I made a mistake interpreting Kuhn and Robinson. Here is a better passage in the third letter down:
I see that I need to say something more about the argument you liked but came to have misgivings about - the one asking what changes in 'the world' might make realism false, having been true, &c. You worry about what 'world' I am talking about there. I suppose the short answer is that I don't myself want to use the expression 'the world' at all in any hard sense, in any way that rests weight on it, neither 'natural world' nor any other. My own view is that the expression 'the world' (of any sort) is a façon de parler, OK for informal indicating, but not capable of sustaining any theoretical weight. It hides traps that won't spring if we only tread lightly. But that's not the view of the (would-be) realists. They think that it has a hard sense and real work can be done with it. In particular, they think that the notion is implicated in, and has work to do in understanding, both the notions of reference and of truth. The notion of world at issue would, I guess, be the broadest sense, something like 'the way things are.' What I am asking is the Wittgenstinian question -'Does Scientific Realism say anything?' (or 'Anti-Realism' for that matter?) What I regard myself as doing in my argument is to use that 'belief' of theirs that the notion of the world has real content or real reference to undermine itself. Given their views of truth, falsehood and reference, what is the status of their would-be thesis of Realism? What kind of an account can they give of it? Is the notion of proof really applicable at all? If not, what does that tell us? Again, I don't want to put this forward as a 'knock-down' argument, because I don't think that that is the way philosophy works. I just want people to mull over that question and hope that mulling may end by reducing the attractiveness of the view. But it will be a hard and long business because of the great network of mutually supporting notions and views that we are up against. Maybe as Wittgenstein thought in his pessimistic moments, those views will only be cured with the curing of 'the sickness of a time.' Still, I think there is work to be done by identifying the sickness, trying to say something about its causes, and by sketching an alternative picture. What else can we do?
Guy Robinson
The mistake was to reproduce near exactly what Kuhn and Robinson were talking against. Durer, Descartes, were early figures of the more explicit enlightenment project that followed them. The project got a big kick up with the explosion of Newtonian physics, and the French Revolution.
What the mathematicians of the revolution did were creat two invaluable techniques. First was the invention of the metric system, and the other was the development of an analytic-geometric calculus. These techniques made it possible to really get started on measuring, engineering, and reproducing the industrial society.
So there is indeed a lot of work in identifying the sickness. I just don't think of it as a sickness. It seems to me more of limited view, something like partitioning the mind in ways that stop cross-fertilization.
Here is another passage from Robinson:
``At the moment the problem I'm anxious to get working on is the nature and function and consequences of the inverted picture of humanity as individuals first and social beings after - that the Seventeenth Century laid down as its starting point, thus setting the agenda to which, in large part, we are still working. Much of the confusions generated by the notion of method in the sciences and elsewhere can be set down to their being aimed at a putative isolated individual for her or his private use.''
You see it? All of these construction and developments happened near simultaneously. In the arts this can be shown by noticing that concept of individualism, and singular genius shows up in signing works. Most of the cathedrals and their works were community works where the general plans changed over time and we don't know who made the stuff. There were guilds of craftsmen who travelled around to apply some speciality or some skill not held locally.
CG