Matthew C. Rees on Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
For Kuhn, a paradigm shift is fundamentally not a scientific but a philosophical change, because the incommensurability of paradigms means that there is no external stance from which one can be shown to be superior to another. Kuhn explains, "The men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved ... were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by 'earth' was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved." To say that the heliocentric model is true and that the geocentric model is false is to ignore the fact that the two models mean quite different things by the term "earth."In "Spengler's Ominous Prophecy" Robert W. Merry quotes from The Decline of the West:
If, in fine, we look at the whole picture—the expansion of the Copernican world into that aspect of stellar space that we possess today; the development of Columbus's discovery into a worldwide command of the earth's surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and the theatre; the passion of our Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-peaks—we see, emerging everywhere, the prime symbol of the Faustian soul, Limitless Space. And those specially Western creations of the soul-myth called "Will," "Force," and "Deed" must be regarded as derivatives of this prime symbol.This would have been helpful when the 5th Graders were asking how Ptolemy and Aristotle could have been so stupid. "Children, children! Let's not superimpose 'that aspect of stellar space that we possess today' on a whole epoch that meant 'fixed position' when they said 'earth.' Recall how the Fall of Constantinople and Columbus's voyage turned the attention of the West to the Atlantic and the 'whole world.'" I'm being serious; that really would have helped.
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3 comments:
Unfortunately, the lesson many people have drawn from Kuhn is that scientific progress is irrational -- and therefore that there is no need to be rational.
It's all about adopting perspectives, none of which is deemed inherently superior to any other (because any such comparison would require the kind of commensurability which Kuhn taught them to deny.)
Kuhn, however, should primarily be read as a critique of the formal, positivist view of science and rationality which was the dominant paradigm in the philosophy of science at the time he wrote his book.
But there's more to both rationality and science than what can be expressed in the positivist's symbolic logic, and the fact is, people do manage to rationally compare what Kuhn said was incommensurable. The fact that Carnap, Popper, et al could not explain in terms of their formal logics how people do this doesn't change the fact that they do. It merely highlights a major shortcoming of their models.
Thanks very much for the comment, Corky.
What is the positivist view of science? That its progress only occurs via observation and experiment? Or that progress itself is scientific?
I'd heard of Kuhn's "paradigm shift" prior to reading this article, but had always associated it with Kant's "Copernican Turn" in philosophy rather than with a set of post-shift scientific practices. So I had not considered "irrationality" or relativism to be a possible objection or consequence.
Maybe some similarity to the Straussian method's perspective of Great writers:
There is a more controversial dimension to the Straussian method. Straussians make a strong distinction between works of political thought that rise to the level of Great Books and those that do not. Great Books are those written by authors—philosophers—of such sovereign critical self-knowledge and intellectual power that they can in no way be reduced to the general thought of their time and place. In fact, the great minds who write such books create the general thought of later times: books by lesser writers, no matter how important, are understood as epiphenomenal to the original insights of a thinker of the first rank.
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