dubdobdee asked me several weeks ago to remind him what the Kuhn questions were, so I'll repost some of them here. Back in Kuhn 5 I asked six broad questions, thinking we could get to work on 1 through 3 relatively quickly and 4 through 6 as we went further. "Quickly" is relative, and if you think of the notion of quickness relative to geologic time, we're ( Read more... )

Mark informs me that a well-regarded philosopher once said something somewhere linking "paradigm" to "metaphor." I haven't read this thing that the well-regarded philosopher said, but I felt like posting a caution anyway.

( Not all resemblance is metaphoric )

Offnotesnotes asks "can music be objectively good?" and Tom repeats the question and Daddino and I comment. Sane people tend to flee such discussion, but I don't, and this was my two cents ( Read more... )

There are some interested people here in Denver who are new to the essay "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" so I'm creating a couple of background primers - this being the first - on a few of Kuhn's ideas; I should have done this for the lj people in the first place, so maybe this will be of help to them, as well.

( You use it, or you are in it )

Major General dubdobdee gave me the following five subjects/things he associates with me, instructing me to elaborate:

pragmatism! r. meltzer! red dark sweet! call-and-response! the rolling stones!

Never have been asked about pragmatism before, so I will give it its own long post, and do the other four some other day.

( pragmatism )

( The usual questions )

I'm posting several passages from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations today not only because they are immediately relevant to Kuhn's idea of "paradigm" (in the sense of "exemplar") but because Kuhn himself cites them in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions when he talks about scientists using paradigms rather than rules. And I'll ( Read more... )

Suppose that someone deliberately says "scarf" where we would say "hat" and says "hat" where we would say "scarf," out of whimsy or contrariness. We could say he's breaking the rules. Suppose someone else - not deliberately, but perhaps because he's a foreigner just learning the language, or a young child, or has some cognitive impairment - also ( Read more... )

What is a "rule"?

Discussion went forward between me and Mark on Kuhn 8, and I recommend you go look, but here's a summary of the main questions as they developed ( Read more... )

Directly following on the Galileo-Huyghens-Bernoulli passage I quoted in Kuhn 9, Kuhn wrote:

( tacit knowledge, which is learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it )