
Did Thomas Kuhn Kill Truth? A review of Errol Morris's critique - wormold
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/did-thomas-kuhn-kill-truth
======
westoncb
Software developers are especially well-positioned to understand some of the
controversial claims of Kuhn: his 'paradigm shift' would be to us a
'refactor'. Not just adding statements or fixing bugs (accounting for
'anomalies' would be the scientific version), but coming up with new primitive
terms through which higher-level program statements are made (conversely, new
terms/entities comprising the foundation of a theory).

My recollection when reading Structure of Scientific Revolutions was that
toward the very end of the book he gets into some more traditional philosophy
in relation to incommensurability, which centers around the technical
impossibility of comparing paradigms and drawing metaphysical conclusions from
that. But for most of the book he speaks very practically about making
comparisons and talks about various measures that can be used to evaluate the
efficacy of competing paradigms (e.g. accuracy with which theoretical claims
match experimental measures, and number of claims which can be verified
experimentally).

The article talks about a frustration of Kuhn's where "... Kuhn felt his
critics disagreed not with his actual views but with distortions of his views
— with the views of a fictional Kuhn." That has certainly been my experience
in coming across discussions of Kuhn after reading Structure of Scientific
Revolutions: "huh? Did we read the same book?" Most all of what he says is
pretty common sensical, practical, illuminating and informed by history—but it
seems that folks aren't interested in that and would prefer to ignore 95% of
the book and respond to his concluding philosophical synthesis (which I mostly
dismissed as an insignificant somewhat egotistical decoration tacked on to the
book).

This bit from the article neatly clarifies the whole issue, IMO:

> _The issue here is not the denial of reality, but the denial of an
> absolutely preferred way of talking about it. Statements can be true or
> false, but not whole languages. As Kuhn puts it, “The ways of being-in-the-
> world which a lexicon provides are not candidates for true /false.”_

~~~
trashtester
"Refactoring" is part of the current paradigm, so the act of refactoring is
not a pardigm shift.

Consider, however, that you are a computer scientist in 2012 that has been
working in the field of image recognition using hand written algorthms for 20
years. You are the best in your field, highly respected. Your code has been
refactored so many times that you think it is near perfect.

Then along comes a young PhD student named Alex, and presents a completely
different way of doing image recognition. Instead of talking about
"refactoring", the talks about "retraining" or "rewireing". Instead of talking
about "software architecture" he talks about "network topology". While you are
"unit testing", he is "regularizing". He is still refactoring and building
software architecture, you say, but for him, those are less important.

6 years later, everyone has forgotten about your life's work, and Alex's one
paper has been cited 25 000 times and triggered a multi-billion $/year field
of study.

I think THIS is the on-going paradigm shift in computer science, and it has
just started.

~~~
westoncb
> "Refactoring" is part of the current paradigm, so the act of refactoring is
> not a pardigm shift.

The example you cited to justify that claim is a difference in magnitude, not
intrinsic structure. I brought up refactoring as an analogy to highlight the
key features of another structure less familiar to software developers.

~~~
trashtester
The point of my example, is that the paradigm shift typically involves new
people, with a new outlook, sometimes a different education or skill set, etc.
They often are younger (but not always, sometimes they are just visionaries
finally proven true, like Hinton).

When there is a paradigm shift, there is typically an "old guard" that is not
able to or willing to let go of the old way, and that gets left behind. This
is why the saying goes: "Science advances one funeral at a time".

In most cases (at least in my experience), refactoring is done either by the
same team of programmers creating the original version, or a new team with a
similar outlook to the old team.

This means that there is not really an "old guard" to leave behind.

But maybe you meant some other type of refactoring?

~~~
westoncb
The key word in my previous comment would be 'analogy'. In any analogy, some
elements in the analogous domain have no mapping. I was highlighting the
isomorphism between code undergoing refactors and theories undergoing paradigm
shifts, in terms of linguistic structure; I was not commenting on the social
components of either.

------
woodandsteel
I have a background in both science and philosophy, and so I have thought a
lot about Kuhn. Here are my conclusions.

To start, there are two parts to Kuhn's ideas. First there is a historical
analysis of the process of an old theory being replaced by a new one. Second
Kuhn tries to come up with a metaphysical explanation of what is going on
here.

