On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Scott Martens wrote:
> In linguistics, Kuhn abuse is so widespread
If that's the source of your animus, I completely sympathize. But it's not Kuhn's fault. The paradigms developed in _Theory of Scientific Revolutions_ clearly don't apply to linquistics, or to sociology, political science or any of the other fields in which they are at present so popular. It's all based on a massive misreading of Kuhn.
> that I'm convinced the social sciences would be better off reading
> Popper, even with his flaws, and not reading Kuhn at all.
Hah, you should have seen them when they were massively misreading Popper (1945-1965). Sociology and political science weren't any better for it, believe me. Perhaps you'll have more luck with linguistics.
> Yes, I can agree with that. Where I can't agree with in Kuhn is
> distinctions between "revolutionary" and "regular" science in terms of
> methods and criteria for accepting hypotheses. I also disagree with
> his use of "paradigms" to suggest that the very methods of science
> change as we discover more. On the whole, they don't. The final
> arbiter remains repeatable, experimental falsification, in more or
> less the manner of Popper.
Kuhn doesn't dispute that. The only exception is the one you've already accepted, that anamolous findings will be given varying weights depending on whether there are few of them or many of them, and whether there is an established theory that people are loathe to throw out, or no real established theory (i.e., several competing reasonable theories), in which case people are by definition willing to throw them out and try out new ones with less concern that they are giving up much. That's the only difference between revolutionary and regular science. And the transition is, as you stated in, when the anamolous findings build up. That's when we begin to pass from one established theory to several new ones competing to take its place and looking for their crucial experiments.
> My biggest complaint about Popper is that he doesn't really
> investigate the sociology of science in any depth.... The underlying
> truth about science is that is it not practised by people who are
> seeking some ideal knowledge for its own sake.... It is therefore
> irrational to expect scientists to practise ideal Popperian logic.
Here is perhaps your only real difference with Kuhn, and perhaps where you and I part company. Kuhn would agree with you about the sociological underpinning of science, but would also argue, and I would follow him, that there is an intellectual justification for not throwing out an established theory on the basis of one bad result. An established theory explains lots of connections. You don't throw it out when it gets one thing wrong -- what would you have to show for yourself? Nothing. That's no advance. Much more fruitful is the theory plus the anamolous result. It's the combination that leads to a better theory. Without the anamolous result, the theory would never get improved. But without the theory, the result isn't anamolous. It has no meaning. And the set of anamolous results that point the way to a new theory are often widely disparate pieces of information that are brought into relation only because they all disagree with the established theory. Not throwing out the theory until you get a better one is therefore crucial to getting a better one.
"Paradigm" is simply Kuhn's translation of gestalt, an assertion that theories come in wholes. They are not built up atomically, true proposition by true proposition. The passage from one established theory to another, as from Ptolomaic to Copernican astronomy, is a change in world view. A new established theory lays out new central principles with wide ramifications. It is for that reason that scientific progress procedes from one powerful theory, through the stage of building up anamolous results, through the stage when it is widely recognized that a new theory is necessary and that there are several promising directions, through the decisive experiments and the establishement of a new established theory.
Popper's model of falsification implicitly assumes theories are more modular, and can be added to or subtracted proposition by proposition. Your model seems to say that would be true, but for human weakness. Kuhn is asserting, and I would agree with him, that discontinuities in world view are part of the nature of knowledge -- you can't revise your central principles a little bit at a time. Although naturally he is bending the stick a little bit the other way. He is overemphacizing discontinuity because Popper over-emphacized continuity. But even when you've bent it back, I think his point still holds, that some discontinuity is essential, and that it stems from the nature of knowledge.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com