The Follies (Re: sketch of Hawkes on Gould)

kelley at pulpculture.org kelley at pulpculture.org
Sat Jun 1 16:34:06 PDT 2002


And no carol, this first statement is not redeemed by your last, in which you claim that non scientists must judge the work of scientist. If that's the case, then their disciplinary credentials do not matter a wit, and they certainly do matter as to whether they get the use of paradigm correctly. I've seen plenty of scientists get it wrong!

Yours is an illogical demand. One need not have degrees in both history or phil of science as well as science in order to speak to Kuhn's work. It is a silly demand and it is certainly not why people don't use paradigm correctly.

I also think you misunderstand the nature of Levins' complaint about Hawkes in the first place. Levins is suggesting that it is an issue that can only work itself out in history, not one which Hawkes can judge while the process is still going on. That's my rough guess anyway. You can ask him to elaborate, I'm curious. But, I'm very certain that he won't complain about the use of paradigm as referring to dramatic changes within a field which can and do happen, according to Kuhn, since that is the subject of his book and why it is entitled, _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_.

"These characteristics emerge with particular clarity from a study of, say, the Newtonian or the chemical revolution. It is, however, a fundamental thesis of this essay that they can also be retrieved from the study of many other episodes that were not so obviously revolutionary. For the far smaller professional group affected by them, Maxwell's equations were as revolutionary as Einstein's, and they were resisted accordingly. The invention of other new theories regularly, and appropiately, evokes the same response... for these men the new theory implies a change in the rules governing the prior practice of NORMAL SCIENCE (emphasis added). Inevitably, therefore, it reflects upon much scientific work they have already successfully completed. That is why a new theory, however special its range of application, is seldom or never just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a sing man and never overnight. <...> " (p 6-7)

YOur claims about what Kuhn means by paradigm are wrong. I don't know if Hawkes if misusing it because I haven't read his article yet. You need to clarify what you really meant, if you mistyped, or apologize to Hawkes and criticize him on another basis.

A paradigm is not a concept pointing to the shift to normal science only. He claims that these were, yes indeed, scientists, people practicing science in a pre-paradigm science 'stage'. They were not doing what he calls "normal science" which is paradigm-based research. He goes on to spend the rest of his book describing how paradigm shifts come about within a field. For instance, he does in fact point to Heisenberg's work as an instance of a crisis in physics. And those kinds of crises, he says, have three outcomes. One of those outcomes can be the emergence of a new paradigm in the field. So, again, it is quite accurate to talk about paradigm shifts as happening within a field of research, and not just as the "big bang" that turned the field from pre=paradigmatic scientific research to pardigmatic research.

"Through the proliferation of divergent articulations (more and more frequently they will come to be described as ad hoc adjustments), the rules of normal science b/c increasingly blurred. Though there still is a paradigm, few practitioners prove to be entirely agreed about what it is. Even formerly standard solutions of solved problems are called in question.

When acute, this situation is sometimes recognized by the scientists involved. Copernicus complained that in his day astronomers were so "inconsistent in the [astronmical] investigations...that they cannot even explain or observe the constant length of the seasonal year." <...> Einstein, restricted by current usage to less florid language, wrong only, "it was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which on could have build." And Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenberg's paper on matrix mechanics pointed the way to a new quantum theory, wrote to a friend, "at the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case it is too difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics." That testimony is particularly impressive if contrasted with Pauli's words less than five months later, "Heisenberg's type of mechanics has again give me hope and joy in life. To be sure it does not supply to solution to the riddle, but I believe it is again possible to march forward."

<...> All crises being with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for formal research. <...> And all crises close in one of three ways. <...> Or, finally, the case that will most concern us here, a crisis may end with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance. This last mode of closure will be considered at length in later sections, but we must anticipate a bit of what will be said there in order to complete these remarks about the evolution and anatomy of the crisis state.

The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achive by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamental, a reconstruction that changes some of the field's most elementary theoretical generalization as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications. "

pp 83-84


>``...It is safest, unless one is both a professional scientist _and_ a
>professional historian/philosopher of science,

rubbish. so few people are both scientist and historian/philosopher of science that you are suggesting that no one, not even colleagues in the history or philosophy of science, should speak to his work, since they are not also scientists.

worse, to suggest this means that one should not speak to the work of any philosopher or historian of any field if one is working as student of literature or professor of literature, since that person is neither a professional scientist nor a professional historian/philosopher of science, let alone BOTH!

do you just draw the line at science? but how can you, if you're drawing the line also at historian/philosopher of science?

kelley



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