The historical analysis seems sound. I say that because it fits my own
understanding, because scientists in general think it is right, and because
philosophers of science, most of whom initially rejected it, have over the
years come to mostly support it.

Where Kuhn gets into trouble is his metaphysical explanation. He has a sort of
dualistic view that leads to a type of anti-realism, though he can't quite
admit it.

What he should have done instead, in my view, is to explain his historical
findings with a metaphysics from one of the anti-foundationalist philosophies,
such as Pragmatism, existential-phenomenology, or the later Wittgenstein. This
sort of approach makes possible a realism that fits his historical studies.

~~~
goatlover
> First there is a historical analysis of the process of an old theory being
> replaced by a new one. Second Kuhn tries to come up with a metaphysical
> explanation of what is going on here.

Sometimes this is overblown. The canonical case of Relativity replacing
Newtonian mechanics doesn't invalidate Newton. Rather, it makes Newton's
theory a special case of GR that's still valid for most everyday calculations.

~~~
Aqueous
Exactly - and the same is true with regard to special vs. general relativity.
Special relativity is another special case of general relativity for inertial
reference frames. And special relativity itself is a necessary consequence of
the theory of electrodynamics that Maxwell described holding true in every
reference frame. But it no more replaces Maxwell's theory than brings it to
its necessary conclusion. And even in the quantum world - which physicists
famously can't reconcile with observations of general relativity - Maxwell's
equations are true even though we have quantum electrodynamics - which include
Maxwell's equations as their foundation.

So the paradigm shifts aren't often as earth-shattering as they seem to
outsiders or as Kuhn makes them out to be, because they often subsume and
contain the prior theory. The way Morris characterizes Kuhn makes it seem like
the different worlds of theory, before- and after- revolution, are orthogonal
to each other - or can't even talk to each other at all, because they are
using the same terms to describe totally different concepts. But I don't
believe that to be true in the slightest.

That said, I must admit that I haven't read Kuhn so I would have to rely on
Morris' interpretation of Kuhn - which seems, ahem, somewhat slanted.

~~~
westoncb
Kuhn is very explicit on that the typical behavior is this kind of subsuming
rather than outright replacement. He even points out cases where the new
paradigm causes us to lose the ability to say certain things we were capable
of in the old one.

------
andybak
Well worth the long read. Astonished that the author is a "mere" grad student.
Keep an eye on this one.

Nice to see a sympathetic account of Kuhn from a scientist. I've always felt
that he wasn't worthy of admission to the Sokal Rogue's Gallery. (I sometimes
wonder if I've been too quick to judge some of the other big names in that
gallery)

~~~
solarmist
I’m unfamiliar with the particular rogues gallery you mention. And a google
search for that term didn’t turn up anything obvious to me.

