I've had Kuhn's classic on the shelf since college, but somehow never gotten around to reading the whole thing. Which in a way is too bad, since it could have saved me a lot of time -- Kuhn articulates more or less the same beef I've had with science for many years now, but in much clearer and more concise form. The book is a classic for very good reasons.
Kuhn's basic thesis is so well known that it's hardly worth spending much time repeating it. Science does not progress towards truth through successive falsification, as if asymptotically approaching some limit. Instead, it progresses through revolutionary shifts between completely incompatible paradigms, shifts which are catalyzed from within by the way each round of "normal", or paradigmatic, science extends and develops the paradigm it unquestioningly takes to be the true model of reality. In short, Kuhn takes science to be an evolutionary process where new scientific theories arise like new species that simply out-compete the old ones, rather than somehow disproving them. This process tends to produce theories of increasing complexity, scope, and accuracy that can legitimately be seen as 'progress' in some sense. But as with Neo-Darwinian evolution, this isn't progress towards some one true final species.
While I was already familiar with, and largely agreed with, this thesis, reading the original version of it was still rewarding for several reasons. First, because you can clearly hear Kuhn's tone, which is in marked contrast to many of the people who popularized his idea. As he points out in the postscript, Kuhn does not consider himself a relativist. On the contrary, he began life as a physicist and thinks of his historical and philosophical project as being more, not less, 'scientific' and empirical about how science actually works. At no point does he suggest anything close to the idea that scientists can just make up whatever theory they like, that all theories are equally good, or that the sole factor in the acceptance of a paradigm is simple social consensus. He is even a firm believer in the 'progress' of science. However, as the quotes suggest, since Kuhn rethinks the very structure of science, his theory changes what we mean by the terms science and progress. He wants us to see that since science isn't the successively closer approximation of truth we took it to be, it doesn't progress the way our textbooks teach us. And while he cannot, by hypothesis, argue that this is a truer view of the scientific enterprise, he does a fine job of putting forward all kinds of perfectly empirical and theoretical reasons to convince us we should adopt this view of science. So while he he takes seriously the observation that all the science we know of is practiced by a certain species of hairless chimp, he does not intend to suggest that science is merely a social construct. We should recognize the reductionist relativist position for what it is historically -- a weaponization of Kuhn by struggling humanities departments.
Second, I was delighted to discover the extended use he made of the gestalt switch model for perception. Scientific revolutions take us from seeing the duck to seeing the rabbit. After a phase shift, the same data crystalizes in a new way. Today, we could make the same point even more effectively by discussing Predictive Processing and the Bayesian Brain framework. Kuhn actually already moves in this direction by repeatedly arguing that scientists are not simply interpreting neutral facts and assembling a theory from a sea of bottom up data, but are using their prior training to directly perceive the entities their theory posits from the top down as real. Scientific revolutions are the sudden shifts in scientific perception triggered when experimental errors and theoretical anomalies reach a critical threshold that causes us to adopt a new set of priors, a new paradigm. I think part of what made Kuhn's book controversial was the way this inverts the flow of information in our usual model of perception; it's hard to convince most folks that they are actively constructing and inferring their world (and self) when it feels like these things are simply given to them. Of course, if you've already drunk the kool-aid, this controversial analogy is part of what makes the book brilliant.
No comments:
Post a Comment