjunction of all their common properties" - I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread - namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres."
...
For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none so far has been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word "game.")
"But then the use of the word is unregulated, the 'game' we play with it is unregulated." - It is not everywhere circumscribed by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one throws the ball in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has rules too.
How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe games to him, and we might add: "This and similar things are called 'games'". And do we know any more about it ourselves? Is it only other people whom we cannot tell exactly what a game is? - But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary - for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! (Except for that special purpose.) No more than it took the definition: 1 pace = 75 cm. to make the measure of length 'one pace' usable. And if you want to say "But still, before that it wasn't an exact measure", then I reply: very well, it was an inexact one. - Though you still owe me a definition of exactness.
"But if the concept 'game' is uncircumscribed like that, you don't really know what you mean by a 'game'." - When I give the description: "The ground was quite covered with plants" - do you want to say I don't know what I am talking about until I can give a definition of a plant?
...
[Marginal note by Wittgenstein: Someone says to me: "Shew the children a game." I teach them gaming with dice, and the other says "I didn't mean that sort of game." Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before his mind when he gave me the order?]
One might say that the concept 'game' is a concept with blurred edges. - "But is a blurred concept a concept at all?" - Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?
Frege compares a concept to an area and says that an area with vague boundaries cannot be called an area at all. This presumably means that we cannot do anything with it. - But is it senseless to say: "Stand roughly there"? Suppose that I were standing with someone in a city square and said that. As I say it I do not draw any kind of boundary, but perhaps point with my hand - as if I were indicating a particular spot. And this is just how one might explain to someone what a game is. One gives examples and intends them to be taken in a particular way. - I do not, however, mean by this that he is supposed to see in those examples that common thing which I - for some reason - was unable to express; but that he is now to employ those examples in a particular way. Here giving examples is not an indirect way of explaining - in default of a better. For any general definition can be misunderstood too. The point is that this is how we play the game. (I mean the language-game with the word "game".)
...
Compare knowing and saying:
how many feet high Mont Blanc is--
how the word "game" is used--
how a clarinet sounds.
If you are surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.
...
When I say "N is dead", then something like the following may hold for the meaning of the name "N"; I believe a human being has lived, whom I (1) have seen in such-and-such places, who (2) looked like this (pictures), (3) has done such-and-such things, and (4) bore the name "N" in social life. - Asked what I understand by "N", I should enumerate all or some of these points, and different ones on different occasions. So my definition of "N" would perhaps be "the man of whom all this is true". - But if some point now proves false? - Shall I be prepared to declare the proposition "N is dead" false - even if it is only something that strikes me as incidental that has turned out false? But where are the bounds of the incidental? - If I had given a definition of the name in such a case, I should now be ready to alter it.
And this can be expressed like this: I use the name "N" without a fixed meaning. (But that detracts as little from its usefulness, as it detracts from that of a table that it stands on four legs instead of three and so sometimes wobbles.)
I think that Wittgenstein is actually driving at an even stronger point: not just that a word can be as useful when it's wobbling as it is when fixed by a definition, but that in many instances wobbling is more functional than being fixed. "Fixed" is really the wrong word here, since a word that's not "fixed" by its definition strides forth and can meet many circumstances, whereas if it were "fixed" it would stumble at the first instance where there were circumstances for which the definition were unprepared. And the analogous point that Kuhn makes is that scientists solve new problems that they see as similar to previous problems, the previous problems and their solutions being the paradigms that the scientists follow - and the scientists do this rather than applying rules that tell them how to solve all such problems. This is directly analogous to Wittgenstein's not having at hand a definition that tells him when to apply or not apply the name "N" to someone, but nonetheless being able to apply the name N where he thinks he needs to.
And now here's the diversion I promised in my introduction:
As Wittgenstein himself would have pointed out, the ideas I've just quoted don't have any consequences one way or the other for how you yourself might use the words "tool" and "game" and "language," don't argue for preserving standard usage or modifying it, expanding it or narrowing it. And the usage of those words doesn't suddenly get a new freedom or recklessness once we read Wittgenstein and discover that our use of those words isn't and never was directed by explicit definitions that instruct us how to use them.
What Wittgenstein's trying to do, among other things, is to walk us away from a certain philosophical assumption (call it "essentialism," the idea that there must be a common feature or set of features and that these common features must be not only what's most important about whatever it is that a term like "game" designates, but indispensable where all other features can be jettisoned) and a certain philosophical problem (call it "the problem of universals"). But he's not announcing a philosophical counterprinciple either. That is, he's not saying that games (or anything else) can't have features that are common to all, or that some features can't be more important than others, or indispensable. E.g., think of the term "scientific revolution," as Kuhn uses it. He's identifying features common to all scientific revolutions, in fact isn't just describing scientific revolutions but creating the concept for us by way of his description.
Wittgenstein also isn't making a comment on the viability of concepts like "essence" and "fundamental," if you take the everyday - rather than the philosophical - usage of those words. (E.g., "I didn't get upset when he called me a crusty, since I knew that he was essentially a sweet kid"; "fundamental to Sam's character was his love and concern for his friend Frodo.")
