<< 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.
And why is that, pray tell? I mean, I agree that K did not mean for or expect social or any other scientists to take over his apparatus and start to talk Kuhnian, or to set up the search for "paradigms" as a goal. But He was talking quite generally about scientifiv inquiry. Maybe you don't think that social science is scientific inquiry. K himself has no pub;lished viewson the mattera s far as I know; he was a physicist and a historian of natural science by training. But when I asked him about social science, he told me that he saw no reason why his apparatus could not be useful in understanding social science.
> 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.
When I did grad work in polisci at Michigan in the 80s, the dominant "paradigm" was ruthlessly logical positivist. From my rather intermittent reading of the polisci lit since. I think it still is. When thi stuff came up, as the on;y "real" philosopher of science in any of my classes, I fely obliged to disabuse the naive positivists with their bland assurances about "scientific method" with the word from Kuhn and Quine.
> 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.
This incorrectly minizes the difference K claims to have discovered. He does insist, and I think correctly, that method and substance is deeply intertwined, and changes, toa greater or lesser extent, acriss revolutions. Think, for example, of the fall of determinism in physics. A substantive change, yes? Well, it's a result of quantum physics. But it is a methodological change too. We no longer insist on determinsitic theories.
>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.
Right, but this is something Popper could buy. For K what makes a revolution is when someone comes up with a new way of accounting for the anomalies that brings to the fore phenomena people never noticed and coiuld not even characterize in the onld framework. The move to this new approach is not problem solving within the old framework. it is a revolutionary transition to a different approach. K further adds, that the methodological differences trend tobe such that the transition cannot be explained or justified with the equipment available in the old framework. If made strong enough, and he himself makes it pretty strong, this incommensurability thesis is not something Popper could buy.
> 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.
Popper would in fact agree.
> "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.
There is a lot more to the claim about "paradigms" than that holistic claim. One paper I once read carefullt distinguisted 11 different senses of "paradigm" in K. The most important two are (1) exemplars. models of successful solutions or approaches, such as the unravelling of the double helix, and (2) metaphysical backgrounds of commitments, such as determinism in a corpulscular universe.
>The passage from one established theory
to another, as from Ptolomaic to Copernican astronomy, is a change in
world view.
Right, which is why more than mere holsim is at state. But "world view" is no use in explaining a term like "paradigm."
> Popper's model of falsification implicitly assumes theories are more
modular, and can be added to or subtracted proposition by proposition.
May thi sis the view in Die Logik der Forschung, but not in the later Conjectures and Refutations, which is much more Quinean.
.> 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.
I don't know. I am not sure than Kuhn doesn't think we are sailors on a boat, able to take up any plank but not all at once. Your Kuhn now sounds more like Feyerabend.
> He is overemphacizing discontinuity
because Popper over-emphacized continuity.
Not _because_. Popper was not important for Kuhn.
--jks (a reformed philosopher of science)
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