Did Thomas Kuhn Kill Truth? A review of Errol Morris's critique

My recollection when reading Structure of Scientific Revolutions was that toward the very end of the book he gets into some more traditional philosophy in relation to incommensurability, which centers around the technical impossibility of comparing paradigms and drawing metaphysical conclusions from that. But for most of the book he speaks very practically about making comparisons and talks about various measures that can be used to evaluate the efficacy of competing paradigms (e.g. accuracy with which theoretical claims match experimental measures, and number of claims which can be verified experimentally).

The article talks about a frustration of Kuhn's where "... Kuhn felt his critics disagreed not with his actual views but with distortions of his views — with the views of a fictional Kuhn." That has certainly been my experience in coming across discussions of Kuhn after reading Structure of Scientific Revolutions: "huh? Did we read the same book?" Most all of what he says is pretty common sensical, practical, illuminating and informed by history—but it seems that folks aren't interested in that and would prefer to ignore 95% of the book and respond to his concluding philosophical synthesis (which I mostly dismissed as an insignificant somewhat egotistical decoration tacked on to the book).

This bit from the article neatly clarifies the whole issue, IMO:

> The issue here is not the denial of reality, but the denial of an absolutely preferred way of talking about it. Statements can be true or false, but not whole languages. As Kuhn puts it, “The ways of being-in-the-world which a lexicon provides are not candidates for true/false.”

To start, there are two parts to Kuhn's ideas. First there is a historical analysis of the process of an old theory being replaced by a new one. Second Kuhn tries to come up with a metaphysical explanation of what is going on here.

The historical analysis seems sound. I say that because it fits my own understanding, because scientists in general think it is right, and because philosophers of science, most of whom initially rejected it, have over the years come to mostly support it.

Where Kuhn gets into trouble is his metaphysical explanation. He has a sort of dualistic view that leads to a type of anti-realism, though he can't quite admit it.

What he should have done instead, in my view, is to explain his historical findings with a metaphysics from one of the anti-foundationalist philosophies, such as Pragmatism, existential-phenomenology, or the later Wittgenstein. This sort of approach makes possible a realism that fits his historical studies.

Nice to see a sympathetic account of Kuhn from a scientist. I've always felt that he wasn't worthy of admission to the Sokal Rogue's Gallery. (I sometimes wonder if I've been too quick to judge some of the other big names in that gallery)

Read up on that if you're interested. It's much more significant than either Kordahl or Morris.

[1] https://principia-scientific.org/who-got-the-scientific-meth...

Morris must have spent years thinking, "I know my advisor's theory is wrong. I must come up with the next theory to replace it." That's what grad school teaches you to do. (I'm still doing it.)

When the prevailing theory denies the existence of universal truth, you can't attack the theory from within itself. You have to step outside it somehow. Is attacking Kuhn's temperament the plan? Did Morris sit down and say, there's no rational way to attack this theory, so I'm going to make this fallacious argument about Kuhn's character, presented in a compelling movie? Using post-truth tactics to defend objective truth?

Tangential, but the author’s description of Kuhn’s paradigms as describing things incommensurably differently (“claims that were true in the old way of talking might be false in the new way, and vice versa”) reminds me of the way Hofstadter summarises Gödel’s incompleteness thereoms in GEB. That is that no set of axioms can be both mathematically complete and consistent, so we may need multiple theories (paradigms?) to reason effectively and discover all truths.

Morris seems to claim (based on the author’s summary) that necessary a posteriori truths (ala Kripke) provide some sort of anchor across these paradigms that proves newer paradigms are better than older ones because (and I’m a little unsure on his argument) newer theories are still describing the same thing in different detail and we can therefore see that a newer paradigm is objectively richer and more truthful.

However, I wonder as Kuhn did whether this argument is strong enough to handle all scenarios. As Kuhn argued, a concept of Heat is substantially different across paradigms. I would add to the list those qualitative problems like consciousness and qualia that seem, at least at this stage, to require non-scientific paradigms (ala Lyotard) to reason meaningfully about, but in taking on these paradigms we lose the ability, as Kuhn argued, to talk meaningfully about things we could previously.

> In Kuhn’s view, reality is out there, but it doesn’t speak our language. It remains forever alien, non-linguistic, regardless of how well we seem to describe its various parts.

"Reality is indescribable" becomes a bit of a liar's paradox. Why should anyone think the sentence is an accurate description of the world, if accurate descriptions of the world are in fact out of reach?

Of course, it's possible this essay is a sometimes insightful and sometimes poor critique of a separate critique, that in turn is sometimes insightful and sometimes poor, and in turn comments on a treatise that wavers between obvious and overgeneralized depictions of scientific discovery.

Nobody's perfect.

It was not super obvious from the article itself online that this article is a book review.

I thought the author was actually himself proposing some specific theory about truth (or science) (or whatever) and was getting really really frustrated wading through all the storytelling trying to find the specific theory that was being advanced.

Finally I realized it was a book review and that extra piece of context helped give the article (which is fun to read) some semantic meaning.

(I guess I take a different and much more naive view of the history of science and related fields, which is that (a) people are pretty smart, (b) people mostly make the best scientific decisions they can with the best info and ideas they have at the time, (c) a useful way to think about the history of science involves trying to reason about what people were thinking at the time and what was normal for them. Having read this book review I genuinely can't tell whether that's a Kuhnian or a Kripkean or a Morrisean Kripkean view or whatever.)

This affects the language used to describe the problem and the solution. For example you still 'call' an Uber, but you actually don't call it anymore, you click on your phone screen to order it. So when a cab company and Uber talk about 'calling', they might have trouble agreeing what 'calling' really means (e.g., in Uber it already entails agreeing on a price, with a cab it doesn't). This is how I understand what Kuhn means with 'incommensurability'.

As the article points out too, it is not two completely separate languages. Rather, the shift in the underlying model also shifts the language, so that supporters of one model mean different things than supporters of the other model, when they make a statement.

How do you tell the difference between earnest thinking and flip flopping, "a sudden real or apparent change of policy or opinion by a public official, sometimes while trying to claim that both positions are consistent with each other... during the period prior to or following an election in order to maximize... popularity?"

Could we at least concede that when somebody says something that makes your bullshit detector go off, and then they change what they're saying, your detector isn't broken?

There's a mature science, where knowledge is limited but accurate, where new findings cause a recontextualization but no paradigm shift, and the previous knowledge is preserved within its new context,, and immature science, where people are doing things wrong, reaching conclusions with inadequate evidence, and stuff gets thrown out during a "paradigm shift", i.e. when they start doing mature science.

Examples of mature science are physics with the incorporation of relativity and quantum physics, which preserved Newtonian physics, or biology, where the human genome project revealed that there were 1/3 as many genes in humans as was previously thought, at which the field barely batted an eye and shifted in a heartbeat to looking more at gene regulation. Clearly, these are huge changes in the fields, but they don't rise to the level of a Kuhnian "paradigm shift" since the old knowledge and vocab and understandings were preserved.

What's an immature science? Probably the social sciences, or those areas of other fields where there's reproducibility problems, p-hacking, and other dysfunctions. To the extent that these fields have overarching paradigms, they may suffer a "paradigm shift". But in mature science, there just aren't any paradigm shifts, in the Kuhnian sense, happening, because a mature science has sufficient evidence in hand before generating a "paradigm".

Kuhn was wrong. But "Paradigm Shift" is a flashy phrase and it captured the zeitgeist of the time it was written. At this point, anything that helps tame this pop-philosophy-of-science phenomenon is not unwelcome, especially because, yes, Kuhn's writings are supporting anti-realist postmodernist trash, without being especially misread.