Kuhn 6 RESTARTED: Dick And Jane Examine Paradigms
[This is my previous Kuhn 6 thread RESTARTED, since that one quickly evolved into an off-topic mess, and on the off chance that some of the lurkers decide to start posting, I want them to have a clearer conversation to join. This doesn't mean that there's nothing to be gained by looking at or joining the previous discussion, but I want to start the
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Comments 35
Here specifically is the First General Comments & Questions Thread for Kuhn matters
Here's the reading list and my introductory spiel
Here in reverse chronological order are all the threads with matters relating to Kuhn (which you can always generate yourself by clicking the Thomas Kuhn tag up at the top of the page)
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i: better not here as LONG
ii: handy for cut-and-paste to discuss particular items here though
iii: i have notes and ideas and explanations but will get to those later
iv: quite possibly not complete --plz to itemise what i've missed
v: keys words in bold (where no bold the whole phrase or sentence seems key)
vi: plz also to say if iim wildly off the point still
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inventory pt3 p29-32 plus foototes
the purpose of these is to provide, without clogging up this thread, a cut-and-pastable repository of a lot -- though by NO MEANS all -- of the models, metaphors, analogies, resemblances and etc (=MMAR&), deployed in thomas kuhn's "what are scientific revolutions?"
glossary: when a quote has more than one bit bolded, it's because i'm indicating what i consider to be the occurrence of POTENTIALLY DISTINCT MMAR& within the same sentence or section -- i have the sense my criteria for listing was changing during this task, which in itself may be of note)
(ps turns out courtesy the snow i had a WHOLE DAY to get on with this after all: however i do now have to get on with something else!!)
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"The route I traveled backward [from Newton to Aristotle] with the aid of written texts was, I shall simply assert, nearly enough the same one that earlier scientists had traveled forward with no text but nature to guide them."
Not sure of the significance of this particular model, except that it suggests a two-way road of discovery between models (the Newtonian and Aristotelian), something -- a period of time of discovery, or a collection of ideas drawing from two different models -- that can be charted but is not itself a model. Do I have this right at all: You can track forward or backwards through the development of two models, but can't align one final model to the other; but it is not strictly evolutionary, since there are also these sort of quantum leaps (the revolution part) that happen? (Although it seems to me that there are also "quantum leaps" in other kinds of evolutionary processes...but that's off-topic, as might be the metaphor I'm using here.) (I'll admit I' ( ... )
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Kuhn is using his backward traveling route as a MODEL for what, going forward, a scientific revolution is. So he's saying, "Just as I, going backwards, had to disarrange and rearrange the pieces, so, going forward, scientists of the past had to disarrange and rearrange the pieces."
As for the rest of your post, I've got scads of notes on the subject, but I think we should either (1) bracket the conversation for later, or (2) go talk about it as soon as we want, but on another thread, such as Kuhn 5: First General C&Q Thread, where petronia has just started posting, hurrah! or on your own lj if you want. The reason I'm saying hold off is that your question is becoming "What goes on in the midst of a scientific revolution?" (or even "What is the structure of a scientific revolution?"), but that's not where I want to be on this thread.
So what are these intermediate points that (I would assume necessarily) have to happen between two models? How long can an intermediate non-model sustain itself before it ( ... )
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p.16 (middle): "In biology, especially, [Aristotle's] descriptive writings provided models..."
p.24 (middle of text):"To get these results, one must conceive the battery and circuit on a more hydrodynamic model..."
I think both these give a good sense of one (some?) (all?) of the things TK means by "model"
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(interesting -- possibly significant -- that it's so hard to spot these uses)
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Remember back in Kuhn 5 where you pinpointed an uncharacteristically woolly statement of Kuhn's? "If the exhibit succeeds, the new initiates emerge with an acquired list of features salient to the required similarity relation - with a feature-space, that is, within which the previously juxtaposed items are durably clustered together as examples of the same ( ... )
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LateR (IN PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS) Wittgenstein asks us
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I'd instructed us to "look not just for where Kuhn describes scientists using models, examples, etc. but for where Kuhn himself uses models, examples, etc. when he's addressing us." Mark actually does a much better job of the latter than I'd done in my own notes; this is useful in that he has an eye for where Kuhn uses what I'll call "subterranean" metaphors, meaning that Mark's picking up spots where Kuhn himself isn't necessarily paying all that much attention to the viewpoints that his words may be directing both us and himself to.
P13:
i: "two types of scientific development, normal and revolutionary""Revolution" is an apt term for what Kuhn's talking about, and it goes well with his contention that some scientific development isn't cumulative. In any event, the sort of revolution he probably has in mind is something like the French or American or Russian, rather than just a coup d'etat that ( ... )
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