I am ready to lead once more: Thomas Kuhn 1, Dilettante Research Revived

[koganbot]

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

Comments

[martinskidmore]

I won't be joining in on the reading, I'm afraid, but I entirely agree about stating and explaining the ideas. I think one difficulty is that there are people in our circles who know vastly more than I do about the subject, and when you are an expert it's easy to forget that some readers know less than you are used to being able to take for granted - today a colleague (I work for what is basically a software house), in a meeting with end users, said we were working on stored procedures and server-side background code, and we'd be starting on the client-side code and interface after that, which he seemed to think was an explanation. Anyone in our department would fully understand that, but I intervened to explain a little more about what that meant, and used what we had just been discussing (a new process and screen design) as an example of what happened where.

There is another, more difficult, problem for experts in this kind of conversation. Not a great parallel, but if I am talking about a cartoonist to another expert (if you'll forgive my claiming that status) I might reference a number of artists they have learnt something from, mentioning the narrative flow and use of light of Eisner and the dynamic anatomy of Gil Kane and the action choreography of Ditko and so on, and the same for writing and for characters and so on, without explaining what I mean by narrative flow in this context or who Eisner is or why he was important or what the similarities are or how the newer cartoonist uses these techniques. Now if I'm talking to someone less expert, I have the choice of not mentioning this at all or explaining all of this. If I'm writing a quick post on LJ, it'll be the former most times. An expert sees so many aspects and tangents and connections, and it can be hard to get the right balance between discussing the ideas reasonably fully without spending days writing thousands of words.

Obviously I am in the equivalent position, in this discussion, of never having heard of Ditko or Eisner or having a clue what many of the specialist terms mean - perversely, this can mean a tendency to overuse some of the ones I have some grasp of, but it mostly means I soon get lost when the specialist terms start taking over, which I think they did on your ILX Kuhn thread.

[koganbot]

One problem is people not being able to speak in a way that the uninitiated can understand, but in fact the problem I'm trying to head off is something different, where the people who use a "difficult" term fundamentally don't know what they're saying. My belief is that pretty much everyone who uses the words "subjective" and "objective," for instance, is farting in the breeze. As for what happened on my ilX Kuhn thread, I challenged the specialist terms whenever they appeared, but the people who used them - e.g. you when I asked you to explain what you meant by "metanarrative" and Alan when I asked him to explain the phrase "the 'no privileged meta-narratives' thing"* - refused to meet my challenge by explaining what they meant. And then, as always, you said you were out of your depth, but we were talking about a depth-laden word that you yourself had introduced. The thing is, the way to bring something within one's depth, or to expand one's depth (to mix metaphors), is to think through what you and others mean by the terms you all are using. Or not use them at all.

*hyphens, classic or dud?

[koganbot]

And since I've linked the ilX thread, I'll say that in at least some of what I was saying about Hegel and Marx I was talking out my ass, not having read enough of them, and other than that I'm as happy with what I wrote on that thread as I am with anything I've ever written. And I nonetheless think that the thread was profoundly dysfunctional, as all conversations I've ever had about "theory" are. And as I said in my main post, the dysfunction itself ought to be a subject for research and inquiry.

Also, I misstated a few things about Aristotle (I should have talked about a general concept of change, rather than calling everything "motion"), none of which harm the point I was making at all.

[koganbot]

Actually, rereading (Kuhn, not Aristotle, whom I've barely read), I think I pretty much got it right ("it" being Kuhn's presentation of Aristotle; I do not claim to truly understand Aristotle's concept of change, but I understood Kuhn's understanding of it well enough to understand the point Kuhn was making).

Re: incidentally

[dubdobdee]

extract (?) of "what are scientific revolutions" here

"the road since structure" here

"black body theory" here

"copernican revolution" here

"structure" not previewed :(

bah

[dubdobdee]

ok the afterword isn't included in that edition of black body theory and preview of copernican revolution fizzles out before the two chapters requested

Re: bah

[koganbot]

No, the Afterword is in that edition of Black Body Theory, but several of its pages are zapped.

Re: incidentally

[koganbot]

Your first link is just an excerpt from "What Are Scientific Revolutions," but in fact it's the most crucial passage, though this one has typos and added emphases. And your Google Books link to "The Road Since Structure" gives you "What Are Scientific Revolutions" in full, though my experience with Google Books is that what pages it gives you can change without warning.