Ian Murray wrote:
>
> > It is safest, unless one is both a professional scientist _and_ a
> > professional historian/philosopher of science, simply not to use the
> > concept.
>
> ===============
>
> And a great big reflexivity alert to you too Carrol!!! :->
Yup! Actually, I've done quite a bit of off-list discussion with a physicist and an anthropologist over the years over just this topic. Ultimately, any discipline has to be judged by those outside it (including the discipline of history/philosopy of science). But those non-scientists, non-historians making those judgments need to be decently aware of the minefields they're crossing. And all too often they aren't, and over the last two weeks on the Milton-L list there has been an extravagant exhibition of lack of care in speaking whereof one does not know. (One poster even babbled on about the "missing-link problem.")That's still my opinion of Hawkes on Gould. I rather trust the judgment of Levins -- and was prepared to reconsider my doubts if there had been a different response on the Science for the People List to my query.
>
> >It seems utterly silly to me, anyhow, to call Einstein's
> > 'overturning' of Newtonian gravity a paradigm shift -- that
> > overturning
> > occurred well within the house of physics.
> ==================
>
> Double super reflexivity alert.
One must risk it sometimes. I see no reason to back off from my claim that the whole "paradigm shift" thing has become more of an academic racket than a serious historical thesis. Have you ever read Galileo's poem "On the Aristotelians"? (Title from memory) It's been around 30 years since I read it, and I don't remember details now -- but _there_ is a paradigm shift for you.
Carrol
> > All of the "paradigm shifts"
> > that make much sense are not shifts within a given physical or natural
> > science but the "shift" constituted by the very origin of such
> science.
> > Galileo/Newton constituted a paradigm shift from non-science to
> > science. Relativity and Quantum mechanics are developments (though
> > far-reaching ones) within the science that Galileo etc created.
>
> ===============
> G & N were rank amatuers compared to what's gone on since 1905
I'll think about this, but my first response is to say such a judgment is anachronistic. But it wouldn't be anachronistic to draw a sharp line between Galileo and the whole set of premises of the astronomers of his own day.
Let's take a neater science, geology. I believe either Kuhn or someone else called the discovery of plate tectonics a "new paradigm." But in the 17th century the early "geologists" were trying to understand the circulation of water in the earth in terms of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. That is, they thought of the earth as an _animal_ -- an organism, and for them analogy was still the primary mode of discovery. The shift away from _that_ set of premises, again, was a serious "paradigm shift," in comparison to which the shifts of the last 100 years, no matter how eath-shaking, are not remotely a paradigm shift. Twenty years ago composition theorists were spouting off about how they were bringing about a paradigm shift in composition. (Many 17th century and earlier thinkers seriously believed that the earth was alive: that one could understand it by analogy to the human body. I think it was Augustine, but I'm really reaching to the dust bins of my memory now) who claimed that whether the earth was alive or not was an undecidable question.
>
> > "Science," however we define it, has to be judged by non-scientists
> (or
> > scientists speaking from outside science), but that fact does not
> > justify anyone in the kind of amateurish fumbling around exhibited by
> > Hawkes, and it certainly doesn't justify the Nation's Book Review
> > Editor.
> >
> > Carrol
>
> ================
>
> Read Gould's book yet?
Nope. It's on order, along with two other of his books I haven't read and the second edition of _Mismeasure_.
Carrol
>
> Ian