Can you elaborate?

~~~
FabHK
Almost surely an allusion to Sokal's eponymous hoax: He published a hilarious
gibberish paper in "Social Text", with the glorious title _Transgressing the
Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity_.

Later, Sokal and Bricmont published a book, _Intellectual Impostures_ (
_Fashionable Nonsense_ in the US) about postmodern "intellectuals" abusing
scientific terminology (eg Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles
Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard);
that would be the rogue gallery presumably.

It's an entertaining book, and I think those writers are guilty as charged.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense)

------
Animats
I thought this was going to be about the Kuhn vs. Popper argument, which is
famous.[1] But he doesn't even mention Popper. Strange.

Read up on that if you're interested. It's much more significant than either
Kordahl or Morris.

[1] [https://principia-scientific.org/who-got-the-scientific-
meth...](https://principia-scientific.org/who-got-the-scientific-method-right-
karl-popper-or-thomas-kuhn/)

------
tlb
In debates about the philosophy of ethics, it's not unusual to see a
philosopher's personal character brought up in a debate about their ideas. But
this is a debate about epistemology! Morris ties relativism to the idea about
there being two (philosophical) Kuhns, then to there being two (temperamental)
Kuhns.

Morris must have spent years thinking, "I know my advisor's theory is wrong. I
must come up with the next theory to replace it." That's what grad school
teaches you to do. (I'm still doing it.)

When the prevailing theory denies the existence of universal truth, you can't
attack the theory from within itself. You have to step outside it somehow. Is
attacking Kuhn's temperament the plan? Did Morris sit down and say, there's no
rational way to attack this theory, so I'm going to make this fallacious
argument about Kuhn's character, presented in a compelling movie? Using post-
truth tactics to defend objective truth?

------
nopassrecover
Great article!

Tangential, but the author’s description of Kuhn’s paradigms as describing
things incommensurably differently (“claims that were true in the old way of
talking might be false in the new way, and vice versa”) reminds me of the way
Hofstadter summarises Gödel’s incompleteness thereoms in GEB. That is that no
set of axioms can be both mathematically complete and consistent, so we may
need multiple theories (paradigms?) to reason effectively and discover all
truths.

Morris seems to claim (based on the author’s summary) that necessary a
posteriori truths (ala Kripke) provide some sort of anchor across these
paradigms that proves newer paradigms are better than older ones because (and
I’m a little unsure on his argument) newer theories are still describing the
same thing in different detail and we can therefore see that a newer paradigm
is objectively richer and more truthful.

However, I wonder as Kuhn did whether this argument is strong enough to handle
all scenarios. As Kuhn argued, a concept of Heat is substantially different
across paradigms. I would add to the list those qualitative problems like
consciousness and qualia that seem, at least at this stage, to require non-
scientific paradigms (ala Lyotard) to reason meaningfully about, but in taking
on these paradigms we lose the ability, as Kuhn argued, to talk meaningfully
about things we could previously.

------
brownbat
The essay as a whole has several interesting moments. Though rehabilitations
of Kuhn like this remain troubling:

> In Kuhn’s view, reality is out there, but it doesn’t speak our language. It
> remains forever alien, non-linguistic, regardless of how well we seem to
> describe its various parts.

"Reality is indescribable" becomes a bit of a liar's paradox. Why should
anyone think the sentence is an accurate description of the world, if accurate
descriptions of the world are in fact out of reach?

Of course, it's possible this essay is a sometimes insightful and sometimes
poor critique of a separate critique, that in turn is sometimes insightful and
sometimes poor, and in turn comments on a treatise that wavers between obvious
and overgeneralized depictions of scientific discovery.

Nobody's perfect.

~~~
olavk
> "Reality is indescribable" becomes a bit of a liar's paradox.

There is a difference between an imperfect description and a lie. Kuhn does
not say that all descriptions of the world are lies, or that "anything goes",
although he have sometimes been misunderstood as saying that.

~~~
brownbat
Ah. That's not exactly what I meant by liar's paradox.

I just meant it's a paradox of self reference. The liar's paradox is the most
famous, but the set of all sets that do not contain themselves is another.

So it's true the Kuhnian proposition is much closer to "Every claim about
reality is (somewhat) inaccurate." But we still have a massive issue.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-
reference/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-reference/)

Wikipedia: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Self-
referential_pa...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Self-
referential_paradoxes)

~~~
olavk
I don't see the paradox though. The problem with the liars paradox is not the
self reference itself, the problem is that the self reference leads to a
contradiction. I don't see any contradiction the sentence presenting Kuhn's
view.

------
mherdeg
Thank you to whoever made sure this news.ycombinator article title included "A
review of Errol Morris's critique".

It was not super obvious from the article itself online that this article is a
book review.

I thought the author was actually himself proposing some specific theory about
truth (or science) (or whatever) and was getting really really frustrated
wading through all the storytelling trying to find the specific theory that
was being advanced.

Finally I realized it was a book review and that extra piece of context helped
give the article (which is fun to read) some semantic meaning.

(I guess I take a different and much more naive view of the history of science
and related fields, which is that (a) people are pretty smart, (b) people
mostly make the best scientific decisions they can with the best info and
ideas they have at the time, (c) a useful way to think about the history of
science involves trying to reason about what people were thinking at the time
and what was normal for them. Having read this book review I genuinely can't
tell whether that's a Kuhnian or a Kripkean or a Morrisean Kripkean view or
whatever.)