But I draw from Wittgenstein's example an added sociological point: that, at least as regards current usage in English and German of the words "game" and "tool," the essentialist assumptions that he's trying to walk us away from actually don't intrude on our use of the words "game" and "tool" at all. This sort of essentialism is simply not in effect, is not a force in the world when it comes to these words. And I'm going to extrapolate from those two examples the general idea that essentialist assumptions have little or no impact on everyday life. So it's only in special circumstances (the circumstances probably go only a little beyond "when doing philosophy"; they're not widespread) that such assumptions have any presence in the world, and the assumptions don't jump from those circumstances into the rest of life.
So, attacks on the idea of "essentialism" are often misfires in that the "essentialism" that philosophers and deconstructionists etc. know how to dissassemble isn't the essentialism of, say, a man who says a woman's essence is to be a mother (this man not necessarily even having an opinion as to whether, e.g., "woman" and "mother" are relational terms or whether or not for every noun there must be a common element to all that the noun denotes). Philosophy keeps trying to change the conversation back to what it knows how to talk about rather than what really is at issue. - The social questions of whether women should receive equal pay for equal work etc. and whether there is or isn't behavior that's innate by gender aren't even addressed by one's opinion as to whether or not all the things a noun designates must share features in common.
Back to Kuhn. This is the passage in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed. pp 44-47) where he cites Wittgenstein:
In the absence of a competent body of rules, what restricts the scientist to a particular normal-scientific tradition? What can the phrase 'direct inspection of paradigms' mean? Partial answers to questions like these were developed by the late Ludwig Wittgenstein, though in a very different context. Because that context is both more elementary and more familiar, it will help to consider his form of the argument first. What need we know, Wittgenstein asked, in order that we apply terms like 'chair,' or 'leaf,' or 'game' unequivocally and without provoking argument? [Footnote: Wittgenstein, however, says almost nothing about the sort of world necessary to support the naming procedure he outlines. Part of the point that follows cannot therefore be attributed to him.]
That question is very old and has generally been answered by saying that we must know, consciously or intuitively, what a chair, or leaf, or game is. We must, that is, grasp some set of attributes that all games and that only games have in common. Wittgenstein, however, concluded that, given the way we use language and the sort of world to which we apply it, there need be no such set of characteristics. Though a discussion of some of the attributes shared by a number of games or chairs or leaves often helps us learn how to employ the corresponding term, there is no set of characteristics that is simultaneously applicable to all members of the class and to them alone. Instead, confronted with a previously unobserved activity, we apply the term 'game' because what we are seeing bears a close "family resemblance" to a number of the activities that we have previously learned to call by that name. For Wittgenstein, in short, games, and chairs, and leaves are natural families, each constituted by a network of overlapping and crisscross resemblances. The existence of such a network sufficiently accounts for our success in identifying the corresponding object of activity. Only if the families we named overlapped and merged gradually into one another - only, that is, if there were no natural families - would our success in identifying and naming provide evidence for a set of common characteristics corresponding to each of the class names we employ.
OK, I'm going to interrupt Kuhn here to say that I'm really glad that he added that footnote above, since Wittgenstein has absolutely no opinion as to whether there are natural families, and I'm damned if I can figure out why Kuhn thinks that, if "games" actually did overlap with, say, entertainments, amusements, pasttimes, sports, puzzles, contests, competitions, charades, gambling, hunting, exhibitions, etc., this would mean that our success in identifying and naming provides evidence for a set of common characteristics. All it means is that we almost always can tell from context where someone is extending his use of the word "game." I mean, jeeesh, is it maybe, slightly, actually possible that human families overlap and merge gradually into one another? Sometimes I think this guy Kuhn is a retard. Anyway, he continues:
Something of the same sort may very well hold for the various research problems and techniques that arise within a single normal-scientific tradition. What these have in common is not that they satisfy some explicit or even some fully discoverable set of rules and assumptions that gives the tradition its character and its hold upon the scientific mind. Instead, they may relate by resemblance and by modeling to one or another part of the scientific corpus which the community in question already recognizes as among its established achievements. Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms. And because they do so, they need no full set of rules. The coherence displayed by the research tradition in which they participate may not imply even the existence of an underlying body of rules and assumptions that additional historical or philosophical investigation might uncover. That scientists do not usually ask or debate what makes a particular problem or solution legitimate tempts us to suppose that, at least intuitively, they know the answer. But it may only indicate that neither the question nor the answer is felt to be relevant to their research. Paradigms may be prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them.
...
Scientists, it should already be clear, never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves. Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start encountered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications. A new theory is always announced together with applications to some concrete range of natural phenomena; without them it would not be even a candidate for acceptance. After it has been accepted, those same applications or others accompany the theory into the textbooks from which the future practitioner will learn his trade. They are not there merely as embroidery or even as documentation. On the contrary, the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like 'force,' 'mass,' 'space,' and 'time,' he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution.
