"When I first wrote this, I received instant criticism from my editor and others: fads are short-lived, while enthusiasm for Kuhn’s book has persisted for half a century. And unlike Pet Rocks, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was never sold as a forting companion, a solution to urban loneliness in a post-industrial society. So not exactly Pet Rocks. Maybe what emerged was more of a cult. With Kuhn as leader, dispensing his own brand of pernicious intellectual Kool-Aid. (In John Milius’s 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian, a peddler tells Conan about the cult of Set: 'Two, three years ago, it was just another snake cult. Now you see it everywhere.')"
Writes Errol Morris in an excerpt from his book "The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality)."
The second link goes to Amazon, where you can pre-order the book (it comes out on the 22nd) and where it says: "In 1972, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at Errol Morris. This book is the result.... Morris wants to establish as clearly as possible what we know and can say about the world, reality, history, our actions and interactions. It’s the fundamental desire that animates his filmmaking, whether he’s probing Robert McNamara about Vietnam or the oddball owner of a pet cemetery. Truth may be slippery, but that doesn’t mean we have to grease its path of escape through philosophical evasions."
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was assigned reading in our philosophy class in seminary, some 40 years ago. While it might not provide answers, I found it to be provocative, stimulating thought and discussion by properly framing the issues. Another of our assigned books was Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
Unfortunately, Kuhn's legacy consists primarily of the word "paradigm," which nowadays bad writers seem to reach for whenever they need a multi-syllabic word.
Two, three years ago, it was just another snake cult. Now you see it everywhere.
That's just a piece of exposition in the uninspiring script of an uninspiring movie about an uninspiring character invented by the uninspiring hack writer called Robert E. Howard. Try as I might I cannot detect a smidgen of philosophical import.
I predict Errol Morris will envy the success of the Pet Rock when his forthcoming book finally goes into the remainder bin.
Scientific revolutions rarely are.
Most of this, and the chatter about it, is just theoretical jaw-jaw. It attracts attention by professional writers but matters not a bit unless someone goes off and actually does something in the real world.
Real revolutions are technical, empirical, not "scientific". Build a better mousetrap, and it does not matter how it is explained by physicists.
I read it once.
Haven't read its spawn.
Jimbino: Ha! I was just coming to say that when I was in college, that was the book Everyone Had to Read. I can only imagine what their current book Everyone Has to Read is (and I'm too lazy to look it up).
Of course, this was Evergreen. Yes, that Evergreen.
Kuhn walked back a lot of what he said in Structure as he got older. It happens a lot in the philosophy biz --- put out a bold book as a young upstart, & then mellow into a more moderate position as you age. Two examples that come to mind: A.J. Ayers Language, Truth, & Logic & Francis Fukuyama's End of History.
Kuhn isn't Morris' enemy anymore, & not just because he's dead. There are a lot of younger & much dumber post-modernists out there, & they're Morris' proper target. Good luck on breaking through that invincible ignorance.
Kuhn is quite unpopular now. His description of the scientific process does not sit well with global warmists who wish to shut down examination and review of their work.
Errol directs ads when he's not busy.
"You write this?"
"Yeah."
"Well it's gonna be a funny spot."
"Thanks."
"But not if we shoot this script."
Absolutely loved Kuhn's book, Structure. One of the best on the big picture.
Was about to hammer Errol Morris (who's he?), but Morris made "The Fog of War," that excellent documentary on McNamara and Vietnam. So, he gets a pass.
Suggestions:
1. Read Kuhn's book for yourself, not Morris' critique.
2. Rent Fog of War.
3. Burn McNamara in effigy for screwing up the Vietnam War.
4. Salute Nixon for ending the Vietnam War.
5. Hammer the Democratic Congress for de-funding efforts to protect South Vietnam from the invading North, after the Paris Peace accords were signed.
