Kuhn 17: Uh, what was the question?

[koganbot]

dubdobdee asked me several weeks ago to remind him what the Kuhn questions were, so I'll repost some of them here. Back in Kuhn 5 I asked six broad questions, thinking we could get to work on 1 through 3 relatively quickly and 4 through 6 as we went further. "Quickly" is relative, and if you think of the notion of quickness relative to geologic time, we're but an instant away from when I asked the questions. In any event, in getting to work on question 2, another question began to supersede these six, an apparently more esoteric and seemingly less world-important one. I'll summarize the question as:

What does Kuhn think the difference is between being following a rule, on the one hand, and seeing how to apply a paradigm, on the other?

This question developed in discussion between Mark and me in the comments to Kuhn 8 and then got restated by me in Kuhn 11 in this way: Kuhn would say that the difference between following rules that tell you how to apply f = ma, on the one hand, and seeing how to apply f = ma, on the other, is _______. And then I summarized with: Kuhn would say that the difference between seeing a resemblance and following a rule is _______.

This was all in relation to this stream of questions (using the word "paradigm" in the narrow sense of "exemplar"): (a) What might these rules or types of rule be that Kuhn thinks other people think are in effect but he thinks are not? What do they do? (b) What are paradigms - these devices that Kuhn thinks accomplish what other people attribute to rules? What do paradigms do? (c) What's the difference between following a rule on the one hand and modeling your solution on a paradigm on the other? (d) Why is it that Kuhn thinks that scientists proceed by way of paradigms rather than rules? (e) Why does Kuhn think it's so important to distinguish between following a rule and being guided by a paradigm?

In trying to answer these questions, we will need to use examples more than to give definitions.

The reason I ask these questions is that I myself don't altogether understand how to answer them, but the issue is REAL IMPORTANT TO KUHN, so we don't understand Kuhn unless we know what he thought the issue was and why it was important to him and understand how he was using the word "rule" and the word "similarity." (Kuhn 6 RESTARTED has a lot in the comments about Kuhn's use of the concept "similarity" and related concepts. And my favorite of my own writing on the issue is Kuhn 12: Scarves and hats.)

In Kuhn 11 I say, "While Kuhn devotes some effort to explaining what he means by "paradigm," he lets the word "rule" fend for itself." Actually, this isn't true. I hadn't read The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions in a while, but it turns out that chapter 4 is all about rules, and chapter 5 is where he says why he thinks paradigms have priority over rules. A subject for a further post, obviously.

Oh yes, and here are the six questions that I posed a blink of a geologic eye ago:

1. What's the difference between cumulative and noncumulative change?
2. What's a paradigm and what's a paradigm shift?
3. What is incommensurability?
4. Is Kuhn's conception of normal science a good one?
5. Do any of the nonsciences have periods equivalent to a science's normal periods?
6. How does one choose between incommensurable paradigms?