Make up on KUHN

1. Make up on KUHN • The following slides (and accompanying recordings) are here to provide a little more consecutive discussion of KUHN, for those of you who have chosen to write on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

2. A revolutionary book on revolutions • The irony lies in the fact that Kuhn began as a straightforward empiricist historian: examine the history of scientific change, on the assumption that the facts will out. • But what was to be the final and hopefully triumphant volume of the Encyclopedia of Unified Science is more like the volume that discredited the entire enterprise. • The main point: The history of science does not show a steady growth of knowledge, with one generation building directly on the work of the past.

3. The problematic term: Paradigm First of all, it is linguistic, and it pertains to a model or pattern, to be followed in similar cases: p. 23: “in grammar, for example, ‘amo, amas, amat’ is a paradigm because it displays the pattern to be used in conjugating a large number of other Latin verb, e.g., in producting ‘laudo, laudas, laudat’ The differences: not a direct following of the model, but following a similarity. (We could use the term for Coleridge, tautegory, to exact effect here. See also, Maxwell: “Are there real analogies in nature?”) From the Postscript 1969: two main senses: 1. sociological:” the entire constellation of belief, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a particular community”; 2. exemplary: “the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science.” From the second chapter: exemplary achievements that are “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity”; and “sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.”

4. The basic model • Until there is general agreement on the exemplary practice, there are not many paradigms, but none: Just competing models. • The activity we recognize today as “scientific” takes off from the acceptance of a paradigm, in its exemplary form. (note Peirce: pragmatic maxim) • The activity of “normal science” then proceeds as “puzzle solving”. The new adherents take on problems that are similar, in the expectation that the exemplary practice taken as foundational can be expanded.

5. Some observations • No one can set out to ‘change a paradigm’. • There is nothing that would count as “revolutionary” science • The paradigm changes as practice changes, as the scope of problems or puzzles expands: no shifts • The difficulty comes with anomalies. Problems that do not succumb to the accepted practices, and refuse to fit expectations

6. Crisis and revolutions • Crisis emerges as the anomaly persists. There may or may not be a ‘revolution’: the science might just die out. • A revolution is the emergence of a new paradigm, with the characteristics already indicated. • The key element: a change in expectations, perhaps even of world view. • (What shifts, that is to say, are our thoughts)

7. The Postscript-69 • In the postscript to Structure, Kuhn remarks on the complaints concerning ambiguity in his use of the term “paradigm”—a point that he notes is not as serious a problem as some might think. • The initial problem is that his use of “paradigm” is itself a metaphor, and as such is subject to the kind of relational thinking that has gained ground steadily since Kant’s critiques. • The point of immediate comparison is that in language, a paradigm is a model, and thus the focus of Kuhn’s development of the idea of paradigms follows: Science uses models, often in preference to specified rules.

8. The two main sense of the term • 1. Concrete puzzle solutions. These are experiments or practices that others in a field recognize to be exemplary. Kuhn says of them that they represent the “philosophically deeper” meaning of “paradigm,” a point we will shortly discuss • 2. The whole matrix of theories, practices, values, and beliefs that are shared by a research community. • In both cases, the key element is that a paradigm is SHARED, and serves to establish EXPECTATIONS.

9. The irony . . . • The net claims that follow include these: • 1. Science as activity is generally NOT rule governed—which is not in any way to say that it is a free for all. It is, rather, that what scientists do in the conduct of inquiry cannot easily be reduced to rule. There are no “discovery procedures,” no “method” that resembles Descartes’ in offering lists of rules. • 2. Without the normative role of paradigms in both senses, there simply is no science. The shared assumptions &c. is what allows one’s work to be checked by others, and to be followed. It is the quality that makes scientific work progressive. • 3. But there is, therefore, no guarantee that following a particular line of research will always continue to work • 4. There is, properly speaking, no such thing as “revolutionary” science: just normal science, that from time to time encounters anomalies

10. World views • The kind of cataclysmic change of world view associated with the Copernican revolution—where an astronomical model disrupted an entire cosmological / religious / philosophical view of nature—is exceedingly rare. • Most scientific revolutions are comparatively minor things—but decisive in changing how scientists work

11. The importance of the exemplar • Why is the concrete example philosophically deeper? • The principal reason is that going from an example to something simpler involves a change in the logic you are actually using. Coleridge’s term “tautegory” is germane here: it allows for generalizing a relation between instances which does not require that the generalization be explicitly interpreted: it is intelligible by virtue of the relation established between the examples. • Thus, if you ask for a “definition” of the relation, you are implicitly attempting to turn it into an object, a thing. This, as you will recall, was Plato’s temptation, that turned into a logical catastrophe, where an insight becomes an endless sequence of paradoxes or contradictions. Ironically, such relations are as good an illustration of what Plato meant by the Intelligible as one can get: without the examples, there is no relation; with just the term designating the relation, it has no content. • We are, in fact, very well able to understand relations in this way (tautegorically), to see that the two examples are connected to each other not by a unique element, but a cognate function or aim.