Structure was assigned reading in my MBA program in 1970. But business doesn't have a paradigm, so it was just for cocktail hour. Then went into economics, which ignored Kuhn because, hey, economics is the truth. It isn't a "paradigm." I haven't gone one month since 1970 without hearing paradigm this and paradigm that. Still pretty good cocktail conversation. I'm not being snotty. It's just part of the language.
"Unfortunately, Kuhn's legacy consists primarily of the word "paradigm," which nowadays bad writers seem to reach for whenever they need a multi-syllabic word."
That is sadly true. In scientific psychology journals, he gets a ton of mention, at least in my time. However the percentage of social scientists who have read Kuhn seems small.
He was a physicist (arguably the only true science because it depends on math) who became a scientific philosopher when he realized that most scientists engaged in repetitive, trivial experiments. It's only a very few who think outside the box and advance our search for truth to a significant degree.
I don't mean to derogate those who test others' hypotheses and the boundary conditions of their theories. That is important work, but it is not the groundbreaking stuff of science that the public has come to expect.
Morris's goal is laudable, and the achievement of that goal is likely necessary to the preservation of Western civilization, but I think his aim is off. Truth as an essential element of the philosophy of science became troublesome decades before Khun's work went to press. Science hasn't resolved the philosophical problems posed by the two-slit experiment even now, except to shrug its collective shoulders and mumble about unknowable quantum realms. Nevertheless, they have a successful theory.
It is possible to argue that Truth took a body blow with the publication of Newton's Principia, which posits a fully knowable cosmos as deterministic as any clock. Newton himself either missed or ignored the implications of his knowable initial conditions, perhaps because of his frustrations over the three-body problem, which led him to infer the necessity of angels. It is indeed ironic that our current cosmology, founded as it is on the acceptance of a realm that is simultaneously real, indispensable, and forever and absolutely locked away from our ability to know, also restored to a degree of freedom taken away by classical mechanics to the point that free will is at least mathematically tenable.
The real villain of the 20th century wasn't Hitler or Stalin, both of whom claimed to be blessed with the knowledge of Ultimate Truth and used that "knowledge" to deal out death and destruction far beyond my ability to comprehend. Formidable monsters they were, yet nevertheless defeatable by the raw power created by free men living in free societies. The real genius was an obscure French academic who admired the monsters. He found a way to give them the final triumph by draining away the lifeblood of the West — its foundation in Reason. I'm talking about Michel Foucault, which Errol Morris is evidently not, ergo his bad aim.
(reposted with edits for clarity)
"For the average educated person it is virtually a necessary truth that plants live by photosynthesis.” EM: The Tea Party might not accept that. "
An ashtray seems inadequate. [Laughter]
"We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."
Calibration is the all-purpose safety valve here.
But the effectiveness of the calibration cannot be established without prior knowledge of the things to be calibrated. (Nor can incommensurability, as I think Kuhn meant it at the outset: you'd have to be able to show that scientific community x really meant this and that scientific community y really meant that, and that never the twain shall meet. Incoherent, as Putnam says.)
Kuhn's point, as I recall, was that the calibration is always paradigm-dependent and that the criteria for effectiveness are always derived from the rules set by that paradigm. Anti-realism does not need to follow. Not does strong incommensurability: we can always agree, pragmatically, across a paradigmatic divide, that a particular calibration is good enough for our shared purposes.
Structure is ideal for the Pierre Bayard-treatment: skimmed and admired (++!), or heard about and admired, or forgotten and viewed negatively (--)? It also helps to make his main point: that reading a book in full constrains the reader's creativity and disrupts the vue d'ensemble. It's more fun to free-associate and make connections of your own, as Morris does, thereby illustrating the relativity of textual interpretation.
Kuhn is great, but he's not some sacred cow, with a pass to avoid critiques.
Critique Kuhn away!
I can see where Global Warming Alarmists might like Kuhn? You see, in the 70s' we were yapping about global cooling. But now, because of a paradigm shift, we are yapping about global warming.
Kuhn was perceptive for his time and has changed our way of thinking about the broadly social environment of science. However, his unfortunate legacy is the misuse of the term paradigm. The term is used to describe contemporaneous change, which is not what Kuhn was talking about.
