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> The gist of his thesis, if I recall correctly, is that scientists are indeed progressing towards a deeper understanding of the universe

Interpreting Kuhn is an art unto itself, but I find rather that he is saying progressed can't be measured and therefore can't be inferred. He wouldn't be much of a relativist otherwise! I'm not sure but I think he uses the word "incommensurability", which implies an absence of indicators of progress (if not him then certainly some interpretations of his book use that very word).

This is not to say that I agree, but it's the cold logic of it that makes him hard to refute. Rather, pragmatists like me have resolved to ignore him and enjoy our iPhones and lasers.

Nothing in Kuhn precludes iphones or lasers.

His critique is more of the way the history of science is presented (as an inevitable succession of triumphs on the way to a single objective truth, each building on the last), than a rejection of objective progress or the scientific method.

He's the poster child of epistemological relativism in science.... Whether he meant this or not I can't say, but his book doesn't seem overly concerned about history for its own sake. I find it too easy to get lost in the hidden meaning of what he meant or meant to say though, as opposed to what he has actually written.

And of course Kuhn isn't opposed to the idea of progress, he's simply raising the question "what really is progress and how can we know". This was necessary at the time, but the trivialization of "advanced" technology has made his point outdated in my opinion (if still perfectly valid in a logical sense). It's almost unthinkable (to me) that Kuhn would've written his famous book in the current era.

His book, as actually written, is mostly about the history of science.

From memory it's pretty straightforward, short, and not a difficult read. The themes dealt with are timeless IMO, and just as relevant today. I'd encourage anyone who hasn't read it to spend a few hours doing so.

Yes. Before I read Kuhn, Popper, Polanyi and Feyerabend, I had naively thought of science as a means to a higher, more solid 'truth'. Over time I realized that (verified!) observations are more fundamental - bricks - than the interpretations (temples) made of those bricks.

But the bricks won't keep the rain off you.

The data is closest to reality, but without interpretation, we can't take useful action from it.

After so many decade finally heard someone read the same set of books and feel great about them.

Kuhn is never bad.

Popper and Feyerabend are incompatible though. Feyerabend explicitly critiqued Popper.

That doesn't make it incompatible as readings.

It's not even that one is right and the other is wrong.

Both can have right and wrong points we can adopt (even if either of them would want us to take all of their points wholesale).

I took a three hour course on the distinction(s) between scientific and magical/religious thought systems applied to how they lead us to think about what we observe and construct theories of how the world operates. It was taught by an anthropologist and met once a week in a three hour block of time right at the end of the day. It might have been one of my favorite courses I ever took. Kuhn's book featured prominently on the syllabus, and I recall it being an easy, enjoyable read. I think the idea (that I recall taking away) from his book that appealed to me the most was that no matter how rigorous and observation-based the system, what constitutes progress is highly context dependent. I think that notion might hold up better in the current era than it did in the '60s.

Having read the book, kaycebasques' original description is one of the more accurate summaries I've come across.

There is this contingent of people who instead offer an interpretation of the book that it's somehow about proving that scientific progress doesn't happen (different from: we can't technically prove that it is, or measure it precisely).

My guess is that those are people with an axe to grind against the idea of reliable scientific progress to begin with, and perceive some kind of technical (philosophical) justification for their view in something Kuhn said in SoSR—despite the fact that main content of the book isn't even any sort of abstract philosophy, but practical comments on the social and psychological conditions of working scientists, backed by historical examples.

I am trying to comprehend how someone could simultaneously think:

1. Kuhn could have authored a critique (of any actual substance) of the way scientists regard the field as progressing, compared to the actual historical record on uptake of new theories & contests between competing theories.

2. Kuhn's criticisms become irrelevant or inapplicable because our society has created iphones and lasers.

If (2) is true, Kuhn surely wasn't saying anything of any gravity and (1) is false. Conversely, If (1) is true, (2) is hard to swallow.

It's become irrelevant because technology is now the measure of all things. It's an outdated mindset to view science and the pursuit of knowledge as sacred things that must have an order. If the technology is progressing, then the field is, therefore there is no need to care about the abstract concept of "progress of science", as it is tangential in practice.

I think many comments are missing the point though, people care about Kuhn because of his epistemological innovation and the implications of his work on the very idea of science, not because of its reception by science historians, however great it may have been.

> It's become irrelevant because technology is now the measure of all things. It's an outdated mindset to view science and the pursuit of knowledge as sacred things that must have an order. If the technology is progressing, then the field is, therefore there is no need to care about the abstract concept of "progress of science", as it is tangential in practice.

You are making a mistake that Kuhn tried to correct in the revised edition of SoSR published in 1969 where his choice of terminology sometimes had 2 senses, causing critics to focus on one sense when he intended the other.

In any case, you seem to use science and technology interchangeably which of course is wrong.

Reading Kuhn forced me to review what we collectively regard as science, engineering and technology. It turns out these are all different things!

From my notes on SoSR + review of Wikipedia articles, I distilled the following summaries as to how they differ:

Science: systematic body of knowledge of the physical world (observations, know-how)

Science can broadly be:

   - applied (urgent solutions) or;
   - theory (non-urgent solutions)

Technology: applied sci. (that yields tools)

Engineering: applied sci. & tech (know-how & tools)

Kuhn wasn't talking about progress though, but rather HOW progress happened.

