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Does All of Science Really Move In 'Paradigm Shifts'?
ATKeiper writes "Thomas Kuhn's landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions just turned fifty years old. In that book, Kuhn coined the expression 'paradigm shift' to describe revolutionary changes in scientific fields — such as the replacement of the geocentric understanding of the universe with the heliocentric model of the solar system. The book was hotly debated for claiming that different scientific paradigms were 'incommensurable,' which implied (for example) that Newton was no more right about gravity than Aristotle. A new essay in The New Atlantis revisits the controversy and asks whether the fact that Kuhn based his argument almost exclusively on physics means that it does not apply as well to major developments in biology or, for that matter, to the social sciences."
my wheel barrow broke I just said, "Dang it!", went to the shed and invented an anti-gravity lift to move the manure around the back lot.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He was talking about science. There's not much science in 'social sciences'.
... when you walk down the street, and out of nowhere YOUR PARADIGM SHIFTS.
It makes me so mad I could scream. Luckily I live in the suburbs, so I just go rake the leaves in my frontyard.
I am suspicious that Kuhn's paradigm shift were valid only during the formative years of science (specifically physics). The shifts - if they truly exist - have tended to become smaller asymptotically as science progresses.
Science no longer moves in "paradigm shifts". It has given way to the movement of "game changers".
Besides, I doubt sicence has ever moved this way. The history of sicence has always seemed to me to follow no consistent path, but rather a series of incremental gains in knowledge and understanding amongst numerous fields that occasionally result in a milestone breakthrough that opens up new fields of research. But this work seems to imply that science follows, to use a visual analogy, a one dimensional line of growth in the direction of "progress" whereas I've always seen science as organically growing and spreading not in one but in many dimensions, along numerous lines of thought.
Or maybe I'm crazy. I just hate the phrase paradigm shift.
It happens at times, often pushed there by massive outside forces (social economic). For example, the miniaturization of electronics was driven by the space race which was in turn driven by political ideology.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Ha. social science.
all science move in incremental steps.
Occasionally, there will be a shift in the way of thinking...but it's very rare.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The shifts - if they truly exist - have tended to become smaller asymptotically as science progresses.
This was explained very well by Isaac Asimov in his essay The Relativity of Wrong. Aristotle and Newton were both wrong about gravity. But, relatively, Aristotle was much more wrong.
I'd say the rule is: the more subjective the field, the more the field will cling to arbitrary paradigms waiting for the next generation to replace the current. Pure mathematics suffers from this the least (logic with little room for speculation, interpretation, etc), but all of Science suffers from paradigm inertia even in the face of contradictory evidence because it is practiced by humans with egos and careers and belief systems.
Kuhn coined the expression 'paradigm shift'
So he's the jerk who coined the buzzword "paradigm shift" that describes everything from relativity to one click purchases to rounded corners on a phone. Grab your pitchforks!
The Kuhn idea is useful, you cant say it is right, its descriptive.
The problem with modern Physics is progress has dramatically slowed thus no paradigm shifts.
In the Social Sciences the methodology of science is not observed, they are NOT sciences but mendaciously re-branded Liberal Arts.
MFG, omb
Thomas Kuhn in his famous book, _The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions_, talked almost exclusively about concepts and hardly at
all about tools. His idea of a scientific revolution is based on a
single example, the revolution in theoretical physics that occurred in
the 1920s with the advent of quantum mechanics. [...]
Kuhn's book was so brilliantly written that it became an
instant classic. It misled a whole generation of students and
historians of science into believing that all scientific revolutions
are concept-driven. [...]
In the last 500 years, in addition to the quantum-mechanical
revolution that Kuhn took as his model, we have had six major
concept-driven revolutions, associated with the names of Copernicus,
Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Freud, and Einstein. During the same period
there have been about twenty tool-driven revolutions [...].
Two prime examples of tool-drive revolutions are the Galilean
revolution resulting from the use of the telescope in astronomy, and
the Crick-Watson revolution resulting from the use of X-ray diffraction
to determine the structure of big molecules in biology.
The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in
new ways. The effect of a tool-drive revolution is to discover new
things that have to be explained.
-- Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds
"Incommensurable" does not mean that one theory is no more correct than the other. It means that paradigms have different sets of terminologies and that scientists working under different paradigms may use the exact same word to mean two different things. That makes it difficult for them to communicate. That's what "incommensurable" means.
Oh look. Another quack advocate trying to justify pseudoscience by calling real science into question.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Um, what? Nobody - not even Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" - claims that "interest and motivation" are "mere drives to perpetuate the genome". Or that love isn't real. (Hell, Dawkins explicitly argues the opposite.)
I'll grant that thinking - consciousness and awareness - is still a 'Kuhnian anomaly' that a lot of people are working on. But just because we understand molecular biology much better now and don't need to posit some elan vital to account for life doesn't mean that we can't make any principled distinctions between life and nonlife. Similarly, if we found out precisely how the brain gives rise to consciousness, that wouldn't mean thinking per se didn't exist.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Firstly, please note that Thomas Kuhn's view of how science happens is one of many possibilities. On one side of the spectrum, you have Popper and his younger collegue, Imre Lakatos; on the other end, you have Feyerabend and his "everything goes". Unfortunately, all that is philosophy, so itself is not science and cannot be verified experimentally or backed up with meaningful statistics. Thus, depending on whom you talk to, you will find arguments for Popper or for Lakatos or for Feyerabend or for Kuhn, all coming from the same field of science.
Personally, I value the popperian hypothesis-falsification paradigm a lot, especially since it fits so nicely with classical statistical hypothesis testing, and I insist on teaching it to students (I am a biologist), but I am well aware of its limitations.
Unfortunately, when reading texts of the great philosphers of science, one has the impression that all they really wanted to explain was "the big stuff", the grand theories, the grand revolutions or paradigm shifts. It is easy to argue for paradigm shifts if you focus on Copernicus and Einstein. It is much harder to immerse yourself in the day-to-day reality of scientific work, the millions of manuscripts generated, the propagation of ideas, their deeply intertwined relationships, as no idea, however genial, ever materializes itself from nothing.
