Kuhn 24: Flash Quiz (Everybody Misunderstands Kuhn)

[koganbot]

Here are the worst five sentences from what's otherwise a pretty good book. The sentences are in no way essential to the book, and didn't need to be there. So I'm just giving you the sentences without the book title. My point in printing them is that most everybody gets Kuhn wrong. There's a mass mental block.

Historians of science have often noted that at any given time scholars in a particular field tend to share basic assumptions about their subject. Social scientists are no exception; they rely on a view of human nature that provides the background of most discussions of specific behaviors but is rarely questioned. Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.

That passage doesn't mention Kuhn or Feyerabend as his "historians of science," but if the author wasn't thinking of either of those two — but he likely was! — he was thinking of someone else who was thinking of them. In any event, if you think you know something about Kuhn, and that passage doesn't strike you as way wrong, you gotta go back and read Kuhn again (or at least click the Thomas Kuhn tag and read our discussion).

I will say a little about the two "broadly accepted" ideas, since they're not particularly relevant to my Kuhn quiz: there were still Marxists and Freudians* running about in the 1970s, and whatever they did or didn't believe regarding the soundness of human thinking, they most definitely would not have considered the phrase "emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred" to be at all adequate to what's going on in ideology and oedipal dramas. (But that's a side issue.)

(I imagine that someone reading this might say to herself, "Frank falls into the category 'somebody'; so if everybody misunderstands Kuhn, Frank too must misunderstand Kuhn." Well, I think there's a way that I veered wrong in the past. But I think I've now substantially got the guy right. May be a subject for a future post, what I got wrong.)

*Yeah, I know the passage uses the word "most," and Marxists and Freudians were never the majority of social scientists. But the word "most" is one of the very features that cause the passage to careen off into wrongness.

(Also don't know if Feyerabend is considered a philosopher or a historian, but he definitely knew plenty about the history of science, whatever field he was officially in.)

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Seemed familiar so I figured that was Kahneman -- googled and indeed it was! I think that somewhere in that Kuhn tag there's a conversation about whether or not the social sciences "count" as something that can ever be truly incommensurable -- it's not impossible to believe simultaneously in many of the different theories of human behavior that exist both in and around (via theory) the social sciences, which means (if I'm understanding this correctly, though I have a long track record of incomprehension) that Kuhn's definition of consensus simply doesn't apply. I wish that my other favorite pop social science book from last year, the Duncan Watts book, was more rigorous in exploring this (subtextually he's hinting that the social sciences are in a kind of Dark Ages and seems to question whether much of it should even count as science, but he also quotes someone who makes that claim directly in order to disagree with him), but he seems terrified of dropping the "K word" despite going on a long and frustrating tiptoe around Kuhn in his conclusion.

[koganbot]

whether or not the social sciences "count" as something that can ever be truly incommensurable

Not sure what you mean by "can ever truly be incommensurable." Do you mean, "the stuff you're comparing is not coherent enough for us even to be able to see how incommensurable it is"? That seems like a complicated way of saying, "A field can't undergo a paradigm shift if it never had a paradigm [in the meaning of 'disciplinary matrix'] to begin with." But that doesn't mean there are no major shifts within any field that lacks an overall disciplinary matrix (such as, e.g., critical theory, lit theory, and so on). Change in such fields merely won't have the form of moving from Consensus A to Consensus B, since the consensuses aren't there. But we would be dogmatic in saying that a social science can never achieve consensus in the first place.

The Koganbot post you're looking about Kuhn contrasting the hard sciences and the social sciences is:

Kuhn 18: A difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences.

But Kuhn is not saying that a social science can never ever get itself together, he's merely saying that the ongoing debates over "fundamentals" are a sign that, e.g., sociologists and psychologists haven't pulled it together. If they do (or have started to) pull it together, you could say that prior to the pulling-together those fields were in their pre-paradigm state, and that now they're developing paradigms (in both senses of the term). A question for you to ponder is what would that "pulling together" consist of. It's not just a bunch of people deciding to agree on something-or-other.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose that "a field can't undergo a paradigm shift if it never had a paradigm" is what I mean. "Never" isn't the right way of thinking about it -- and I think that's the issue Watts takes with the guy he quotes (IIRC), that he's chalking it up to some problem that the social sciences can't fix because they are not hard sciences; whereas Watts claims that it's more a matter of framing problems more accurately and having better tools to measure and test those problems. I'm fairly convinced by Watts's experiments in broad social phenomena, and think that his correlation to biology, in which we can atomize or look at macro shifts but can't necessarily both do both at the same time, is important for social sciences (and there's literature to that effect, I think, but there's no definite corollary to my mind to, e.g., micro- and "macro-" biology.

[koganbot]

But to keep this going as a quiz, rather than turning it into a lecture, here are phrases to look at:

(1) "tend to share basic assumptions about their subject" - the word "tend": do they need to share some basic assumptions or all basic assumptions? what's an example of a basic assumption? are there crucial assumptions that don't seem similar to that one (e.g., Bayes's theorem can be basic; what a "fruit" is can be basic; but theorems don't seem much like fruit)? What does sharing a basic assumption do for you? Do you need to share anything else? "Broadly accepted"?

(2) "at any given time" - like, really?

(3) "Particular field" and "social scientists"; is social science a particular field?

[koganbot]

Vague and pompous citations of authority like "Historians of science have often noted..." are very rare in Thinking, Fast And Slow; in fact, this may be the only one in the book. It seems out of character for Kahneman.