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

[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

[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).

incidentally

[dubdobdee]

have you read TK's "comments on the relations of science and art"? -- it's collected in "the essential tension: selected studies in scientific tradition and change", the final essay (and if i've read it it was 25-odd years ago)

i'll skim it to see if we can get anywhere re commensurability and music...

Re: incidentally

[koganbot]

Have just gotten The Essential Tension myself. Read it before, also probably about 25 years ago.

Scroll down to see my response to petronia, where I'm talking about covert classroom-hallway splits in Kuhn (though I don't call 'em that in the post). I don't think those splits affect Kuhn's basic ideas, fortunately.

[skyecaptain]

I'm in -- pending a few interlibrary loan requests.

[petronia]

Thanks for linking the first DDR* post, I've been at sea w/r/t the concept. ^^; It's interesting because I'm beginning to sense the edges of the limitations of the interdisciplinary model, in the Treble Cliff course. That is, we're mostly being talked at, still, five sessions in, and I don't think enough (any) time is being spent on ensuring that everyone in the room is still on the same page and picking up on the same points. I know I'm doing a lot of code-switching (business vs IT/engineering vs academic theory vs music fandom); I don't know if everyone else is. That's the problem with it, it's not enough to have a couple of people from each discipline in the same room. You have to have a couple of people from each discipline with a cross-disciplinary mindset in the room. Which means at the least being familiar with more than one discipline (out of the 5-6 represented) - it's like speaking foreign languages. The practical problem is that this thing could easily be a 9-to-5 seminar, every day of the week, for a month, and not

[petronia]

Oh, and I'm in for the Kuhn, whom I know absolutely nothing about, so. XD

[koganbot]

Shortly after I introduced the term "Department of Dilettante Research," some wag - I forget if it was dubdobdee, freakytigger, or byebyepride - started calling it "DDR," knowing full well the confusion that this would cause in regard to "Dance Dance Revolution