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Comment by woodandsteel | Hacker News Reader

Whether or not Kuhn was a radical relativist, a great many intellectuals today are.

Radical relativism rests on Cartesian dualism. This is a philosophical doctrine that, as anyone who has studied philosophy knows, is highly problematic. In the last century or so it has been rejected by a long string of major philosophers, include Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Whitehead, the later Wittgenstein, Strawson, Putnam, Dewey, Peirce, and James. Kuhn, alas, apparently was unaware of this.

Also, Kuhn believed that James was right when he said that the mind of the infant is a ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion’. However, this claim was made before there had been any scientific investigation of infant perception. In recent decades there has been a great deal such research, and it has been determined that infants do perceive the world, and according to universal principles.

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The relativist position in modern philosophy of science has little or nothing to do with Cartesian dualism; it has more in common with the incompleteness theorem in certain respects.

The short version is that any theory of observations (i.e., scientific theory) necessarily defines the observational process and therefore the observations themselves, so that it is impossible to separate an explanation from its explanandum. What's relativist about this is that the very thing you are explaining by the theory is implicit in the theory, so that what you have are a series of paradigms or theories that replace one after the other.

This isn't to say that we don't predict things better, or even that there is no reality separate from the theory, only that it doesn't matter at some level.

All of this too is sort of distinct from what Kuhn is remembered for, which is the social nature of science, which is all too real.

Scientists are often in denial about these social factors, which is naive at best and dangerous at worst. Humans are not conduits of God; they are imperfect machines that are part of the system they are studying.

My sense is that Morris (who I respect immensely for his work) is kind of fighting a strawman argument whose depths he doesn't entirely understand, because of some personal conflict he hasn't come to terms with (ironically, given the nature of what he is arguing against).

>The short version is that any theory of observations (i.e., scientific theory) necessarily defines the observational process and therefore the observations themselves, so that it is impossible to separate an explanation from its explanandum.

What I am saying is that all the different scientific theories are ultimately based on a universal understanding of reality that is in turn due to the universal nature of the human organism and its engagements with the real world. That's why I included the last paragraph in my comment.

But this is ignoring what is is probably the most harmful influence of Kuhn -- the whole idea of "paradigm shifts". For a while nearly every new finding was hyped as a "new paradigm" thanks to Kuhn's SSR -- in the field of statistical genetics, Joe Felsenstein used to joke that he owed his success to the fact that he was the only one doing boring "normal science" in the 1970s rather than trying to shift paradigms.

I see contemporary radical relativism as being inevitable.

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