They're pointing out that "social science" doesn't work that way, but "social science" is science just like "business ethics" is ethics.
Wrote my senior thesis on Kuhn, positivism, etc nearly 10 years ago. My take away was that scientific and theoretical advances get disseminated throughout society. Ergo, a population undergoes memetic evolution. Drawing on biology, the obvious model is one of punctuated equilibrium. Once one reconciles the ideas of paradigm shifts with punctuated equilibrium, it becomes pretty evident how technology evolves, science is disseminated, differing rates of change in different fields, etc. All one has to do is look at the iPhone, iPad, and Leap to see modern paradigm changes in action. (Protip: The language we use to describe the punctuated equilibrium changes of the human species is that of stock markets, marketing, and market analysis.)
As Gibson put it, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." I also highly recommend Hulls "Science as a Process".
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Process-Evolutionary-Development-Foundations/dp/0226360512
Second, there is nothing special about long time ago in physics and now in physics except that now we are in the middle of it and cannot see what is to happen. Before Galileo things that had more 'mass' fell faster. Then with Newton equal masses would accelerate the same given the same force, always. Then with Einstein a mass would not always be accelerated with a force. QM began to define what we really meant by force, and more critically, mass, and now that we may know what mass really is there is certainly going a shift in the way we do physics.
Furthermore, even though social science has may have multiple hypothesis, it does not mean that in the grand scale paradigms do not shift. Look at education. When I started school I was at the tail end of the philosophy that stated the best way to teach was to hav students sitting at desks, and if the student got out of the desk the best way to end the negative behavior was to beat the student. That does not happen so much any more.
There are still researchers who fully support the IQ test a valid and reasonable measure of intelligence, and use it to show that certain races are inherently less intelligent than others. That is not a top theory anymore. The social experiment in China that resulted in severe deficit of females certainly is going to do damage to the social theories that females are less valuable.
Which leads to the fact that, as was mentioned in the article, trying to do science based on social good rather than basic research is harmful. Science, as it has evolved, is the collection of data from observable, then the systematic organizations of those observables into a system that constant within itself. This has proven hugely successful when doing objective work.It is not successful when trying to prove a your socially dominant hypothesis. This is why so many object to science and people like Kuhn. All too often they do not get their way, and then they throw a temper tantrum. Which is really what a paradigm shift is about, because we are all human. As the old guard dies, and the new evidence is presented to fresh eyes, new world views come about. Like that beating children may not be the best way to handle discipline.
There is one interesting case in social sciences that may be a contemporary paradigm shift. There are linguists out there that are trying to do different things with the evolution of languages, and coming up with different results from traditional methods. One of these is going to be right. If it is possible to prove the new model is superior, then we will see a new generation of linguist using the new tools.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Paradigm shifts are a global phenomenon...but scaling factors are significant. Large paradigm shifts are extremely rare. Small scale ones happen all the time. Basically it's just evolution happening in a different milleau than biology. A large paradigm shift is analogous to speciation. A small paradigm shift is analogous to a change in allele frequency. And things happen at every scale in between.
Consider, when psychologists stopped considering the mind a black box, that was a paradigm shift. So was when they started considering it one. In every field you can think of there are continual small paradigm shifts. But the large ones are *extremely* rare. You're unlikely to encounger one major paradigm shift in a century...depending on what you mean by major.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Dunno about science, but a lot of management tends to move in "paradigm shifts".
C|N>K
Start with a fundamental understanding of the universe. Build off of it as much as possible. When the principle fails to answer all the new questions that inevitably arise, you need a new theory to work from. That new theory explains why some things just wouldn't work, and opens up new opportunities that were not known before.
Voila. Paradigm shift.
IANAP, but I took a modern physics class eons ago and took away from it that there's never really a massive shift in thinking. There's always some other base of knowledge that might not get the respect or acknowledgement of the general public. Newton derived from Kepler even as Liebniz [sic] worked on the same concepts. Einstein had Maxwell to springboard off of. The shifts seem to be public perception of some wild-haired genius toiling in solitude on his way to the next discovery.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
One famous recent "paradigm shift" is the acceleration of the Hubble expansion, presumed to be caused by "dark energy", and supposedly discovered through high redshift supernovae. But out of the public view, there were other anomalies in cosmology that astrophysicists had noticed years before, such as stars somewhat older than the apparent age of the universe, and the failure of simulations to reproduce the observed patterns of galaxy clustering. I remember several times when colleagues brought up the possibility that these could be resolved by a nonzero "cosmological constant" (a special case of "dark energy"). Finally, the supernova evidence pushed these ideas into our popular articles and textbooks, creating the illusion of a sudden "paradigm shift". I think one reason the supernova results were welcomed rather than disputed was that they confirmed what many of us already suspected privately, based on different lines of evidence.
Yes, Kuhn was full of horse puckey. Not only doesn't his book describe science outside of physics at all well, it doesn't even correctly describe 20th-century physics, its ostensible paradigm (using the word correctly now) case.
Years ago I wrote a more detailed takedown in Brother, can you Paradigm?
The only amplification I'd write today is that the shifts between large theoretical models generally (and contrary to Kuhn's claims) go smoothly in physics because test by correct prediction of experimental results is so difficult to argue with. The soft sciences have more trouble setting up repeatable experiments, so it's easier for people to hold on to broken theoretical models.
>>esr>>
Yes, it's true. I reject pseudoscience because I'm not some pathetic loser who hates scientists and gloms on to some fucking fraud as a way of soothing the chip on his shoulder.
You're "revolutionary" scientist is a fucking retired chem professor who spouts absolute fucking nonsense.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The interesting bit is the meta question implied by this - whether truths developed in a mathematical sense are valid in other contexts.
