Kuhn 24: Flash Quiz (Everybody Misunderstands Kuhn)

[koganbot]

Here are the worst five sentences from what's otherwise a pretty good book. The sentences are in no way essential to the book, and didn't need to be there. So I'm just giving you the sentences without the book title. My point in printing them is that most everybody gets Kuhn wrong. There's a mass mental block.

Historians of science have often

Comments

[koganbot]

whether or not the social sciences "count" as something that can ever be truly incommensurable

Not sure what you mean by "can ever truly be incommensurable." Do you mean, "the stuff you're comparing is not coherent enough for us even to be able to see how incommensurable it is"? That seems like a complicated way of saying, "A field can't undergo a paradigm shift if it never had a paradigm [in the meaning of 'disciplinary matrix'] to begin with." But that doesn't mean there are no major shifts within any field that lacks an overall disciplinary matrix (such as, e.g., critical theory, lit theory, and so on). Change in such fields merely won't have the form of moving from Consensus A to Consensus B, since the consensuses aren't there. But we would be dogmatic in saying that a social science can never achieve consensus in the first place.

The Koganbot post you're looking about Kuhn contrasting the hard sciences and the social sciences is:

Kuhn 18: A difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences.

But Kuhn is not saying that a social science can never ever get itself together, he's merely saying that the ongoing debates over "fundamentals" are a sign that, e.g., sociologists and psychologists haven't pulled it together. If they do (or have started to) pull it together, you could say that prior to the pulling-together those fields were in their pre-paradigm state, and that now they're developing paradigms (in both senses of the term). A question for you to ponder is what would that "pulling together" consist of. It's not just a bunch of people deciding to agree on something-or-other.

[skyecaptain]

Yes, I suppose that "a field can't undergo a paradigm shift if it never had a paradigm" is what I mean. "Never" isn't the right way of thinking about it -- and I think that's the issue Watts takes with the guy he quotes (IIRC), that he's chalking it up to some problem that the social sciences can't fix because they are not hard sciences; whereas Watts claims that it's more a matter of framing problems more accurately and having better tools to measure and test those problems. I'm fairly convinced by Watts's experiments in broad social phenomena, and think that his correlation to biology, in which we can atomize or look at macro shifts but can't necessarily both do both at the same time, is important for social sciences (and there's literature to that effect, I think, but there's no definite corollary to my mind to, e.g., micro- and "macro-" biology.