------
wsy
To explain Kuhn to the HN reader, I'd like to make an analogy between an
established enterprise, and a disruptive startup. The startup is disruptive,
because it has re-thought a problem, and uses a different basic model to solve
it.

This affects the language used to describe the problem and the solution. For
example you still 'call' an Uber, but you actually don't call it anymore, you
click on your phone screen to order it. So when a cab company and Uber talk
about 'calling', they might have trouble agreeing what 'calling' really means
(e.g., in Uber it already entails agreeing on a price, with a cab it doesn't).
This is how I understand what Kuhn means with 'incommensurability'.

As the article points out too, it is not two completely separate languages.
Rather, the shift in the underlying model also shifts the language, so that
supporters of one model mean different things than supporters of the other
model, when they make a statement.

------
doctorpangloss
> To me, these “endless textual revisions and supposed clarifications” sounded
> suspiciously like thinking.

How do you tell the difference between earnest thinking and flip flopping, "a
sudden real or apparent change of policy or opinion by a public official,
sometimes while trying to claim that both positions are consistent with each
other... during the period prior to or following an election in order to
maximize... popularity?"

Could we at least concede that when somebody says something that makes your
bullshit detector go off, and then they change what they're saying, your
detector isn't broken?

~~~
tlb
There are two reasons people change their stories. One is that they once
believed something, but later discovered they were in error and now say
something else they believe to be true. The other is that they don't care
about what's actually true, and are just saying whatever they think will
engage or impress their listeners. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" is a readable
survey of this topic.

The second kind is far more common. But the first kind is really important.
When someone updates their views we should pay attention. Perhaps a member of
the rationalist community could prove this using Bayes theorem.

~~~
forapurpose
> The second kind is far more common.

When you revise your software, is it usually because the earlier versions were
bullshit? Anyone who isn't constantly revising their ideas either isn't trying
or is bullshitting.

~~~
nostrademons
I'd argue that human interaction occurs far more frequently than software
updates.

------
8077628
Well the postmodernists certainly cite Kuhn in support of their anti-reality
drivel, but the real problem with Kuhn is that he was just wrong.

There's a mature science, where knowledge is limited but accurate, where new
findings cause a recontextualization but no paradigm shift, and the previous
knowledge is preserved within its new context,, and immature science, where
people are doing things wrong, reaching conclusions with inadequate evidence,
and stuff gets thrown out during a "paradigm shift", i.e. when they start
doing mature science.

Examples of mature science are physics with the incorporation of relativity
and quantum physics, which preserved Newtonian physics, or biology, where the
human genome project revealed that there were 1/3 as many genes in humans as
was previously thought, at which the field barely batted an eye and shifted in
a heartbeat to looking more at gene regulation. Clearly, these are huge
changes in the fields, but they don't rise to the level of a Kuhnian "paradigm
shift" since the old knowledge and vocab and understandings were preserved.

What's an immature science? Probably the social sciences, or those areas of
other fields where there's reproducibility problems, p-hacking, and other
dysfunctions. To the extent that these fields have overarching paradigms, they
may suffer a "paradigm shift". But in mature science, there just aren't any
paradigm shifts, in the Kuhnian sense, happening, because a mature science has
sufficient evidence in hand before generating a "paradigm".

Kuhn was wrong. But "Paradigm Shift" is a flashy phrase and it captured the
zeitgeist of the time it was written. At this point, anything that helps tame
this pop-philosophy-of-science phenomenon is not unwelcome, especially
because, yes, Kuhn's writings are supporting anti-realist postmodernist trash,
without being especially misread.

~~~
waserwill
First, note that you are conflating Kuhn's talk of theories with talk of
disciplines. The introduction of quantum mechanics enhanced the explanatory
power of physics; it also sent alternative theories, which proposed too many
factors or more poorly explained the world, to the dustbin.

On that note, can physics be called a "mature science," then? To reconcile
relativistic and quantum physics—both of which provide limited but very
accurate and useful results—would be a paradigm shift; it would require the
revision of large parts of one or both theories to be able to combine them
without contradiction.

There are core ideas in each of these theories which are not simply revisable:
they are connected with too many others. Peripheral ideas are malleable; the
precise number of genes isn't very important if we can still explain protein
variety (via alternative splicing and other modifications).