AN answer is something along the lines of this:
While a single equation cannot be created to fit every possible model it IS possible to develop an equation that fits properties of the model under study (at least to your own level of understanding of both maths and the problem domain).
The question whether mathematical insight can be used as an analogy machine to determine outcomes in other domains is the same question as to the breath of any particular philosophy, IMO.
To come back down to the question at hand Consider that the proposition under study is that differing eras of paradims are incommesurable.
Given the new meta framework we can then ask what would the underlying scientific model changes between physics, biology, and the social sciences be that would necessarily invalidate this proposition?
Since all of these models ultimately rest in mathematical descriptions of experimentation on created models, the question appears to me to be moot. That is, given the basis of these disiplines they cannot help fall into the same category. Even broadening their functions to the philosophical does not lead one out of this conclusion (if one accepts Maths as simply A particular rigorous philosophy).
Regards /.!
Don't choke on that Flavor-Aid too quickly, now. Slashdot is most definitely extremely positivist, and Pollack has been independently confirmed to some extent, and those confirmations are peer-reviewed. I'm not going to touch the constructivist stuff directly, but it's certainly true that minds both great and small throughout history have gotten stuck on old paradigms and could not bring themselves to accept new findings.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I'm not sure he actually did that though. He might be a quack -- his "structured water" comment makes me wonder a bit -- but his comments about positivism vs constructivism aren't that far from the truth. A positivist will insist that science should not be in the business of interpreting theories. For example, trying to resolve the many interpretations of quantum mechanics -- what does QM really *mean*? -- is futile and not science according to positivists. The AC's point that they then risk missing paradigm shifts is actually quite interesting given this.
And yet, look who's coming up with the goods.
Funny that.
This kind of gross behaviourism can be found in physiology and psychology when they interface with modern biology. Physiologists, for example, like to describe humans as "behavioural homeostatic regulators" (at least, my second-year professors did), implying that there is some direct stimulatory link between feeling hot and removing one's sweater. (And certain kinds of psychologists make much more grievous reductionisms regarding evolution.)
In the former case, the researchers themselves are making rather outdated (and suspiciously Hobbesian...) philosophical statements that derive from their own experiences as clinicians and the traditions of their mentors, whereas in the latter case, I feel the article's interpretation of social sciences pursuing in-vogue theories applies rather neatly.
For the record, biologists tend to subscribe to a kind of emulated dualism: the mind is a black box that contains its own arrangement of notions which, while they may not be as real as physical matter, should be treated as real. It's only when you stray near psychology that you start seeing stupid shit like this. I suspect this more reveals the limits of the author's experience.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Sydney Brenner, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on programmed cell death, wrote a nice essay in the journal Science (subscription required) describing what he saw as a major paradigm shift in the 1950s and 60s that created modern molecular biology. Prior to the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, biologists had been focusing on how DNA and its associated proteins might be carrying out the functions of the cell. The discovery of the structure of DNA, however, fundamentally changed how researchers approached these questions by revealing that DNA is really just carrying information. Brenner writes:
"We can now see exactly what constituted the new paradigm in the life sciences: It was the introduction of the idea of information and its physical embodiment in DNA sequences of four different bases. Thus, although the components of DNA are simple chemicals, the complexity that can be generated by different sequences is enormous. In 1953, biochemists were preoccupied only with questions of matter and energy, but now they had to add information. In the study of protein synthesis, most biochemists were concerned with the source of energy for the synthesis of the peptide bond; a few wrote about the “patternization” problem. For molecular biologists, the problem was how one sequence of four nucleotides encoded another sequence of 20 amino acids."
Indeed, following this paradigm shift, Watson and others quickly worked out the question of how the information encoded in DNA gets read by the cell and their work now forms the central dogma of modern molecular biology. Therefore, Kuhn's concept of paradigm shifts does indeed apply to biology.
I am watching a show made in '86 about physics, its called the mechanical universe. It goes through the historical context as well. Before watching this i thought things went through shits myself, however, now i know its one scientist working on another work until its figured out, i wouldn't say its so much a paradigm shift, more like a few scientist getting credit for completing another work(or adding to it). Its not a sudden shift because in between all these 'shifts' is a easily followed building blocks, but society looks at it as a shift because they are disconnected from the community.
We at the black mesa laboratory move in blue shifts.
Progress is made not from conference to conference, but from funeral to funeral.
Paradigm.. paradigmish.. paradigmons.. paradigmez.. paradigment...
Sorry.. couldn't resist...
I think there have been some huge paradigm shifts in biology.
For example: Darwin's Origin of Species gave a mechanism for evolution. Once there was a mechanism the entire paradigm shifted to looking at traits as adaptions to environments. The whole way we understood life and examined species changed. Prior to Darwin creatures shaped their environment after Darwin we had a duality of creates forming and being formed by their environment.
They love paradigm shifts, and leveraging them.
Similarly, if we found out precisely how the brain gives rise to consciousness, that wouldn't mean thinking per se didn't exist.
The "phenomena are not real" crowd have two basic moves, which contradict each other.
The first is, "We can reduce phenomenon X to cause Y, therefore phenomenon X doesn't 'really' exist" (because they for some reason believe that only their atomic terms to which they want to reduce everything 'really' exist--no explanation for this surreal prejudice is ever given)
The second is, "We cannot reduce phenomenon X to cause Y, therefore phenomenon X doesn't 'really' exist" (because they have assumed ab initio that only their atomic terms 'really' exist, and therefore anything that cannot be reduced to them must not 'really' exist.)
Self-contradictory 'arguments' against free will, which attempt to get people to use their free will to voluntarily change their minds regarding the obviously existing phenomenon of free will are of the latter type.
The utility of Kuhn's analysis is that he at least vaguely recognized that the sciences have two basic moves available: to make arguments reducing phenomena to known causes that flow from existing atomic terms; and to introduce new atomic terms (wave functions, tectonic plates, genes, subconsious motivations, germs.) He vastly over-stated the differences between these two moves in day-to-day science. They both happen all the time, and the distiction between "normal" and "revolutionary" science is fairly blury in practice.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I guess the OP didn't read "Good Calories, Bad Calories." Shame. There are a lot of Slashdoters that could benefit from it.