Technological progress is how new paradigms can et expressed. No laser disc without QM, not GPS without Relativity etc. and in some sense that's exactly his point.

The iPhone isn't truth, it's just one way to express our understanding of the scientific paradigms.

You're confusing invention, innovation, and fundamental research.

An iPhone and an original IBM PC are essentially the same class of device. The iPhone is miniaturised, refined, and improved, but the principles of operation are recognisably similar. They both have similar technological roots.

You can have steady technological process without a revolution in the fundamentals - which was what Kuhn was interested in.

Fundamental research tends to become math before it becomes technology. Maxwell and Heaviside are more fundamental than the transistor amplifier, the dynamic memory cell, or the valve radio, and you don't get to have any of the latter without the former.

After an explosion of change in the late 19th and early 20th century, the pace of that kind of fundamental research has slowed right down. Existing models and techniques are being refined to create smaller and faster devices, but there have been no revolutions that could lead to new kinds of devices.

There are some prospects for invention - like quantum computing - but there doesn't seem to be any immediate likelihood of new insights on the scale of the revolutions created by electromagnetic theory, thermodynamics, evolution, the periodic table, relativity, quantum theory, and the standard model.

Miniaturization isn't merely building the same design, smaller.

Familiar principles like Ohm's law stop working on small scale devices. Fundamental research in nanoscience was required to learn how things behave on such small scales. Some of that research led to Nobel Prizes and new kinds of devices like MEMS.

But we do seem to have reached a limit in physics; not the end, but the limit of what we can learn with the resources available to us. The revolutions we can look forward to in the near future (e.g better machine learning, implantation of 3D printed organs, safe and effective gene therapy, quantum computers with more qubits) are mostly about new ways of building up rather than learning down. Opportunities for engineers, not scientists.

But then again, a scientific revolution might strike without warning.

> (as an inevitable succession of triumphs on the way to a single objective truth, each building on the last)

See also James Burke's "Connection" series, as well as his (amusingly named) "The Day the Universe Changed":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burke_(science_historian... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed

Not being able to measure progress is not the same thing as it not existing. I left the book with the impression that progress does occur, it's just far messier than we would like.

>I'm not sure but I think he uses the word "incommensurability", which implies an absence of indicators of progress (if not him then certainly some interpretations of his book use that very word). (...) Rather, pragmatists like me have resolved to ignore him and enjoy our iPhones and lasers.

Well, Kuhn was concerned with science and epistemology, so not progress in the general sense if I'm not mistaken.

Technological progress (from simpler to more complex technologies) could hardly be refuted, even from Kuhn.

But whether iPhones and lasers are progress in the value sense, that (with a logic similar to Kuhn's thoughts on science) depends on our value framework. They're not irrefutable progress even for all of us in today's cultural climate (some e.g. consider them regressions regarding experiencing the world directly, intimacy with others, privacy, etc, and think we'd be better off without them, even if we lose portable social media apps, global internet access from our pocket, etc).

Even less so for other cultural contexts (and we don't even have to go to the past; would the Amish, for example, consider an iPhone "progress"?)

"I think Kuhn goes so far as to say that sometimes the old paradigm can only be laid to rest when its last proponents die." Or sometimes the old paradigm turns into religion

"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." -- Max Planck https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck

Or the shorthand version "Science advances one funeral at at a time."

> how clear Kuhn’s writing and thinking was

I thought there were, famously, several dozen slightly different (incommensurable?) definitions (or interpretations) of "paradigm" alone in the text.

Kuhn's a realist... someone needs to tell the Humanities departments this because it's definitely not the interpretation they've been running with!

No, Kuhn represented the "pro-humanities" view. The hard line was from Karl Popper: if it's not falsifiable, it's not science. If you can clearly demonstrate a violation of F = m*a, it's gone.

Popper's standards exclude sociology, psychology, theology, economics, and most of the "soft" sciences. This annoyed many people who claim to be doing science. Kuhn was willing to consider them science, but had to redefine science to make that work.

Falsifiable theories allow reliable predictions. So they lead to engineering, and stuff that works. Although Popper's position is currently unpopular, he wasn't wrong.

The shortcoming with that line of reasoning is that it's still not wholly satisfying. Falsifiability is probably necessary but not sufficient for what most people consider to be science. The problem of induction still stands and falsifiability doesn't have much to say about it. Focusing on falsifiability seems incomplete as a philosophy of science.

Actually what most people consider science is in line with Popper's view. When most people think science, they think the "hard sciences" - physics, biology, chemistry, etc. It's fairly recently that the idea of the "soft sciences" ( sociology, economists, etc ) being real science has become popular.

Richard Feynman called "soft science" a pseudoscience, which I completely agree with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

Humanities departments around the country essentially appropriated the good name of science at add more legitimacy to their "soft science". It's similar to how "christian science" or "scientology" appropriated the good name of science to legitimatize themselves in the eyes of the public. Creationists have even created creationism "science" to make themselves look more legitimate.

It doesn't really matter what you or SciAm think Kuhn believed, I'm telling you that the humanities faculty have used him to cosign the most outrageous anti-realist ideas imaginable. If you don't believe me, just take a class and find out!