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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.
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.
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.
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!
By 'paradigm shift' Kuhn is talking about a change in how scientists look at the things. The point is not about whether science is more about moving forward in little baby steps or huge leaps or even whether it moves 'forward' at all, but about what happens when everyone starts looking at things differently. It's' a change in perspective more than some objective 'breakthrough', although a major breakthrough may be the stimulus for a paradigm shift.
Since I don't have a copy of the book in front of me here's a blurb from wikipedia that seems to understand where Kuhn is coming from.
A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies that cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. This is based on features of landscape of knowledge that scientists can identify around them.
There are anomalies for all paradigms, Kuhn maintained, that are brushed away as acceptable levels of error, or simply ignored and not dealt with (a principal argument Kuhn uses to reject Karl Popper's model of falsifiability as the key force involved in scientific change). Rather, according to Kuhn, anomalies have various levels of significance to the practitioners of science at the time. To put it in the context of early 20th century physics, some scientists found the problems with calculating Mercury's perihelion more troubling than the Michelson-Morley experiment results, and some the other way around.
and
When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis, according to Kuhn. During this crisis, new ideas, perhaps ones previously discarded, are tried. Eventually a new paradigm is formed, which gains its own new followers, and an intellectual "battle" takes place between the followers of the new paradigm and the hold-outs of the old paradigm. Again, for early 20th century physics, the transition between the Maxwellian electromagnetic worldview and the Einsteinian Relativistic worldview was neither instantaneous nor calm, and instead involved a protracted set of "attacks," both with empirical data as well as rhetorical or philosophical arguments, by both sides, with the Einsteinian theory winning out in the long-run. Again, the weighing of evidence and importance of new data was fit through the human sieve: some scientists found the simplicity of Einstein's equations to be most compelling, while some found them more complicated than the notion of Maxwell's aether which they banished. Some found Eddington's photographs of light bending around the sun to be compelling, some questioned their accuracy and meaning. Sometimes the convincing force is just time itself and the human toll it takes, Kuhn said, using a quote from Max Planck: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
After a given discipline has changed from one paradigm to another, this is called, in Kuhn's terminology, a scientific revolution or a paradigm shift. It is often this final conclusion, the result of the long process, that is meant when the term paradigm shift is used colloquially: simply the (often radical) change of worldview, without reference to the specificities of Kuhn's historical argument.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
By paradigm shift Kuhn is not just talking about a big change in science. The data might be nearly the same, but the conceptual model has changed and the data begins to prove another theory entirely. Don't forget that when Copernicus' theory was first released Ptolemy's model fit
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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
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.
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.
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.
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