Oh look, the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Re: "his "structured water" comment makes me wonder a bit"
Guys, Gerald Pollack bases much of his work upon Gilbert Ling's work. Needless to say, the idea for the MRI was based upon Ling's premise of structured water. If you take the time to track down a good explanation for how the MRI actually works, you'll observe that the technique is fundamentally designed to observe water molecules which are aligned together. Bulk water does not do that. It does appear, however, that Ling made a mistake insofar as Pollack has observed that the exclusion zone exhibits a net negative charge. This has forced Pollack to revise Ling's notion that structured water is a simplistic alternating dipole structure. If I understand Pollack right, structured water is very similar to the structure of ice -- minus the protons. The protons are what make ice hard. Pollack is a very meticulous researcher, and has carefully confirmed that this is what's happening.
Pumps and channels are by now a completely unnecessary construct. It's been known for many years now that when the cell membrane is compromised, those cells can continue to function perfectly fine. The healthy body is literally filled with cells which exhibit observable structural damage to the cell membrane. What this suggests is that the cell membrane is not at all holding in place aqueous solution. The cytoplasm is a gel, just like polymers and jello. This could not be more important to cell biology, because gels exhibit completely natural ionic gradients. And that solves one of the most vexing problems in biology right there -- the failure of cell biologists to get their energy accounting to work. When you imagine that the body needs all of these pumps and channels to scoot ions in and out of the cell membranes at all times, you run into a major energy accounting problem. I believe Ling knew about this many, many years ago, but students aren't taught such controversies today (It's the positivist way!).
Those of us who have taken the time to carefully listen to Pollack can see quite clearly that this new biological paradigm, where proteins structure the water which surrounds them into gels, is a far more efficient process for the body than this simplistic mechanical notion of pumps and channels. And if nature cares about anything, it is efficiency.
I personally don't care what positivists think of Pollack. In fact, I can tell you that many constructivists know better than to waste too much time talking to positivists, because talking about, thinking about and experimenting in cutting edge science is far more fun than trying to teach philosophy to people online. As I said, constructivism is the new standard in education reform circles, so all of this positivist nonsense will fade as we all become older, quite naturally. Many of us realize that it will lead to a renaissance in science. Pollack's work is the lead we've been waiting for. It's conceptually accessible to the layperson too.
To argue that paradigm shift dont apply to social science would be to admit that social science is a science.
The truth is that the vast majority of people cannot handle truth, and instead want big explosive generalizations to help adapt to new facts.
Kuhn's theory suffers from a fatal flaw. It explains the succession from one paradigm to another in sociological or psychological terms, rather than as having primarily to do with the objective merit of the rival explanations. Yet unless one understands science as a quest for explanations, the fact that it does find successive explanations, each objectively better than the last, is inexplicable. (David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality)
It's been a long time since I've read Kuhn (it was required in college along with a counter position by someone whose name escapes me), and I remember not fully agreeing with every nuance that he wrote. But I completely agree with parent that Biology has gone through paradigm shifts, and I'd say it's clear that other things have as well. We live in a world where cloning is a reality -- this is a paradigm shift from when it was science fiction. Microbiology changed the way everyone interacts with the world right down to the soap we buy.
Obviously economists are having some identity crises lately that I suspect will be looked back upon as somewhat of a paradigm shift. Chemistry has moved quite far from alchemy and nuclear chemistry was unthinkable or understandable not long ago. Manufacturing went from fully manual through the assembly line and is now in a phase of robotics and desktop printing. Spectrum disorders are fairly recent diagnoses (as a specific category at least), in the psychological sciences. Triceratops were recently reshuffled and we're far more likely to imagine dinosaurs with feathers now than when I was a kid. Don't get me started on the Brontosaurus. Warfare is changing; it's barely important to have a person with a weapon see someone opposing them directly in some cases. The concept of water on other planets is far more accepted and direct evidence is changing common thinking on the topic. We have a near-permanent presence in space. Gender views are changing... gay-rights are probably at a social tipping point, at least in some places, and any social-science is strongly affected.
All of these things are dramatic changes. Are they paradigm shifts? Some of them... one of the problems with paradigm shifts is that they're nearly impossible to see from the inside. And yes, they may appear more subtle than "the earth is round - no it's not" debates, but remember that those took quite a long time for large populations to accept themselves. It's difficult to predict how any new way of looking at something will affect the future, but some of these changes will eventually be looked back upon as paradigm shifts.
It was a real blow when Wöhler was able to synthesize urea from 'inorganic' chemicals. It was held that the substances in living things were special and followed different rules. There was a very sharp - and allegedly impassible - boundary between 'organic' and 'inorganic' chemicals. The former appeared in living things and had some special 'vital force', but inorganic chemicals were 'just stuff', not living nor could they ever be living. Wöhler upset that paradigm rather dramatically.
But that didn't mean that there wasn't a difference between organic and inorganic chemistry - now organic chemistry is understood to be chemistry that involves carbon. (Though a few chemicals containing carbon are still called 'inorganic' because of that historical quirk.) But just because there isn't a magic difference between life and nonlife doesn't mean there's no difference between them.
Similarly, one can be a naturalist and still think both of the forks you propose are wrong.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Have you actually taken any social science classes? At a high level?
I can't talk for sociology (though I would love to call it a joke), but in certain areas of psychology, there is real science going on. Predictions, measurements, mapping things to mathematical models, testing those models with highly controlled empirical techniques, etc... Yes, there are the feel good, talky, therapy bits, and those bits are guilty of bad science, and truth by handwaving. But there is also a lot of pure research going on, and many experiments that have been done thousands of times with similar results. Yes, the standard of proof is a bit lower than physics and the like, but this is inevitable. Its harder to control for people, than it is a single atom of cesium in a vacuum.
