ANKI END
Thomas Kuhn’s book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolution,” shattered traditional myths about science, especially empiricist ones. He showed that scientific behavior has little to do traditional philosophical theories of rationality and knowledge.
In Kuhn’s theory, a paradigm is a a whole way of doing science in some particular field. It is comprised of:
* A package of claims about the world
* Methods for gathering and analyzing data
* Habits of scientific thought and action
-> Scientific revolutions occur when one paradigm replaces another
* So observational data and logic alone can’t cause a paradigm shift, because different paradigms include within them different rules for treating data and assessing theories.
‘Paradigm’ (before Kuhn) meant an illustrative example of something, on which other cases can be modeled.
Paradigm (broad sense): A whole way of doing science – a package of ideas and methods, which when combined, make up both a view of the world and a way of doing science.
Paradigm (narrow sense): Examples that serve as models, inspiring and directing further work. A paradigm in the narrow sense is a specific achievement, or an exemplar that exists within a broader paradigm– for example:
Mendel’s experiments with peas which eventually became the basis of
modern genetics.
Or the exemplary part of a paradigm in question could be the formulation of a set of equations or laws – for example:Newton’s laws of motion
Maxwell’s equations describing electromagnetism
Normal Science: Well-organized scientific work that occurs within the framework provided by a paradigm.
* Scientists doing this kind of science:
* agree on which problems are important,
* agree on how to approach these problems
* agree on how to assess possible solutions
* agree on what the world is like (in broad outlines)
Permanent Openness
Popper’s science is defined by permanent openness which encourages a permanent and all-encompassing critical stance even towards fundamental ideas in a scientific field.
Kuhn’s science asserts that science doesn’t exhibit permanent opennessto the testing of fundamental ideas, and that it would be worse off if that was the case
Scientific Change
Popper’s science proceeds via a single process of conjecture and refutation, so revolutions are just different in degree compared to what goes on most of the time, with bigger conjectures + more dramatic refutations
Kuhn’s science has two distinct kinds of change, which are bridged by crisis science, a period of unstable stasis:
Change within normal science
Revolutionary science
Both types have different epistemological features:
Concepts like justification, rationality, and progress have to be used very differently to describe each type of science, because they can be easily used for normal science, but not revolutionary science
Kuhn addressed philosophical questions about reason and evidence by examining the history of science and connecting them to each other.
Most fascinating feature of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” according to Godfrey-Smith:
Emphasis on the arbitrary, personal nature of factors that influence scientific decisions + rigidity of scientific indoctrination in students + the ‘conceptual boxes’ that nature gets forced into by scientists
The suggestion that these features are the key to science’s success and progress
Narrow science = paradigm in the narrow sense
* Work inspired by a striking achievement the provides a basis for further work
All scientific fields begin in a state of pre-paradigm science in which work is not well-organized or very effective.
Scientific fields progress to normal science when a striking piece of work appears that provides insight into the workings of some part of the world, and supplies a model for further investigation.
Examples of paradigms:
Newton’s paradigm
Einstein’s paradigm
Skinnerian Behaviorism
Theoretical claim: Learning is the same in all animals
Theoretical claim: Learning proceeds by reinforcement.
Behaviors with good consequences tend to be repeated
Behaviors with bad consequences tend not to be repeated
A set of experimental tools
Statistical techniques used to analyze data about various habits and skills for working out relevant and interesting experiments
Modern molecular genetics
Theoretical claim: Genes are made of DNA in all organisms except some viruses
Theoretical claim: Genes have their effects by producing protein molecules and regulation other genes
Theoretical claim: Nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) specify the structure of proteins, but not vice versa
A set of techniques for sequencing genes, producing and studying mutations, and analyzing the similarity of different genes.
-> A paradigm’s role is to organize scientific work by coordinating the work of individuals into an efficient collective enterprise a.k.a. concensus-forging
What distinguishes normal science from other kids of science is the absence of debate about fundamentals.
* Cooperation and consensus require closing off of debate about fundamentals.
Normal science = puzzle-solving within the existing paradigm using its tools to fit new phenomena within its framework
* a puzzle is something we haven’t yet solved, but which we think does have a solution, so normal science applies concepts to issues that the paradigm suggests should be solvable.
* While puzzles are trivial, that’s the point – they can reveal deep new facts about the world via the well-organized machine of normal science
-> In Kuhn’s normal science, fundamental principles are insulated from refutation. So normal scientists extend the paradigm theoretically and experimentally to deal with new cases.
Happens only when:
A critical mass of anomalies has arisen
A rival paradigm has appeared
Anomaly: A puzzle that resists solution. When anomalies accumulate into a critical mass, it triggers a crisis – a.k.a. crisis science
Natural science is inherently self-destructive in this way. The stimulus that triggers crisis science is usually a deeper problem that reveals the inadequacies of the paradigm.
Crisis science: A special period when an existing paradigm has lost the ability to inspire and guide scientists, but when no new paradigm has emerged to get the field back on track. -> Like a phase transition
-> This balance exists implicitly in the social structures and transmitted traditions of scientific behavior, and in the quirks of the scientific mind. It can’t exist in a set of explicit rules
-> willingness to revise ideas in response to observations can go too far
If the simplest forms of empiricist thinking prevailed, people would throw ideas away too quickly when unexpected observations appeared, and chaos would result.
In contrast, if science was completely unresponsive to empirical failures, conceptual advance would grind to a halt.
Paradigms function to organize scientific work
Normal science extends upon and refines a paradigm
Anomalies arise and eventually reach a critical mass leading to crisis
Insistence that there’s only one paradigm per scientific field at a time
Exaggeration of the commitment a normal scientist should have to a paradigm, wherein a scientific education = indoctrination, leading to a “deep faith” in their paradigm.
Tenacious/strong commitment isn’t really prevalent in real science
Strong commitment isn’t necessarily a good thing because it can hamper open-mindedness
Science depends on the good normal scientists’ keen interest in puzzle-solving for its own sake.