I don't necessarily have a position on Kuhn's ideas about the nature of Truth, but based upon my very extensive reading in the history of Science, he was substantially correct about the way scientists go about it. One thing we can state with certainty is that, if our current scientific views are correct, then almost everyone has been completely mistaken about almost everything almost all of the time. Silly scientists! Their mistake was to live in the Past, when we had not yet figured everything out. We must be careful not to repeat that error.
One of my favorite scientific experiments is van Helmont's growing a tree in a tub. He weighed the dirt that went in, and after the tree had grown fairly large, he removed it and weighed the dirt again, and found that the dirt weighed almost the same, even though the tree was quite heavy. He concluded, quite properly, based upon the conservation of mass, that trees must be made of water, as that was the only mass he had added. And he was half right, which is pretty damned good for someone in the Past.
Most of "Science" is good only as a narrative to comfort people.
Its a justification for one line of thought versus another.
The world is so, and this is our story for why this is.
"Science" has little to do with technology, which actually does matter.
The scientific method is not some secret that needs to be taught, as such, to anyone who is learning to make things happen in nature. It is implicit in the work of any auto mechanic or blacksmith or farmer, or their much more specialized modern descendants.
Perhaps it needs to be explained as a process to a literary-minded intellectual, or some such ignorant person, but really, that just amounts to accommodating a disability.
As to what drives "science" -
Technology first.
Instruments make science possible, and these depend on technical processes and an economy that can afford scientists, technicians and the making of instruments. And the growth of the economy depends on technology.
The celebrity culture, the "great scientist" narrative is also a fraud.
Who is taught about Louis Pasteurs microscope makers?
If a book is required reading for syllabi book sales or persistence thereof aren't evidence of popularity.
buwaya said...
"The scientific method is not some secret that needs to be taught ..."
I have spent a lot of time in scientific labs, and I can't recall ever seeing anyone employ the so-called "scientific method", although there are some famous experiments that may be described in those terms. Whether they actually occurred that way is another matter. Scientists do not choose, they grope.
On the other hand, I find that debugging computer programs often follows the scientific method. You make a hypothesis, devise an experiment, conduct the experiment, and refine the hypothesis according ot the result. But this is only possible because you are working in a limited and well-known realm, where the range of possibilities can be anticipated.
"On the other hand, I find that debugging computer programs often follows the scientific method."
Everything technical does.
Blogger buwaya said...
As to what drives "science" -
Technology first.
Instruments make science possible, and these depend on technical processes and an economy that can afford scientists, technicians and the making of instruments. And the growth of the economy depends on technology.
---------------------------------------------
That was my thought when I was forced to muck through Kuhn.
My professors did not like that take.
They were entranced by the fact that Kuhn's basic analysis was
a dialectic; being hip leftists that made them swoon.
As we progress farther, the seems like it becomes exponentially more difficult to discover new things. Until the modern era, the frontiers of science were generally hemmed in by culture, superstition, religion, and the general instability of civilization. But as we progressed through the industrial revolution to the information age, all the low hanging fruit has been plucked. Now it requires exponentially more effort to discover, define, and gain a new understanding on the nature of reality.
This can be seen most clearly in the realm of theoretical physics. We need increasing more complex and expensive equipment to probe smaller and smaller scales. The LHC was something like 7 or 8 billion dollars, is 27 kilometers long, and enables collisions of 14 TeV. Now there's talk of building colliders capable of 80 - 100 TeV that are perhaps 100 kilometers long.
buwaya said...
"On the other hand, I find that debugging computer programs often follows the scientific method."
'Everything technical does.'
Yes indeed. But look where the careful construction and evaluation of hypotheses led van Helmont. Perhaps we should call it the "technological method".
Anyone who tells you that you must "change your paradigm" (see e.g. Steven Covey) obviously didn't read or understand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Paradigms are near impossible to change. Everyone is stuffing their understanding and interpretation of their daily life into their operative paradigm, regardless of how well it fits or doesn't fit.