You also ignore emerging and growing cross over of psychology and neurology, and biology, along with some areas of compsci (whose science-ishness is also a bit dubious).
Anthropology is also a mixed bag. Cultural anthropology is a bout as woo as most sociology, but physical anthropology is pretty much only an offshoot of biology, and thus an actual science.
Some aspects of the social sciences are just as sciency as the hard sciences. Some aspects of the so-called hard-sciences are also pretty damn ridiculous as well, which is only classical metaphysics for math nerds.
Back to Kuhn, oddly I just finished re-reading his book. I read it in college when I was doing philosophy of science, but I came across it when reading about Errol Morris' experiences with Mr. Kuhn, so gave it another go. Errol Morris had some very good complains, mostly hinging on "incommensurability", and what a horribly defined concept it is. In the book, people of two paradigms can't talk to each other in an understandable way anymore, which is obviously idiotic. Mr. Kuhn then spent the rest of his career trying to actually define his own term, a term which much of his theory actually rests on. The fault in this idea was very clear when I re-read it. If you read it as a less extreme version of itself it is rather profound. But if you read it as it sounds, it is a bit absurd with some thought.
Either way, I still love the book, since right or wrong it leads to an interesting conversation, and some fun exploration within the philosophy of science.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
A new essay in The New Atlantis revisits the controversy and asks whether the fact that Kuhn based his argument almost exclusively on physics means that it does not apply as well to major developments in biology...
Hippos, Rhinos, Elephants, Manatees, Dolphins, Whales, etc, etc... Hairless Mammals. They have aquatic ancestors. Compared to apes: We're naked, have superior breath control (can make vocal noise under-water), have fat concentrated in outer layers rather than inside our cores (insulation blubber), travel predominantly upright (like primates do when in water).
Want to know what happened to the Merfolk of Atlantis? Look in a Mirror.
I hope you aren't a scientist.
Not quite, you're right that it has nothing to do with relative correctness, but it also has nothing to do with communication
incommensurable
adj.
a. Impossible to measure or compare.
b. Lacking a common quality on which to make a comparison.
In other words it means that there is simply no common yardstick against which they could be compared. Remember, we're not talking about the theories themselves - clearly the later ones are more accurate or they wouldn't have replaced the earlier ones. We're talking about the paradigm shifts. Newton said that the motion of bodies was fundamentally predictable and followed simple, strict rules. Einstein said that the fundamental matrix of the universe was malleable and distorted with perspective. QM says that the basic "stuff" in the universe is in principle non-deterministic and we will never, ever be able to perfectly predict or copy *anything*.
Each of the concepts fundamentally altered the way scientists looked at the world, but how can you compare the nature and magnitude of such a shift? Things that were common knowledge for generations were suddenly shown to be false. There's simply no way to say "This change in world view was bigger than that one", what yardstick could you possibly use for comparison? That is what incommensurable means.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Actually, no. Social sciences are concerned with various aspects of the first question. The second question is a philosophical question which is outside the scope of the social sciences in the same way as the question "what should we do with the world's supply of fissionables" is outside the scope of nuclear physics.
Obviously, individual social scientists may be concerned with the second question and, moreover, once you determine a particular set of goals with regard to the second question, social science can provide insight as to the particular steps which are most likely to acheive the desired goals, just as once you have the performance requirements for an aircraft, materials science can provide insight as to what materials are most appropriate to build it out of given the requirements.
Interesting stuff
Does All Science Really Move In 'Paradigm Shifts'?
Answer: No. It Moves Where The Money Is!
compsci is not science at all. It is a branch of mathematics. There is the question of processor design, if you count it in, which is basically engineering.
Mathematics are not a science, because they do not rely on underlying reality: the universe may have had completely different physics (never mind the fine-tuning arguments) but mathematics would still be the same.
The article says no such thing:
In other words, physics and biology sciences, just like social science, are reliant on philosophy: but there normal functioning - what Kuhn calls "normal science" - depends on them disregarding this dependence. But when a crisis is reached, philosophy becomes central. (I had to read that and the following text a few times to appreciate the important distinction between independence and dismissal.)
Here is Kuhn in the book itself, explaining why competing paradigms are incommensurable. Arguing agains Popper's idea of falsification, his point is that scientific method cannot provide a foolproof method for deciding between them:
(Frankly, this is probably a little unfair. Perhaps no falsifying test can be absolutely perfect, but some can come awfully close.) Ultimately, when a paradigm shift takes place it can only be resolved through consensus, not scientific objectivity. Thus the character of a scientific community is central to his inquiry and his theory:
The philosopher Juergen Habermas has explored the nature of science also. He argues that the scientific questions are decided on the basis of evidence: but that no objective method can determine what counts as evidence. It is the consensus of the community of scientists that makes this judgement. Thus the fundamental basis f
50 year old book is slowing becoming irrelevant as society is slowly changing., more at 11.
The positivist demands, "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence!" and the constructivist simply responds: "Extraordinary to which worldview?" It's really as simple as that. Thank God that the education reform movement gets it.
And what is the label for people who say, "Your claims, extraordinary or not, directly contradict a multitude of very simple experiments testing those exact claims"?
Much of which directly contradicts experiments and observations that could be seen in a undergraduate lab course, or possibly even a determined hobbyist with a microscope. While I would find potential interest in the positivist vs. constructivist (although difficult to say much new on it, as a lot has been already written on the topic), it is polluted with crap science. The pushing of the particular theory is rather irrelevant to the positivist vs. constructivist argument, and just really a plug for many demonstratively wrong claims with some philosophy veneer slapped on top. It is a not too uncommon pattern in psuedoscience, that not just is there some great injustice or flawed paradigm in science, but that it because they are not acknowledging a particular pet theory (I would still hesitate to label Pollack psuedoscience in general, as there are a few good things buried in a sea of obviously wrong stuff, none of which is really mentioned by the other AC you are replying to).
