Thomas Kuhn changed the way the world looked at science (2012)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I found that to be a really good foundation for scientists, and highly recommend these three to anyone in academia or science.
Here's one of his papers that outlines the application of Kuhn to philosophy: http://www.ifac.univ-nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/Texte_de_Macintyre_19...
On a slightly different note:
>Kuhn, like Popper, thought that science was mainly about theory, but an increasing amount of cutting-edge scientific research is data- rather than theory-driven.
Science always proclaims to be "data driven." Galileo and the Ptolemaics were working with the same "data." When Aristotle examined the bones of animals, he was working with the same "data" as Darwin. What changes is how they interpret it: what standards of truth and observation they observe in its collection and synthesis. There is no such thing as "raw data."
There was no revolution. Newton was right with the caveat that if things are very large, very small, or very fast things may look different. To this day if something disagrees with the core of what Newton said it's almost certainly wrong. The fact that the "paradigm shift" from deterministic to probabilistic left most of science untouched should show how paradigms aren't all that important. Quantum mechanics has multiple "paradigms" describing the exact same things and they're doing close to nothing in terms of pushing science forward, some think they're holding it back because so much time is spent arguing about them.
So, the new paradigms were a shift from Newtonian physics for sure.
I agree you need physics Newton never dreamt of for photocells. Explaining Mercury's precession was a big deal for Relativity as well. Out of curiosity, what's non-Newtonian in a rocket launch?
Off topic: I have no idea how this voting stuff works, and I don't know why mine is -3
He explicitly rejected dogmatism and did not claim that his identifications were to be used against new facts if and when such would be discovered.
That a scientist had great contributions to science doesn't mean that s/he was a human being with her own dogmas and conflicts.
Newton's laws have never been overturned, merely refined, so we've never truly shifted away from a Newtonian paradigm.
A better example (and one that Kuhn himself used), would be phlogiston theory, which was fully overturned when oxygen was redefined as an element and not as simply being "dephlogisticated air".
Phlogiston theory was overturned but the idea of oxygen is still standing strong despite the major advances in chemistry since 1773. Other puzzle pieces have been placed around it but they're additions to it. Even if the universe turns out to be a hologram the idea of oxygen will survive.
Once the big puzzle pieces are found they're rarely removed. Since the big shift towards empiricism most "revolutions" and paradigm shifts are happening in new areas or at different scales than the old ones. Much of what are being called revolutions I would call explorations of the unknown.
To give an example, how much do you know about theories of geology before 1960? Any educated person today knows the basic idea of plate tectonics, but only a historian of science might know what came before.
According to Kuhn, the impression you get that "puzzle pieces are rarely removed" is something that happens after science has been rewritten to fit a new paradigm.
A quick visit to wikipedia shows modern geology dates itself back to the 17th century. You can view the field since then as successive additions and modifications to what was started by Nicholas Sterno in 1669 when he stated the law of superposition, the principle of original horizontality and the principle of lateral continuity. Those are 3 of the 7 principles of modern stratigraphy that wikipedia lists, but according to you and Kuhn the "modern paradigm" of geology starts in 1965 and everything before that's been erased?
I'm not here to argue with you in case you have that impression.
> "When we read a science textbook, all of the information is placed within the structure of the current paradigm, as if none other came before it."
Newtonian physics isn't taught from within the frameworks of quantum mechanics or relativity. The opposite is true, it's taught as if we live in a constant-time, deterministic universe. That's an exact wrong prediction for the most central and fundamental field of science. To make it worse it's something that's easy to check. That's frustrating.
Rather than describing a dichotomy between conservatism and revolution, I'd say that the revolutionaries searched for and found a hybrid of the two.
I also think that if any departure from steady-state is defined as a "revolution," then it's self fulfilling.
None of this is to downplay their intellectual contributions. It is only to illustrate Kuhn's assertion that science constantly redefines past literature as continuous with incompatible contemporary beliefs: any interpretation of Newton's work orthogonally to the existence of god does not accurately depict his views.
There's his scientific work which is widely available, and then there's his personal beliefs. I could really care less if we don't talk about his theology, but if you're accusing science of being dishonest about his mathematical and scientific contributions that's a claim which requires better evidence than you've provided.
