
The revolutionary ideas of Thomas Kuhn - benbreen
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/scientific-revolutions-thomas-kuhn/
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herodotus
A lot of Kuhn's argument about "paradigm shift" centred on Copernicus vs
Ptolemy. Owen Gingerich wrote an article disputing this view which is
available here:
[https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4258973/Crisis%2...](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4258973/Crisis%20vs%20Aesthetic%20OGingrich.pdf?sequence=2)

~~~
joe_the_user
I think this article misses a point that has become standard. My understanding
is that the historical consensus already was that the Copernican system was no
more accurate than previous Ptolemaic system and for that reason in practice
had as many ad-hoc corrections as the Ptolemaic system. The only thing the
Ptolemaic system had was conceptual simplicity, simplicity in it's outline and
that really can't be determined by a direct comparison of tables. That
increased conceptual simplicity was a response to practical complexity may
seem a bit strange but only if you want to ignore fairly natural intellectual
impulses (if your system is moving towards complexity-overload, organizing it
with simple principles seems like something worth investing in even if you see
immediate improvements).

And naturally, "intelligent design" proponent Owen Gingerich might not the
most unbiased in his judgments of obviousness here.

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

~~~
westoncb
The above is my understanding of the situation too (based on E.A. Burtt's 'The
Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science', in my case).

Additionally, in Kuhn's book, there is an abstract argument in addition to
many examples. Copernicus is one example—and a good one because of its clarity
via the whole epicycle vs ellipse 'refactor'—but not the only one).

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laxd
I remember writing an essay on Kuhn vs Popper as a final assigment in Ex.Phil.
My memory of Kuhn has now been distilled into "Science advances one funeral at
a time."

~~~
pmoriarty
Max Planck said something similar:

 _" A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."_

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glenstein
I think science and technology are closely intertwined, and for all the debate
about _scientific_ progress, I think it's indisputable that a term like
"progress" can be meaningfully used to describe the gains in capability and
complexity of technology over time. I don't think any analysis of technology
would yield to an interpretation that insisted different technological ages
were merely a succession of untranslatable frameworks to which no notion of
progress could be descriptive. Some things worked better than others, and that
was that.

And if it's true of technology, which depends on science, why couldn't it be
true of science too? I'm not even sure there's a clear dividing line between
them.

~~~
bbvnvlt
Science and engineeing may be intimately intertwined, but technology does not
"depend on" science in any straightforward way. People were reliably producing
alloys before metallurgy, flight happened well before any meaningful
understanding of aerodynamics, and most famously, steam engines led to the
development of thermodynamic science, not the other way round.

~~~
glenstein
As Joe said, the relation of dependence is complex. You added an extra caveat,
of it being "straightforward" which wasn't part of my claim and I would argue
is not even a good faith interpretation of the claim.

And all of this seems lateral to the point I was making: can we really trust
Kuhn's arguments, which demand we dispense with a notion of scientific
progress or independent reality of scientific truths, when we would never take
such an argument seriously if made about technology?

~~~
bbvnvlt
You’re right, sorry, I jumped on your second paragraph a bit too eagerly. Pet
peeve against the “technology is applied science” view.

That said, Kuhn definitely does not ask that we dispense with the notion of
science making progress. New paradigms are accepted because they’re _better_ ,
after all.

~~~
glenstein
You're definitely right that technology isn't merely applied science and your
examples illustrate that well. Technological advances sometimes happen with
blind trial and error rather than any theory. But my point was that nobody
would get away with talk of paradigms and incommensurability in the context of
technological progress the way Kuhn gets away with it in talking about
scientific progress.

And those aren't the same thing, but they are close enough that we should
wonder why the rules are different.

For Kuhn paradigm shifts are shifts of largely faith, and paradigms supposedly
aren't "really" better or worse than one another. Any declaration that this is
so is, Kuhn insists, an anachronistic re-interpretation from within a
preferred paradigm rather than an actual insight into truth.

And as the article says, Kuhn frustratingly thinks the whole question of
relativism implied by his philosophy is "beside the point." Which is even more
frustrating than if the charge were answered positively or negatively. Having
that kind of an attitude toward truth is like a banker saying it's "beside the
point" whether you have any money in your bank account.

~~~
bbvnvlt
> Technological advances sometimes happen with blind trial and error rather
> than any theory.

Not with _blind_ trials, but technology has historically advanced (way) ahead
of theory _most of the time_.

See, for instance, Clifford D. Connor's "A People's History of Science" or the
authoratitive (in philosophy of technology circles) "What Engineers Know and
How They Know It" by Walter Vincenti. One of the convincing cases Vincenti
describes is the development of wing profiles. Structured, intelligent trial
and error (parameter variation) to get to shapes that work, but no theory to
speak of (nothing that helps the development, in any case).

The rules can be different because science and engineering _are_ different.
Linked, but separate.

And I've never gotten the relativism charge against Kuhn. In my reading, he
doesn't claim one paradigm isn't "really" better than another. He claims that
when paradigms compete, there is at that time not an objective test to select
between them. That's why belief is required. But again, the proponents of a
new paradigm believe (and do their best to argue, rationally) that it is
_better_ in some sense. More true.

There are many directions in which to move away from ignorance. That competing
paradigms take such different routes away from falsity, that they're not both
on one dimension, and that one is not incontrovertibly and obviously superior
to the other in every way with reference to some imagined objective standard,
does not mean that it isn't a step towards a more true and accurate
representation of the world.

------
ibeckermayer
No wonder our culture is careening off the tracks, when contradictory
metaphysics like Kuhn's are considered important to philosophy.