You told someone above "I hope you aren't a scientist,:" who said essentially the same thing, in less detail and less kind words. I don't know about him, but I am. It is one thing to make claims that are missing evidence, and another to make one contradicting evidence. If someone told me that lead had negative mass, and hence lead all lead bricks would get stuck on the ceiling, I would have to tell them, "You are either missing some particular details and qualifiers in your claim, or you are flat out wrong," after having moved lead bricks daily, having them strongly falling downward. If they spammed such things to the point of distracting people from more productive avenues, without better refining the idea or presenting some evidence that could be used to help them find why there is a discrepancy between their lead and mine, then I would have less and less kind words for them too.
To be fair, though, one of Dawkins favorite activities is not inferring the logically-required inferences demanded by his worldview premises, with the implicit suggestion that if he doesn't state the logically-required inferences, or argues the opposite from the required inferences, the logically-required inferences becomes no longer logically-required.
One can start with the question of how we evolved, in the interim period between early man's biological development and the first religion, a period which would number in the hundreds of thousands of years. Given that he has literally stated that a world without religion would be "paradise on Earth", yet somehow there was sufficient selection pressure for our advanced physical/neurological development (and in concurrence with the mainline evolutionary "Out of Africa" model), which suggest an ongoing inter-tribal bloodbath. This would have been the baseline, normal state throughout eons before the existence of even language by which to communicate anything resembling the religion he rails against, and this suggests a major logical disconnect systemic to his worldview.
Refusing to acknowledge that disconnect, though, does not make it go away.
That's actually just scratching the surface of the implications for Pollack's work. This "exclusion zone" is basically a zone of structured water that can form when water exists adjacent to a hydrophilic surface (such as a gel). What is pretty interesting is that the exclusion zone can be observed to grow within the presence of light. But, that's not all. The EZ grows most significantly at 270 nm infrared. If your interest is in understanding the origins of life within the universe, then this observation should pique your interest tremendously.
A tube made of a hydrophilic material, placed within a tank of water, and exposed to 270 nm infrared will naturally pump water through the tube without any actual pump attached to the tube (!). This is a very interesting observation, because another controversy within biology which the positivists refuse to acknowledge is the accounting problem which relates to the blood pressure required to pump blood through the body's thinnest capillaries. Calculations suggest that, assuming a strictly mechanical process, the heart is simply incapable of generating the pressures required to get the job done without some assistance. Validating that something strange is going on are videos of red blood cells bent in half, as they move through these thinnest capillaries. Why would nature do this? If it's strictly mechanical, then that would seem to create an extraordinary resistance for the heart to deal with. But, as many know, the red blood cells are actually electrically charged bodies. So, it would appear that the body might be harvesting infrared as an energy source, to help with moving blood through the circulatory system. Have you guys ever heard of the book, Life from Light? Pollack explains that there is a long history of scientists who have tried and failed to get the energy into the body to match the energy out. This might offer an important clue for why that is. It could also explain why some scientists have reported seeing the chicken's blood begin pumping in the egg before the heart has finished growing ...
One of the biggest problems for the positivists is that they are essentially cultivating an ignorance of anomalies. How in the world can a person ask good questions in science if they go so far out of their way to ignore anomalies?
Your use of the label "positivist" has is now completely decoupled from positivism and what the term actually means in philosophy, and is now just an empty term for "those that don't agree with me."
Nazi Germany -> Post-War Germany: a paradigm shift in social sciences in one country. Application of scientific process to pre-natal care: a paradigm shift. Modern psychiatry, a paradigm shift from a incarceration to medical care. Cell theory, a complete new way of understanding life and definitely a paradigm shift in biology.
In fact, the introduction of the word paradigm by Kuhn, in the book, is in the context of Chemistry, or at least phlogiston vs. Oxygen involved in combustion as a topic. See book.
He's a rabid half-wit that utilizes the concept of science the same way half-wit religious types utilize the concept of God; To fucking stupid to think abou this own assumptions, so he assumes away anything that might threaten the world view that gives his pathetic life meaning.
Mathematics are not a science, because they do not rely on underlying reality: the universe may have had completely different physics (never mind the fine-tuning arguments) but mathematics would still be the same.
Off-topic, but fun. When I was in school one of my best friends was a math/physics major, and we had many a long, heated, talk over this. She endorsed the idea that math was real, as in an actual thing in the universe, and thus was as much a science as physics. This, I found, is not an uncommon view. I endorsed math being a formulaic language, and had the same connection to the world as any other language. Saying "tree" in French or English, still refers to the same object, and thus it is with math. There could be other formulaic systems with the same descriptive power as our math, but of a completely different, and perhaps incompatible, form.
The place of math in epistemology, is very interesting, and still completely ambiguous. It obviously works, so there is no debating that, but HOW it works, and WHY it works are pretty interesting debates. Is our development of math nothing but uncovering an a priori thing? Is it an evolution of some basic "laws of thought", or internal logic, which was evolved into our conception of the world, and this explains its usefulness in modeling exterior events? Is it some odd ad hoc system, which we cater to the world?
I miss college. You could hang out and drink and discuss deep (but useless) issues. Now I when I manage to hang out and drink and talk about yard work, kids, and bills.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
All just publisher 'smoke and mirrors' to push pulp.
In todays world the 'Anthropocentric Era' which as a proposed geologic unit does not exist anywhere on planet Earth, is the attempted refutation of the Heliocentric Theory by Later Day worshipers of 'Man' as the center of all of Known Existence and Perception and Being.
What a Mighty Step .... Backward ... Indeed.
A rejoinder to Kuhn was Paul Thagard's Conceptual Revolutions. Highly recommended. He argued that scientific revolutions are conceptual paradigm shifts that alter how knowledge is organised, by combining orthogonal data points into new frameworks. He measured the strength of that framework using his ECHO model, which functionalised extrapanatory coherence. He also had something to say about abduction, but I don't think it was as germane as he made it sound in the book. Either way, bright guy.
