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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
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.
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.
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.
I don't think Kuhn was really thinking in terms of social sciences in his book. He was thinking of traditional science which is about using the scientific method of testing hypothesis with experiments. Depending on how you define "social science" I don't think there is a lot of objective experimentation going on.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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.
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
That's exactly right. In fact the article complains at great length that the social sciences are a mistake: they're really veiled branches of philosophy, trying to fit a complicated universe to a set of paradigms stolen from other fields (including physics and biology) simply because those fields and models are in vogue. When Kuhn described the process of paradigm change, the social scientists interpreted it as a validation of their methodology, which ran directly against his wishes.
The summary is hence very dishonest about the book and article; Kuhn explicitly considered his theories inappropriate for the social sciences, and the article never casts any doubt on the applicability of his model to biology; it merely points out that it was an oversight. (And as a biologist, I feel pretty strongly that paradigm shifting applies equally to physics and biology.)
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I don't think there is a lot of objective experimentation going on.
I've see Biology accused of the same thing. That seems silly to me.
That's because you're not familiar with those fields. You'll find that empirical methods are the standard, just like every other science.
There is a greater reliance on ordinal data, but that's no more wrong that the hard-sciences' dependence on induction.
The problem on seems to appear when non-scientists repeat rubbish like this from other non-scientists. I suspect, however, that this particular bit of nonsense has its roots in good old fashioned discipline envy.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Einstein still claims...
Wait, what?
This is very disturbing.
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.
Another way of putting it: Many social sciences aren't really science. Some fields of study that are described as "social sciences" are really sciences: For example, psychology is a field in which there are real experiments you can run on people and come to useful conclusions about human behavior. Some other fields of study that are described as "social sciences" are not really science.
An example of a non-science "science": macroeconomics. The reason that macroeconomics isn't really a science is that people who's hypotheses fail to match reality can always come up with another external reason for why their hypothesis doesn't apply. For example, if you believe the Efficient Market Hypothesis (which basically argues that markets quickly sort out any mis-priced assets and re-price them correctly), and you find out that trillions of dollars worth of financial assets are mis-priced and have been for years, you can just find any kind of government intervention that hasn't really been tested as to what its effects really are and claim that this is why the mis-pricing happened, allowing the hypothesis to stand even in the face of contrary evidence.
Another example of a non-science "social science": [historically-disadvantaged-group] studies. These aren't generally speaking sciences because they are focused on documenting and attempting to understand the history and present realities of the disadvantages the group has suffered. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, but it does mean that it's not science. For example, there's nobody I'm aware of in those fields that's doing experimental work, just a lot of documenting and guessing at what it all means.
I am officially gone from
the social sciences are a mistake: they're really veiled branches of philosophy
So is the whole of natural science. What we colloquially refer to as "science" is just applied epistemology.
It always bothers me when philosophy is used as a pejorative. Not because I have some particular fondness for philosophy, but because that use stems from a shameful level of willful ignorance. Questions like "Why do the methods of science work?" and "How can they change over time and still be effective?" are decidedly philosophical questions.
Second-rate scientists with this sort of negative attitude toward philosophy remind me of the women in this old joke: A man is helping his wife prepare a roast for dinner. The womans' husband asks here why she cuts the ends off the roast before putting it in the pan. "I don't know" she replies "that's the way my mother always did it." The wife now curious, calls her mother to ask. "I don't know" her mother replies "that's the way my mother always did it." Undaunted, she calls her grandmother and asks her why she always cut the ends off the roast before putting it in the pan. Finally, she gets the answer "Because my roasting pan was too small!" O mortal
Just like the women in the story could produce a fine roast without any real understanding about how a roast should be prepared, so can the second-rate scientist produce acceptable output without having the faintest clue about how science works.
In short, you can't understand science without understanding philosophy.
This will offend a lot of people. Confronting ones own ignorance can be difficult.
Required reading for internet skeptics
To argue that paradigm shift dont apply to social science would be to admit that social science is a science.
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
Science once was referred as 'natural philosophy' and it is clear that even mathematics (which are the most intelectually pure endeavor) require an understanding of old philosophic problems and pose new, hard to tackle ones. The problem is that much of what is contemporarly referred as 'philosphy' is masturbatory, long winded and conclusive; tackling mostly issues of the political world and 'self-help'. Long gone are the days where Wittgenstein and Russell were read and discussed seriously in philosophy faculties.
(And as a biologist, I feel pretty strongly that paradigm shifting applies equally to physics and biology.)
Indeed. One of the striking things about modern science is the how rapidly the biological sciences are advancing - and how quickly fundamentally new understandings about how biological systems have been appearing. From genetics to genomics, we have within the lifetime of one of the original discovers of the structure of DNA (James Watson) gone through several vast shifts in understanding of how DNA works, and what the DNA record shows about the tree of life.