The obscene luxury that scientists have is the permitted ability to constantly rewrite their history to maintain the fiction that everything scientists have been doing has inexorably led to our present truths and understanding. Which, of course, is a load of bollocks.
Before the Michelson–Morley experiment, Newtonian physics was king. There was no other! But now the history of science reads like they always knew that the speed of light needed to be added to the equations. (Oh come on! They didn't always know that! It took Einstein to suggest it, and only because the Michelson–Morley experiment was such a puzzler was anyone ready or willing to listen to Einstein.)
This all highlights the most important thing Kuhn said in TSOSR, which is: that it cannot be said that science leads to truth. There are a whole lot of things science once told us are true that science no longer believes. What can only be said of science is, merely, that it leads to better explanations.
LarsP has it absolutely correct: "Technology first.
Instruments make science possible, and these depend on technical processes and an economy that can afford scientists, technicians and the making of instruments. And the growth of the economy depends on technology."
One of the other fictions scientists propagate is that science leads to all the new gadgets we have. That also is a load of bollocks!
Science and engineering are not the same fields. Most of the technologies we have stem from engineering. Scientists usually couldn't create a functioning gadget if their life depended on it.
Quayle said...
"One of the other fictions scientists propagate is that science leads to all the new gadgets we have. That also is a load of bollocks!"
While it is certainly true that most of the people who call themselves scientists are charlatans, self-deluded or otherwise, engineers do not invent the structures within which they operate. Almost all of modern engineering is conducted within the framework of Newtonian Mechanics and Maxwell's laws, which were not invented by engineers.
@Quayle: Most of the technologies we have stem from engineering.
In the past this was more true, but there have been discoveries from pure science that proved a branch of technology could exist, which was not known before, such as semiconductors and superconductors.
Furthermore, engineers are frequently blindsided by unanticipated science, such as the aerostatic flutter that doomed the Tacoma Narrows bridge.
Scientists usually couldn't create a functioning gadget if their life depended on it.
Depends on the science. Physicists frequently have to make their own equipment, because it doesn't exist. Again, semiconductors come to mind.
@Qualye:But now the history of science reads like they always knew that the speed of light needed to be added to the equations. (Oh come on! They didn't always know that! It took Einstein to suggest it, and only because the Michelson–Morley experiment was such a puzzler was anyone ready or willing to listen to Einstein.)
This isn't quite true. It was implied in the Maxwell equations all along. But Maxwell (and everyone else) didn't have a good way to interpret what the equations implied.
The Maxwell equations needed no refinement to accommodate special relativity.
Despite polluting the world with the term "paradigm shift", Kuhn's books is the most convincing description I've read about how business as usual is disrupted and re-established. I read the book in 1969 and I have been reminded of it several times a year since then. I was just this week thinking about in connection with Kanye West.
semiconductors come to mind
For example, as we design smaller and smaller semiconductors we run up against issues that aren't adequately described by classical mechanics (leakage) and get into the realm of quantum mechanics.
I remember a lecture in grad school (physics) at Ga Tech when a notable physicist referred to Kuhn as a failed physicist.
Is he still alive? I thought Earl Morrall died a few years ago.
So it was another version of The Critique of Pure Reason? Was that book a fad?
Wootton, The Invention Of Science
This contains a nice section on the older theories of a globe that were disproved by exploration, and immediately accepted as disproven. This pretty much refutes Kuhn. Ever wonder why you heard weird things about antipodes, and their impossibility? Because of these older theories. He has other cases, where a radical new theory was just immediately accepted, contra Kuhn.
Gabriel said...
The Maxwell equations needed no refinement to accommodate special relativity.
Someone (Sagan?) claimed that the era of "modern physics" started with Maxwell because his equations unified light, electricity and magnetism, which were previously considered separate phenomena.
Ken B said...
"This pretty much refutes Kuhn."
