I am ready to lead once more: Thomas Kuhn 1, Dilettante Research Revived
Am embarking on a project of rereading Thomas Kuhn and so I'm starting a Thomas Kuhn reading group here in Denver. The group so far consists in its entirety of me and my friend David (the fellow who taught the intro to philosophy course I audited last semester) and isn't likely to grow, so I'm adding an online component. As always, I'm open to anyone posting here whether you've done the reading or not and whether you feel "qualified" or not. You'll likely stimulate my ideas even when your own aren't worked out. That said... well, see below.
Believe it or not I find this stuff real easy (about a hundred times easier than figuring out and articulating why I like Cassie's "Turn The Lights Off" and Heidi Montag's "No More"). And what's impressive about its easiness is that Kuhn is addressing himself to the hardest practical topic there is, how to go about understanding a mode of thought that you had not previously been acquainted with.
I'm going to experiment to see if these posts can function as a proto- Department Of Dilettante Research, which means I'll put thought into how to be a teacher, how to stimulate your ideas. So in some instances I'll be asking questions but temporarily holding back my own answers until you've had a chance to start on yours, my belief being that ideas you work out for yourself will stick with you better than ones you simply read or memorize. And this also means that if you want to learn much you're better off doing the reading and doing what I tell you.
The latter will usually be an exhortation to "state the idea, don't just summarize it or allude to it," my assumption being that if you can't state it you don't know it or it doesn't exist. Of course, you don't need to state the idea if you know that everybody else already knows it or, whether or not they know it, understanding it is not crucial to the point you're making. And also, if you're genuinely working your way towards an idea that's new to you, I'm not going to shout, "No, you must explain this in full, now!," given that it probably doesn't yet exist in full. Really, what I'm trying to forestall is people tossing words up in the air in the belief that the words are doing work. Terms like "objective," "subjective," "scientific method," "metanarrative," "appropriation," "deconstruction," "positivism," "pragmatism," "relativism," "postmodern," "discourse," "Popper," "Foucault," "Derrida," etc. etc. etc. aren't self-explanatory, and if left to fend for themselves end up clogging up the works. When an explanation needs 3,000 words, use 3,000 words. And a link is not an explanation.
I'm interested in our developing our own ideas, not just our figuring out Kuhn's. My experience with Why Music Sucks and ilX is that, in discussing "theory," people forget the kindergarten basics of communication, and no one seems to mind this but me. This whole phenomenon is strange - and worth exploring sociologically at some point down the line, to see if we can discover what short-term social rewards people gain from failing to articulate and communicate ideas, and why this dysfunction is so important to "theory": how the dysfunction functions, as it were.
Reading list, in order:
Thomas S. Kuhn, "What Are Scientific Revolutions," 1981 and 1987, which is the first essay in his compilation The Road Since Structure, which you can probably find at most university libraries. It's 20 pages.
Thomas S. Kuhn, "Revisiting Planck," 1984, which was originally in some magazine called HSPS 14(2), and now is available as the Afterword to the Second Edition* of Kuhn's Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. This is 22 pages, but you only really need to concentrate on section 4, which is the last ten pages or so, starting at the bottom of p. 361.
*that is, the one from The University Of Chicago Press, not the earlier one from Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962; Second Edition, enlarged, 1970; it's crucial that you get the Second Edition of this, too, since in the "Postscript - 1969" he disentangles the various different things he'd meant by "paradigm."
Chapter 5, "Copernicus's Innovation," and the Johannes Kepler subsection of Chapter 6, "The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy," in Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution. 1957. (Haven't really thought yet how much of this if any I'm going to talk about.)
While all this is going on, I'll be posting about any old thing Kuhnian I feel like, too, since I've got scads of notes.
You don't have to understand all the science to understand his key points; otherwise I'd be up Shit's Creek.
I'll post some more specific guidance in a few days. My main advice is to set aside everything your other teachers etc. told you about Kuhn.
Believe it or not I find this stuff real easy (about a hundred times easier than figuring out and articulating why I like Cassie's "Turn The Lights Off" and Heidi Montag's "No More"). And what's impressive about its easiness is that Kuhn is addressing himself to the hardest practical topic there is, how to go about understanding a mode of thought that you had not previously been acquainted with.
I'm going to experiment to see if these posts can function as a proto- Department Of Dilettante Research, which means I'll put thought into how to be a teacher, how to stimulate your ideas. So in some instances I'll be asking questions but temporarily holding back my own answers until you've had a chance to start on yours, my belief being that ideas you work out for yourself will stick with you better than ones you simply read or memorize. And this also means that if you want to learn much you're better off doing the reading and doing what I tell you.
The latter will usually be an exhortation to "state the idea, don't just summarize it or allude to it," my assumption being that if you can't state it you don't know it or it doesn't exist. Of course, you don't need to state the idea if you know that everybody else already knows it or, whether or not they know it, understanding it is not crucial to the point you're making. And also, if you're genuinely working your way towards an idea that's new to you, I'm not going to shout, "No, you must explain this in full, now!," given that it probably doesn't yet exist in full. Really, what I'm trying to forestall is people tossing words up in the air in the belief that the words are doing work. Terms like "objective," "subjective," "scientific method," "metanarrative," "appropriation," "deconstruction," "positivism," "pragmatism," "relativism," "postmodern," "discourse," "Popper," "Foucault," "Derrida," etc. etc. etc. aren't self-explanatory, and if left to fend for themselves end up clogging up the works. When an explanation needs 3,000 words, use 3,000 words. And a link is not an explanation.
I'm interested in our developing our own ideas, not just our figuring out Kuhn's. My experience with Why Music Sucks and ilX is that, in discussing "theory," people forget the kindergarten basics of communication, and no one seems to mind this but me. This whole phenomenon is strange - and worth exploring sociologically at some point down the line, to see if we can discover what short-term social rewards people gain from failing to articulate and communicate ideas, and why this dysfunction is so important to "theory": how the dysfunction functions, as it were.
Reading list, in order:
Thomas S. Kuhn, "What Are Scientific Revolutions," 1981 and 1987, which is the first essay in his compilation The Road Since Structure, which you can probably find at most university libraries. It's 20 pages.
Thomas S. Kuhn, "Revisiting Planck," 1984, which was originally in some magazine called HSPS 14(2), and now is available as the Afterword to the Second Edition* of Kuhn's Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. This is 22 pages, but you only really need to concentrate on section 4, which is the last ten pages or so, starting at the bottom of p. 361.
*that is, the one from The University Of Chicago Press, not the earlier one from Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962; Second Edition, enlarged, 1970; it's crucial that you get the Second Edition of this, too, since in the "Postscript - 1969" he disentangles the various different things he'd meant by "paradigm."
Chapter 5, "Copernicus's Innovation," and the Johannes Kepler subsection of Chapter 6, "The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy," in Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution. 1957. (Haven't really thought yet how much of this if any I'm going to talk about.)
While all this is going on, I'll be posting about any old thing Kuhnian I feel like, too, since I've got scads of notes.
You don't have to understand all the science to understand his key points; otherwise I'd be up Shit's Creek.
I'll post some more specific guidance in a few days. My main advice is to set aside everything your other teachers etc. told you about Kuhn.