> There are sociological reasons why students of science are not encouraged to read Newton for themselves.
Like what? Do you think physics teachers are afraid their students will find out Newton believed in God and then they won't be atheists? Do you think they're pushing materialism or "scientism" and rewriting history to that end? This is close to a conspiracy theory. I think you're ascribing malice or ill intent to what are almost purely pragmatic choices.
Here's the text of The Principia[1], read a few pages and imagine a physics student trying to make sense of it. When I finally opened it I found exactly what I had always been told I would find: something interesting but hard to read and not the best place to learn physics. I don't think there are any physics books today that prove the fundamentals of calculus in the middle of their discussion of physics. That's a pedagogical nightmare. Today you learn calculus and then you do physics with it, but Newton developed calculus to do physics so there were no calculus books he could assume his audience was already familiar with.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Scholium [1] - http://www.archive.org/stream/newtonspmathema00newtrich/newt...
Aside from having to add Latin to the scientific cannon alongside German and English and Russian, the direction in which Newton's thinking evolved is disruptive in the context of contemporary science's self image...none of which is surprising given Kuhn's work.
When a scientist wants to build up the self-image of science they do the exact opposite of what you're suggesting. They use Newton as an example to prove that science is superior to the other disciplines he also practiced but bore no fruit.
Be fair to theology, for it admits when it's proofs resort to revelation.
It is important to make this distinction if you want to accurately understand scientific revolutions. It is not accurate to think that quantum mechanics was just this new thing that replaced Newtonian mechanics. One has to keep the precise correspondence between Newtonian and quantum mechanics in mind. This isn't just a narrative that scientists use to feel good about Newton.
This brings into question whether revolution is a good word for this phenomenon.
What QM has is better accuracy and a different scope. It solves different problems, and where it overlaps, it does better. Also, it is not an extension of Newtonian physics, and hence is a new paradigm. It is not a better version of Newtonian physics.
I disagree that multiple paradigms describe the exact same things with respect to paradigm shifting science. They are merely different models, and are not new paradigms in the Khun sense. In fact, the fact that they are not pushing science forward attests to this. There are versions of reality because we are uncertain. Not because each is a different way of thinking that solves new kinds of problems.
It's true that Newtonian mechanics remains useful despite being based on a now falsified premise: time is a constant. Although his laws eventually break down, they do not lose all their power to predict effects from causes under certain common conditions.
Popular myth holds that Ptotomeic cosomology was conceived by dull-minded early men arrogantly imagining that God must have placed us at the center. But no. It was based on centuries of documented observation (now called "data") and brilliant reasoning. The predictive power of this well developed model was excellent, even after it was overturned.
So are these revolutions somehow categorically different? It's easy to think so, but that's based on an illusion of mind. Geometry is somehow much more tangible or "factual" in our minds than time. But is a flaw in the position of objects really more fundamental than a flaw in the understanding of time?
They're so different that I'm surprised it's even a question. If anything the illusion of mind is bending them to fit a narrative.
When Relativity explained the precession of Mercury's perihelion the existing physics was off by 1/12,000,000th of Mercury's orbit (per orbit.) Not only was the Ptolemic system off by entire degrees (as opposed to arcseconds which are 1/3,600th of a degree) it was highly dependent on the position of the observer, if you stood on Jupiter I imagine the Ptolemic system would give you complete nonsense as to where the planets would be.
More importantly Newton's work has never been thrown out and you can derive classical mechanics as a special case of Relativity. You can also derive it from quantum mechanics. I don't believe you can show that the geocentric model of the solar system is a special case of the heliocentric model.
Conditions where relativity manifests seem way out extreme to us today. How extreme would standing on Jupiter have seemed in 1500 when your goal is not to land a rocket on the moon but to develop a more accurate calendar or navigate the Mediterranean? What will they say of Newtonian mechanics after 500 more years of hindsight?
I recommend reading the book, as he goes into this kind of objection. One of his main points about the paradigm shift is that afterwards, the way scientists think about the problems has changed, and as a result, the kind of questions they ask - or even can ask - has changed.
It was surprisingly enjoyable, and surprisingly personally influential. I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about what it was in the human brain that caused this pattern of 'normal science' versus 'revolutionary science' to be stable—and it was time well spent, I think.