But then there's the (at least) equal and opposite error, which I call Haldane's Error - the belief that anything not currently explained by science must perforce be supernatural and can never be explained by science.
Oh, what a beautiful quote, I will steal it for my students. It is simply grand... given the career and persona of J.B.S. Haldane, son of J.S. Haldane, who was one of the most influential evolutionary biologists and geneticists of all time.
Part of the problem lies in academic politics, which places (for example) both experimental psychology and sociology in the same faculty, namely Social Sciences.
Experimental psychology and Physical Anthropology should considered specializations of Biology, and thus part of the Faculty of Science.
You are fighting an uphill battle. Physicists will forever live under the false assumption that all science is physics, that all scientific disciplines are derived from physics and therefore anything that isn't physics isn't science. In truth physics is a descriptive science that seeks to explain the natural world, thus breakthroughs in science are later explained (i.e., theories are constructed and tested) in the language of physics, which makes it easy to confuse science and physics in retrospect.
Since social sciences employ the tools of science--most notably the scientific method--they are, by definition science. However, they do not use the descriptive language of physics because they seek to explain the "social world" rather than the natural world. If you cannot write something down as a series of equations and predict a behavior with a graph, physicists will not consider it science. Chemistry and biology have been fighting this battle for ages, as they are the other two core natural sciences--i.e., they do not reduce to physics and are philosophically completely independent. But trying to explain to a physicist that something "is unless it isn't" because the rules are empirical and describe collections of behaviors in systems that are too complex to observe, reduce, or comprehend completely is like yelling "do you speak English" louder in an effort to make someone understand you.
It irritates me to see physical scientists bash the social sciences too, as they cannot know the difficulties of studying something as nebulous as human nature, nor can they appreciate how hard it is to conduct a controlled experiment in such a topic. They erroneously expect a statistical correlation to translate into a "scientific law" with predictive power. Anything less is written off as pseudoscience while the efficacy of its findings, when put into practice, are willfully ignored.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Dawkins isn't perfect, and has exaggerated at times. But it's still amazing just how big a gap there is between what people say Dawkins says and what he actually says.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Dude(tte), you need to find friends/collegues with a bit more conversation. You'll whither away otherwise.
I don't actually think the place of maths is ambiguous: even if logic exists as some fundamental fact (I happen to believe that, and this is a reason why I believe in no gods) , it is not a fact which depends on physical reality. It merely requires the capability to perform calculations.
Which the universe happens to do, but also computers, minds, and any non-linear physical process. If there is a non-linear process, maths are.
And science, on the other hand, is the description of physical reality. Through theories which predict measurable outcomes from measurable inputs. If you can't measure it (however indirectly) it is not science.
No, I have a very good feel for what positivism is. There are in fact several ways to learn it: (1) from philosophy, history, cognitive science or education reform books; (2) by spending a lot of time alternating between groups of positivists (like this one) and constructivists (such as certain fringe theorists); and (3) by directly engaging random strangers on complex issues which are outside of their bounds of specialty (which I did for 2.5 years), in order to observe how they react and think. I've done all three, and they all corroborate one another.
But, do you mind if I note how ironic it is that somebody on a positivist website would complain that I don't know what positivism is? I mean, the very complaint which the constructivists are lodging here is that meaning is constructed within the mind of the person, and is not absolute. You see, I have a worldview. And you have a worldview. Although there exists some shared meaning amongst us, the concepts which we routinely use to communicate are in fact ultimately defined by our worldviews. Concepts get their meaning not just from their interrelationships with other concepts, but also from a person's epistemology -- how we know what we know. When you criticize my definition of positivism, you need to go out of your way to first validate that I'm not simply coming from a different worldview. If you treat everybody who disagrees with "science" as though they are "anti-science", then you are behaving as a positivist. The positivists are like unruly fans in a football game, insofar as they are very vocal, but despite that, they have decided to not participate in the actual scientific process in any meaningful way, because they have decided to not take any risks with their beliefs. Positivists think that they can learn how to think like a scientist by memorizing what scientists think. The truth is that the job of the scientist is to actually add to scientific knowledge, and that sometimes means diverging from established wisdom. Positivists don't get that; they imagine that we are essentially near the end of the game here, and they defend the textbooks as if they are bibles.
For instance, if somebody believes that "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence," as a principle for their own epistemology (the Sagan Standard), then note that implicit within this is a locus for a worldview -- as if science is fully associated with just one worldview. This has been a very big problem in cognitive psychology, because for many years it was believed that we could learn a lot about higher-order cognitive processes within humans by studying rats (behaviorism). The behaviorists were positivists, and so they went out of their way to vigorously ignore and shout down alternative epistemological approaches. The end result is that when behaviorism didn't pan out, our system of education was left with no other theories for education to fall back on.
Positivists behave like addicted gamblers, insofar as they take enormous risks with science in order to permit themselves to feel certain that they know. And when those risks don't pan out, since they have not cultured any deep knowledge of alternative worldviews, they are forced to double down on their initial bet. It's actually quite selfish behavior. We've seen the same pattern of behavior in most (if not all) of the disciplines actually. Astrophysics and cosmology are probably the most painful to watch, given how ill-structured and data-starved those disciplines truthfully are. There's tons of cognitive space for the study of all sorts of cosmologies, but the positivists insist that we are hot on the trail of truth -- even though we can only see around 5% of the universe's matter within the conventional worldview.
Positivism is very dangerous because it is a philosophy which reinforces itself: Since it convinces students that it's not important to attach concepts to philosophy, in practice, the students are not taught to care about philosophy or history of science. "Show me
If you think about it, it just makes sense to move in paradigm shifts.
The reason for this is simply that as science when a new idea comes out it gets a lot of attention. With all that attention new developments using that idea start flowing, after all everyone wants to be first. (our fault for engineering society that way) Because of this older ideas tent to get pushed to the back burner and the majority of new discoveries tend to come from the latest ideas. (this the appearance of a paradigm) Until a new idea comes out and starts a new series of discoveries.
