Kuhn 6 RESTARTED: Dick And Jane Examine Paradigms

[koganbot]

[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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[skyecaptain]

A model Kuhn uses in addressing us (re: his own journey):

"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'm still kind of at Dick and Jane myself.)

"In revolutionary change one must either live with incoherence or else revise a number of interrelated generalizations together. If these same changes were introduced one at a time, there would be no intermediate resting place. Only the initial and final sets of generalizations provide a coherent account of nature" (29).

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 becomes a new model? How on-topic is this?

[koganbot]

A way that it is totally on-topic:

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 becomes a new model?

For the limited subject of "paradigms meaning models or exemplars," this is off-topic because I don't think "models" is the right word here. Kuhn is not talking about what's intermediary in time between two models but rather what's intermediary in time between a whole, more-or-less coherent buncha stuff (e.g., Aristotle's physics and cosmology) and another whole, more-or-less coherent buncha stuff (e.g., Newtonian physics and cosmology), of which models (in the plural) are only a part of what also includes theories and formulas etc.

There can be plenty of models in times when there are competing paradigms (as in competing "disciplinary matrices") or in fields where there are no and never have been dominant paradigms (as in "never have been dominant disciplinary matrices"). I mean, there are plenty of things that people can use as models in music and in music criticism, even though there is no single coherent thing that all musicians or all critics do.

But that's for another discussion. For here, in the text of "What Are Scientific Revolutions?," where do we find "models"/"exemplars" and how do they seem to function?