I wouldn't have bothered writing this rant except that the sloppy use of words like 'world' when all that can really be meant is something like 'the world of science' or possibly 'the views of some academic observers of science' is one of the defining characteristics of journalism (both high brow and mass market). When one claims far more than is plausible one does a disservice to the truth and misleads the interested lay person and when that person discovers that the claim is untrue the reputations not only of the journalist but also of the original work suffer.
There's a word for the state of these scientists and laypeople: ignorance.
Edit to add some substance to the name-calling:
There's a certain perspective held by many scientists that the scientific method can and will describe the purposes and meaning behind every phenomena both natural and man-made that have any relevance or importance to our lives as humans. If those holding this perspective grant that valuable knowledge lies outside the ability of science to observe and explain, they tend to view it as irrelevant and frivolous. Those who hold this perspective tend to view philosophy as mere wordplay, and the idea of studying science from the perspective of philosophy (as Kuhn did) as pointless or an usurpation of their position at the top of the intellectual ladder.
Feynman embodied this attitude when he said, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."
It's a belligerent and proud ignorance that puts a black stain on the practice of science today, and an attitude that threatens some of the most valuable academic disciplines in the humanities, to the detriment of our culture.
My brief statement above was meant to call attention to this belligerent ignorance and poke fun at it a little bit.
Your comment still does not explain how philosophy of science should be useful to scientists. It would be much more convincing if it did.
Kuhn's key point is that scientists (like many humans) tend to be herd animals. When you get results that are inconsistent with the public record, not to mention current dogma, there's a tendency to dig seriously for systematic errors. And when you start getting results that are consistent with the public record, you tend to get on with the writeup. Being aware of that stereotypic behavior is the first step in being free of it. No?
And anyway, those are all artificial categories, I think.
This is not to say that the philosophy is useless or that it will never influence science in the future - Feynman is just stating how things have been.
Put another way, I simply don't see philosophy of science as it is helping someone do better science. I would be very interested if this were false.
Wouldn't Karl Popper's work on emphasizing the importance of falsification be an example of how philosophy of science was useful to scientists?
My parents, both scientists educated in the 1950s, never heard of them. They followed a pretty simplistic notion of scientific methodology, that mainly revolved around intellectual honesty: Report everything that you observe, and be willing to change your beliefs when confronted with new information.
I never heard of Popper or Kuhn until after I finished my science degree, and then, only in the context of debates about evolution versus creationism. But I don't know if I'm typical or not.
I honestly don't know. I'd always assumed that all of that happened well before I was born, but never bothered looking for any exact dates. It's just something I've always been exposed to, and have always taken the importance of falsification as a given.
A quick search turns up this[1] from Wikipedia:
"In work beginning in the 1930s, Popper gave falsifiability a renewed emphasis as a criterion of empirical statements in science."
OTOH, the entry on Popper at Plato[2] says this:
"However, in the 1970's a series of papers published by researchers such as Miller, Tichý, and Grünbaum in particular revealed fundamental defects in Popper's formal definitions of verisimilitude."
which suggest that his work had achieved enough signficance by the 1970's that other people were basing work on it (and in this case, perhaps refuting bits of it).
The idea of falsification suffers from three issues: (1) it's binary true or false (2) it's asymmetric (falsifying a theory T vs falsifying the theory not T) and (3) it's kind of vague what constitutes falsification. Bayesian incorporation of evidence into beliefs arguably gives a superior solution to the problem, and Laplace (1749 - 1827) was already fully aware of this.
I don't know the exact history, but I suspect that people were doing quantitative science before we developed a good grasp of statistics.
Also, both Kuhn and Popper endeavored to describe science as it was already being done.
Philosophy may not be directly beneficial to the narrow practice of science, but it is critical to almost every activity surrounding it.
For example, philosophy can help scientists answer questions like:
- Does the pain caused during animal research justify the knowledge obtained from it?
- Should we fund scientists to study better methods of farming, or atomic bombs?
- Should we publish the details of the specific mutations required to produce a superbug from bird flu, or omit those details from our methods?
- What is scientific knowledge, and how does it differ from other types of knowledge?
And on and on and on.
Let's look at Feynmann's statement again, that "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."