The new kingdoms of life, dramatic changes in understanding of how evolution proceeds, successive revolutions in understanding DNA (multiple levels of regulation still being discovered, the profound importance of inaccurately named "junk" DNA, etc. etc.). The emergence of new paradigms is obscured perhaps by how many there are and how quickly one follows another.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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.
I wasn't attacking you. I was addressing a specific statement, made by the author, that you reference. Relax, the world isn't out to get you.
(In fairness, my reply to your "strawman" post could be interpreted as an attack -- but one made in retaliation! You've got to admit, however, that it isn't exactly the most coherent thing you've ever written.)
You have not refuted the claim that the social sciences are essentially unscientific
Why should it? Would you bother to refute a nonsense claim like "marshmellows are just like pudding" or "cat's can only live on a strict diet of bicycles"? Of course not. It's not my fault that the author is a moron, nor is it my problem. (Besides, what would I offer as proof? Slowly copy/paste 50 years worth of the most popular journals?)
It's obvious to anyone without a mental disorder that the social sciences are scientific. They do, after all, apply the same methods as other sciences (with testable hypotheses and experiments and everything!). It's like claiming that Biology isn't a science.
I've run across that one myself. I'll bet you have as well. Discipline envy? Just get over it and laugh when the morons on internet discussion forums who bash biology or the social sciences fall all over themselves to produce this or that study (the fruits of biology or the social sciences) to support their argument with scientific research. :)
Required reading for internet skeptics
Not to pile on but: there's a lot of science in social sciences. What there's not is engineering. Core theories are (mostly) about testible premises, and I'm not sure where you'd get the idea that they aren't.
Take for example the oft-maligned field of "communication studies". There's no engineering there yet, but there is practical science: how do you measure "receptivity to information", how do you measure how persuasive a speech is to one group vs another, and so on. Constructing repeatable measures that give repeatable results is where all sciences begin, and even in this somewhat primitive state it's a useful science. How do you make a warning sign that people will actually be warned by? How do you ask patients in a walk-in clininc personal questions in such a way that you maximize your chance of an honest answer?
It may all be squishy, and not the geek-loved black-and-white, but once a science has a repeatable way to measure what they study, hypotheses can make predictions, and these predictions can be falsified and science can happen.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's obvious to anyone without a mental disorder that the social sciences are scientific.
You seem to have forgotten what site you are on.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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
Malthus's influence on Darwin led to a model of natural selection that was much more accurate than its predecessors, readily supported by the ecosystem of the Galapagos Islands, and which naturally followed from the subject matter. Two ways are discussed in which theories in the social sciences fail to meet these standards:
First, the article states that Popper felt that important theories in the social sciences (such as Freudian psychology) never reach this level of concreteness, saying of Freudianism that it "did not make well-defined predictions and proved adept at reformulating its explanations to fit observations, changing the details so as to salvage the theory."
Second, the article calls attention to cases where Kuhn himself felt the social sciences borrowed metaphors from other fields without identifying a root cause for why this should be so, only exploiting superficial similarity in the phenomena within those fields:
Many of the early social scientists came to view society in terms of contemporary physics; they adopted the Enlightenment belief in science as the source of progress, and considered physics the archetypical science. They understood society as a mechanism that could be engineered and adjusted.
And:
...and so in the social sciences, the conception of society as a machine has gone out of vogue. Social scientists have increasingly turned to biology and ecology for possible analogies on which to build their social theories; organisms are supplanting machines as the guiding metaphor for social life. In 1991, the Journal of Evolutionary Economics was launched with an eye toward advancing a Darwinian understanding of economics, complete with genotypes and phenotypes. The justification for this kind of model is straightforward: one of the biggest difficulties for economists is the dynamism of any given economy. As Joseph Schumpeter rightly pointed out, economies change; they evolve, rather than staying fixed like a Newtonian machine with merely moving parts. Since machines do not change, whereas societies do, it is reasonable to move the study of economics away from the metaphor of systems and toward that of organisms.
This is essentially different from the validation that Darwinian evolution underwent when the mechanism of Mendelian genetics was provided to explain how it worked. Without a comprehensive reason to explain why economics should resemble biological life to this extent, this analogy is only one of convenience. There should be no incentive to hammer a social science into the template of a model from the hard sciences, and the article points out an example noticed by Eric Voegelin, wherein John Fortescue broke from a 'human body' metaphor in his description of a political theory, borrowing concepts from Christianity to improve on it.
Personally, I believe the article's author is a bit hard on the social sciences, and sets a tone implying that all theories in the social sciences necessarily have these faults. I don't think all fundamental theories in the social sciences necessarily involve value judgements, and certainly not all of them are unverifiable. Does that address any of your complaints?
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