I asked this of B. Michael over on Tumblr, so I thought I ought to ask it of you all as well ( Read more... )

Int: In Philosophy And The Mirror of Nature, you attacked Putnam's early philosophy. What do you think of his more recent work?

Rorty: I think our views are practically indistinguishable, but he doesn't. He thinks I'm a relativist and he isn't. And I think: if I'm a relativist, then he's one too.

Int: Why do you think Putnam sees you as a ( Read more... )

Meme from catsgomiaow

( meme )

What I posted on girlboymusic's tumblr thread after she'd claimed that "PUMPKIN IS NOT A VEGETABLE. IT'S A FRUIT. SCIENCE." Relevant to Kuhn's idea of incommensurability; the point I always make with the botany-cookery distinction is that one can easily hold both nomenclatures in mind simultaneously, despite their being incommensurable; so knowing ( Read more... )

So, the rooms in our* house were waist deep in water, and Nietzsche - one of the people there - insisted that to be true philosophers we needed to swim underwater.

*our?

I like this response I just made to Nate on the several-days-old pain thread, so I'm reposting here so it doesn't get lost ( Read more... )

tarigwaemir asks in the Kuhn 20 thread whether the quantum revolution is really a revolution,* seeing as we still use classical mechanics as "a valid approximation for certain frames of reference." Kuhn would emphatically say yes it's a revolution (and so would I, though my poor knowledge of physics makes my "yes" less impressive than his). In Structure Kuhn ( Read more... )

The term "paradigm shift" has made it into the common language as "a fundamental change in the way of seeing or doing something." Of course, many people's threshold for what counts as "fundamental" or "change" is really low, and "paradigm shift" is usually what people want the other guy to undergo so that his ideas will come to match the ones we've ( Read more... )

Oliver Morton in the New York Times (Found in Transit): One day, over a lunch mostly devoted to an enthusiastic if only partially successful attempt to turn me on to the isotopic intricacies of the Earth's sulphur cycle, my friend Kevin Zahnle summed up the case for finding out how common complex biospheres are on planets around other stars: "It is ( Read more... )

Working away on the question of the distinction that Kuhn draws between rules and paradigms, and why he thinks it's important to draw such a distinction:

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions p. viii: I was struck by the number and extent of overt disagreements between social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific ( Read more... )