Shift Happens

• Shift Happens

  • Kuhn wanted to free us from the illusion that knowledge is independent of history and of the sociality that marks us as humans, but he did not think that all beliefs that our history and sociality put before us are equally worthy.
  • First, scientific ideas occur within a context that enables them to make sense. Second, context is accepted for different sorts of reasons than are the hypotheses that emerge within it. Third, the idea of a new scientific context occurs roughly the way his own illumination of Aristotle's ideas did: all at once, an entire whole snapping into view
  • The positivists were strict parents. If a proposition could not be verified, it not only wasn't science, it was devoid of meaning.
  • Popper had pulled much of the ground out from under the positivists by arguing that falsifiability was the real test: If a hypothesis doesn't come with ways to show it could be false, then it isn't a scientific hypothesis
  • individual propositions within a science might be characterized by falsifiability, but how about the sort of gestalt that crystallized for Kuhn when at last and in an instant he understood Aristotle's idea of motion? That gestalt—which Kuhn of course called a paradigm—was of a different category than the propositions it enabled.
  • Margaret Masterman listed 21 senses in which Kuhn used the term in that book. She clustered them into three groups: (1) a set of beliefs, (2) a "universally recognized scientific achievement" that serves as a defining example of how that science is done, and (3) the textbooks, instruments, and other physical artifacts by which scientists learn and practice their fields.
  • Kuhn emphasized the second view of paradigms, as exemplars that guide practice
  • normal science," the daily work of career scientists. He said they are not in the business of plotting revolutionary overthrows of existing paradigms, but are instead solving puzzles. Which puzzles are interesting, how to address them, and what counts as solutions all are determined by the paradigm—or, depending on which sense of paradigm one uses, those are the paradigm.
  • new paradigms emerge to explain the accumulation of anomalies: findings that do not make sense within the current paradigm.
  • When a new paradigm is conceived that makes sense of the anomalies, science is in for a revolutionary shift.
  • Is progress possible?
  • the most consistently attacked idea was what Kuhn referred to as incommensurability, a term taken from geometry, where it refers to the lack of a shared measurement. In SSR it means something like the inability to understand one paradigm from within another.
  • The scientists hated incommensurability because it seemed to imply that science makes no real progress, the philosophers hated it because it seemed to imply that there is no truth, and the positivists hated it because it seemed to imply that science is based on nonrational decisions.
  • if science exists within paradigms, and if those paradigms can't understand one another, and if there is no Archimedean platform from which to view them, then how can we tell if we're making progress? It was easier before Kuhn, when science looked like it was the gradual accumulation of knowledge over time.
  • Outside of the metaphysical paradigm that says a true statement corresponds to an objective reality, the concept of progress becomes problematic,
  • Stephen Toulmin wrote that the continuous small adjustments paradigms go through make them less discontinuous and more commensurable than Kuhn's use of religious language—"conversion," for example—often made them sound
  • Steven Weinberg, in a 1998 article, also wasn't buying the incommensurability of scientific revolutions, pointing to the "hard"—that is, durable—parts of science that endure across paradigms
  • Kuhn rejected our old metaphysics—consciousness consists of an inner representation of an outer reality—as incoherent, impossible, and fundamentally inhuman. That's why he begins SSR by invoking history not as a discipline that can be applied to science, but as a necessary part of scientific understanding. All understanding is historical, and no human project escapes the characteristics of history-based humanity: fallible, limited, impure of motive, social, and always situated in a culture, a language, and a time.

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