I don't believe that Kuhn claimed to provide a model for all scientific advance. He merely pointed out that it was often the case that scientists clung to existing explanatory frameworks long after their drawbacks were clear and better ones had been proposed. And this is most assuredly true. Anyone who thinks Kuhn is a lightweight, or God help me a "failed physicist", should try dragging his pitiful collection of neurons through "Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity".
Now, as to whether "Truth", scientific or otherwise, is "socially constructed", well, it is obviously the case that many previous societies had widely accepted "Truths" that we do not widely accept today. If they weren't socially constructed, where did they come from? Some guy brought them down from a mountain, carved in stone? We just have the remarkable good fortune to live in the first era in which everything is known and all science is settled. Let us all laugh at the poor, primitive clods who went before us. What a bunch of saps they were, to think they understood anything!
An interesting sidelight; at one time, what we now call "science" was regarded as simply one aspect of Philosophy. As the natural philosophers extended their reach, and began to lay claim to something like a comprehensive theory of the World, their arrogance began to call forth resistance. You may recall, that Horatio had been to University, where he studied the available science of his day. But when he tried to claim that ghosts did not exist, Hamlet told him what he thought of "your Philosophy". He did not mean some personal "philosophy" that Horatio might have developed, as modern readers tend to assume. He meant it the way you might tell a credulous friend that "There isn't an ounce of truth in your Astrology" -- "yours" not because it is yours alone, but because I'm having none of it.
"Almost all of modern engineering is conducted within the framework of Newtonian Mechanics and Maxwell's laws, which were not invented by engineers."
Almost all of modern engineering uses equations derived from the above, and etc. The mathematics is handy, thanks! However -
Almost all of modern engineering adds a heck of a lot of OTHER equations that include various rules-of-thumb and coefficients and other empirically-derived things that would be impossible to "prove".
And then you have to make the change/build the prototype, and test - and after that all of Newton goes out the window (at 9.8m/s^2). You fudge stuff till it works as you need it to.
about an uninspiring character invented by the uninspiring hack writer called Robert E. Howard.
😱Smile when you say that, you son of a bitch! 😒
Engineering is way more important than science. It's a similar distinction between practice and theory.
Kurusawa's movie Roshomon investigated perception versus reality.
The diffraction grating experiments of Michelson and the water drop experiments of Milliken investigated reality.
The depth perception experiments of Gibson and Walk investigated actual perception.
Try to keep these kinds of investigations separate.
Kuhn’s book was groundbreaking. It is often misrepresented as anti-truth or relativistic, but that is complete and utter borscht. It merely posits that all of our understanding, even of fields such as physics that satisfy Popper’s falsifiability requirement with a high degree of regularity, is incomplete or a work in progress. Most of the time, science consists of verifying or refining theoretical constructs through empirical testing. But when a theroteical construct fails to predict outcomes or provide a coherent explanation for phenomena, a scientifiist in the field will emerge who will call into question the framework and propose an alternative. History shows again and again that such iconoclasts, or revolutionaries, are at first scorned and derided by their peers. But eventually, as the new framework proves to have superior predictive capabilities, it finds acceptance and the scientist is rightly recognized for advancing the cause of knowledge. Often (at least in the past), the textbooks are rewritten to excise the prior framework, leaving the misimpression that science is a field in which knowledge is accumulated in a straight line.
Of course, Kuhn’s observation is vulnerable to misuse by dilettantes and hacks. The mere fact that a prevailing framework cannot predict outcomes or explain phenomena 100% of the time does not mean that it is not state of the art or without value. And not every alternative theory is an equally worthy candidate to supplant the prevailing framework. But if scientific inquiry is to continue to advance, we must keep an open mind to the possibility that our understanding may be in need of a radical overhaul. This is particularly true outside the “hard” sciences, where testing theories controlling for all other variables is difficult or impossible.
@Bay Area Guy:Engineering is way more important than science. It's a similar distinction between practice and theory.
Walking is more important than having feet, perhaps, but you won't walk far if your feet aren't in good shape.
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