We're supposed to read that and think 'Hah, yeah - birds don't know and can't know anything about ornithology, how can it be useful to them?!'
Of course it can be useful to them. We study birds to better understand them and their behavior. We use the results of ornithology to make their lives better by answering questions like:
- What can we do to minimize the impact of wind-power generators on the migratory patterns of birds?
- How can we save and preserve this near-extince species of bird?
- How do birds influence the spread of jungles and other forests?
And on and on and on. Ornithologists study birds, and the interaction between birds and humans - of course such knowledge will be useful to birds.
In the same way, an individual scientist can be completely ignorant of philosophy and still be a good scientist - but philosophy (and other non-scientific disciplines) support and inform every aspect of life around her job. If she wants to explore the ethical ramifications of her work, needs to justify support of her work, or discuss the process of science contrast to other disciplines, she must begin to use the terminology and processes of philosophy, not science.
[1] 'Soft sciences', such as psychology, sociology, economics, etc. attempt to study subjective phenomena but do so by directly observing behavior of the entities/systems under study.
> We're supposed to read that and think 'Hah, yeah - birds don't know and can't know anything about ornithology, how can it be useful to them?!'
I think you misunderstood the quote. Birds will not fly any differently whether ornithologists study them or not. That is what it means that ornithology is not useful to birds: the birds will not use ornithology to make decisions about flying. Feynman, as a practicing scientist, was well-placed to say whether philosophy of science informed his practice of science, so his comment absolutely does not reflect his ignorance.
> but philosophy (and other non-scientific disciplines) support and inform every aspect of life around her job.
The things that you listed won't inform how a scientist does science, so they don't really address the core of the question.
It just says "useful to scientists". I feel that my argument shows quite clearly how philosophy can be useful to scientists - maybe not in the actually practice of doing science (as that is practicing science - not practicing philosophy), but definitely useful for the scientist when he attempts to integrate his scientific findings or practice with the surrounding culture.
One might take this question, 'How is philosophy useful to the practice of science', flip it around, and come at it using your approach:
How is science useful to to the practice of philosophy?
Well, the answer there, since we've focussed on the actual practice instead of general utility, is that science isn't very useful to the practice of philosophy.
EDIT: I should qualify that last statement - scientific discoveries, when they overlap with assertions made by philosophers, can help to invalidate inaccurate philosophical assertions, and lend support to valid statements. So it can be helpful during the validation stage of the philosophical process.
If you believe that science can explain everything, your conceptual map widens the concept of 'science' to include practically everything that refers to the objective world, making the concept less useful for precise thought about epistemology.
And philosophy is more directly useful to scientists than cars are to philosophers. For one thing you're comparing a concrete artifact to epistemological processes. We're comparing processes, not artifacts. The concepts developed by philosophers have direct relevance to scientists, see my examples above.
I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it, that would be very nice to discover.
If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is, but whatever way it comes out its nature is there and she's going to come out the way she is, and therefore when we go to investigate it we shouldn't predecide what it is we're trying to do except to try to find out more about it. If you say your problem is, why do you find out more about it, if you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you're going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature, but I don't look at it [like that]. My interest in science is to simply find out about the world, and the more I find out the better it is, like, to find out.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10176173 [1] http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/DCARead?standardNo=0738...
Also, maybe Feynman was just fucking with the interviewer. He was like a physics version of Lenny Bruce. But warmer, like Bill Clinton.
http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-...
Feyerabend's position was far more radical. He (and, again, I'm trying not to misrepresent him, but I haven't read any of his stuff in decades) was trying to show that science is no more rational than anything else that people do, that scientists accept or ignore evidence arbitrarily, and that the existence of a scientific method is a myth. He was wrong, and the Galileo stuff is a good example. On the one hand, you have, not just Galileo himself, but a bunch of other people, observing very specific things, and the same things, repeatably; things that have natural physical explanations. On the other hand, you have some people who didn't see anything, or just a blur. You're right that there was little experience of looking through telescopes. But the failure to make an observation is not an observation. That scientists were influenced, in their model building, by observations, even in the face of the inability of some people to make them, does not mean that science is irrational. That the course of science is complex and mired in politics doesn't mean that there is no such thing as a scientific method.
Yes, I can dig up references if someone asks, I'm just lazy atm.