This is one reason I actually quit the psych program while in college, I was trying to specialize in the pure research aspects, but was pretty much forced to coexist with the softer aspects. A lot of these people didn't even have a basic understanding of science, and their world-view was very different than mine (feelings expose truth, as opposed to empiricism). Our program tried to channel people into three areas (therapy/abnormal, experimental, and industrial), but it really didn't help. It also didn't help that psych is now the most highly populated department in many colleges, which leads to things being a bit messy. Our department was very beauracatic, with very little personal support, and thus geared, on a organizational level, to what most students were interested in (the soft, human aspects), and was pretty clueless about the actual science students.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I agree with the parent post. We should be talking about Scientific Evolution instead of Scientific Revolutions.
This Evolution is one example of what is called SocioCultural Evolution, an emerging interdisciplinary research field which is now being developed by Sociobiologists, Ethologists, Psychologists, Sociologists, Archeologists, Behavioral Economists and a much of others.
If anybody is wondering what happened to Memetics - the Meme was a problem because it was not directly measurable. Now we talk about evolution of Socially Learnable Behavior (called Culture), and here we can certainly speak of Evolution (Behavior is reproduced with modification) but we cannot draw a close parallel to the (discrete, directly measurable) gene. We can draw parallels however with genetic evolution as a process - there are things akin to Mutation (innovation), Selection, Drift, Recombination. They have different mechanisms and the details differ, but the basic ideas are the same.
Being enforced by a paradigm has advantage and dissadvantages.
The advantage is to be standard and any scientific production will be more easily accepted by
paradigmatic peers.
However you lose scientific freedom and any advancement should become harder than previous
because every-paradigmatic-one diggs at the same place.
By now any mayor Journal only paradigmatic manuscripts.
So
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated by the current paradigm.
Whats happening here? The GP has something constructive to say about the culture of the philosophy of science in our day and age, and he gets shot down by someone who completely misunderstands the post.
What is up with these ratings? Do the people who moded those posts even know what he was talking about or did they just all assume the parent post is correct because of his tone? We have a big problem- its a problem of Rampant Scientism. That is what is up. Start talking about the philosophy of science, talking about how the problem of demarcation might have no solution? Heresy!
Ideas don't only flow out of Science, but into it. In fact there is some evidence that much more innovation comes independently of directed research then comes from directed research programs. Much can be said of the contribution of technological innovation (which occurs with much less help from organized science then many people think) to scientific progress, as some others have mentioned above.
That said I have been thinking in terms of punctuated equilibrium for a while now, and suspect shifts size or impact may have a fat-tailed distribution. Another note- Memetics is antiquated (since they don't seem to exist), the current paradigm is Cultural Evolution, which speaks of the Evolution of Behavior (which *is* directly measurable).
I like to speak in Instrumentalist terms and see science as a subset of Technology - a prediction technology.
I am aware of what positivism is. But, do I have a different definition of it than you?
Either you are using a definition radically different from its general use and accepted meaning, or you are not applying your awareness here. Either way, the use of positivism and related debate seems to be a facade. It doesn't really matter whether it is intentionally dishonesty to aggrandize your position, or unintentionally because it makes you feel more differentiated from those people. Either way, you act as you are advocating something to oppose positivism, but it is just positivism with a slightly different data set in the end. This makes it rather difficult for those trying to show there are alternatives to positivism, ones that are not just more positivism in disguise.
http://pesn.com/2013/01/03/9602259_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_January3/
The same may be starting in medicine and (re)realizing how important nutrition is:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Informative summary, thanks 0x7e!
Some other economic and political aspects as well:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Inferential science (quantum physics and the like) may advance in paradigm shifts. Progress in the empirical sciences simply accelerates and decelerates.
This is so vague as to be completely useless. I'd love to learn from you, but you'll need to actually spend some time to teach me why I'm wrong. It might even give me hope that there are people on Slashdot who do still care about philosophy.
By the way, I did not invent these views on positivism. The basis of my definition of positivism is the very pragmatic work of Joseph Novak (Learning, Creating and Using Knowledge) -- an education reformer who invented concept maps. This is important because Novak points to the vee diagram as a methodology for grounding concepts in philosophy. Since Novak is concerned with reforming science education, he makes a point of not getting lost within dead-end philosophical discussions. His focus is very usefully and poignantly pertinent to the relationship between how we teach science and how people think within science. This is the problem with philosophy, as it stands: The philosophers have failed to convince the public why it should matter to them. Novak shows us that philosophy is incredibly important to education reform efforts, insofar as it dramatically alters how we approach, learn and discuss complex subjects, such as science.
Personally, I am very suspicious of the views of anybody on Slashdot with regards to positivism -- for, when a community's worldview devalues the roles of history and philosophy to science, by simplistically establishing meaning as an objective reality, the community is not likely to ever directly observe its own mistakes. The nature of the training of an engineer is to completely ignore the connection of concepts to philosophy. It is: "Here are the equations; and here is the solution. Now, repeat it." Thus, it is not at all a surprise that the positivist mindset rules in places like this. And this, honestly, doesn't always cause a problem. In fact, that's exactly what's needed to do many jobs. The real problems pop up when this mindset is applied to ill-structured and data-starved fields of science. But, positivists do not make a distinction.
I would love to be taught a more useful definition of what positivism is than this. Please share.
This phrase:" 'paradigm shift' to describe revolutionary changes in scientific fields" needs to be explained more carefully. Till what degree is a change considered a "paradigm shift"? What is considered a revolutionary change? Nowadays AIDS ain't cured but instead of dying in months you die in decades. Cancer is not cured in a general sense but a good amount of cancers, specially in early stages can be cured...These aren't absolute changes, or paradigm shifts but certainly more important than most issues that can come to your mind... For funding, research and peer finding please refer to the non-profit Aging Portfolio.