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The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change

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Kuhn's ideas are almost always insightful, sometimes brilliant, though he can be challenging and somewhat dense to read. The last point is an observation rather than a criticism. Unlike some academic writers who use a lot of jargon and unnecessarily big words to sound authoritative, Kuhn is "scholarly" in the best sense -- meticulous about detail and extremely thoughtful in his explanations. There's a lot of great stuff here, just not light reading.

A collection of essays like this is especially nice because Kuhn's writings on a variety of topics can be sampled in manageable chunks of about 10 to 30 pages each. His consistent theme is how communities of scientists come to understand, test, and advance the state of knowledge in their fields of study. What makes the essays so fascinating for me is Kuhn's deft exploration of the inherent social nature of how science is done and how it moves forward. And though Kuhn is writing specifically about SCIENCE as a social endeavor, a number of the insights can be readily applied to other areas.

Finally, Kuhn's analyses, insights, and critiques carry added weight because he's not writing about science as an outsider. He started out as a scientist/practitioner and it shows in the crisp way he explains and weaves scientific examples into his writing. Well worth the effort to read!

These collected essays provide a nice framework for further investigations into Kuhn's groundbreaking 'The Structures of Scientific Revolutions.' At the forefront are the issues of writing the history of scientific disciplines. This is to be contrasted with the philosophy of science, and, to be sure, Kuhn differentiates the writing of a history from the philosophy. What this book provides are more empirical and contextual essays that serve as details to the theoretical framework of "Structures." Kuhn is and will always be a frustrating but rewarding thinker. This book is no exception.

Brilliant!
Kuhn is one of very few Scientific Historians, who happens to also be a philosopher. In many ways, he is the father of coming at the three disciplines in this manner. There are so many truly brilliant concepts in this book, it is hard to really point any any one area that would sell this book.

Some of the themes:
1) How is knowledge captured? What exactly is this learning, particularly as relates to new discoveries? What exactly is happening to the individual as he takes in this knowledge.
2) Why is it that lots of innovation tends to happen all at once and then there are periods of considerably less innovation?

He moves the entire discourse away from just rules based learning to far more complex ideas of learning. For example, so many in education would simply think that if you could get a child to parrot rules, this is learning. However, Kuhn puts forth a wonderful argument for a different type of learning. This plays beautifully into the current work done on plasticity of the mind.

Particularly for the used price, this book is cheap for the breadth of knowledge it offers. Kuhns, unlike other philosophers and historians, writes in a manner that extremely digestible. Definitely get this book if you are interested in any of these topics.

Almost all of these articles consist in pretty straightforward elaboration and extrapolation of the ideas in Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. No fundamentally new ideas are introduced (although there are some trivial adjustments in terminology, which people have made too much fuss about).

"The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science." It is an unfortunate textbook dogma to think that theories are confirmed by measurement, or, even worse, that scientific theories are constructed to fit given measurements, for the following reasons. (a) It is ambiguous what constitutes reasonable fit with data; one person's confirmation is another's refutation, as historical examples show (e.g., Ptolemy/Copernicus, etc., p. 185, and Galileo on falling bodies, pp. 193-194). We must conclude that the tables of data in science textbooks serve not to confirm the theories but to define the bounds of reasonable fit. (b) Most theories make very few measurable predictions. Therefore measurements may be indecisive (e.g., caloric and dynamical theories of heat, p. 200) or pertain only to relatively incidental aspects of the theory (e.g., relativity theory, p. 188). (c) To the extent that naive confirmation by measurement has been attempted, it has routinely rejected correct theories (e.g., Dalton on chemical composition, p. 195, Laplace on the speed of sound, p. 196) and it has turned out that "nature itself needs to be forced to yield the appropriate results" (p. 197). (d) "the road from scientific law to scientific measurement can rarely be traveled in the reverse direction" (p. 219). Successful measurements have almost exclusively been achieved where "the quantitative implications of a qualitative theory led the way" (p. 198, countless examples throughout). For these reasons, "only a miniscule fraction of even the best and most creative measurements ... are motivated by a desire to discover new quantitative regularities or to confirm old ones" (p. 187). Instead, the objective of measurement is "to improve the measure of 'reasonable agreement' characteristic of the theory in a given application and ... to open up new areas of application and establish new measurements of 'reasonable agreement' applicable to them. ... this can be fascinating and intensely rewarding work. And there is always the remote possibility that it will pay an additional dividend: something may go wrong." (p. 192). We all know how crucial anomalies can be, but even without them measurements would be valuable with respect to theory choice since "I know of no case in the development of science which exhibits a loss of quantitative accuracy as a consequence of the transition from an earlier to a later theory" (p. 213). By contrast, explanatory power has been abandoned repeatedly, even to the extent of rejecting earlier ideas as unscientific, e.g., Newton's gravity, or Lavoisier's theory which "deprived chemistry of one principal traditional function---the explanation of the qualitative properties of bodies in terms of the particular combination of chemical 'principles' that composed them" (p. 212).

"A Function for Thought Experiments." Since thought experiments do not introduce new empirical data one may think that the only way they can improve a theory is to isolate and resolve inconsistencies inherent in the theory. Kuhn shall argue against this view. His only substantial illustration is a thought experiment of Galileo showing an inconsistency in Aristotle's definition of speed: two things move as fast if they cover the same distance in the same time. Consider an inclined plane. One ball is sliding down the plane, another is dropped vertically from the same height. Call the vertical height H. By Aristotle's definition the dropping ball is faster: it has covered the distance H before the rolling ball has done so. But it is also slower, if H is measured from the bottom of the inclined plane instead of the top. But this does not prove that Aristotle's theory is intrinsically inconsistent, for it would be consistent if there was no accelerated motion. Thus thought experiments can improve theories not only by discovering inherent fallacies but by drawing attention to "previously unassimilated experience" (p. 261).

"Comment on the Relations of Science and Art." This is an extremely simpleminded article concerned only with reiterating foolish prejudices. Let us examine a few of these. "Unlike art, science destroys its past [and does not have museums] to inculcate craftsmanship or enlighten public taste. ... only historians read old scientific works. ... In no area is the contrast between art and science clearer. ... Picasso's success has not relegated Rembrandt's paintings to the storage vaults of art museums" (p. 345). This is ridiculous. What better description could there be of high school and undergraduate science than as a museum of past science intended "to inculcate craftsmanship or enlighten public taste"? And what works are on display in these museums if not the theories of the Rembrandts of science (i.e. Newton et al.)? Further, "Having seen Matisse's Odalisque, one may regard Ingres' with new eyes but one does not stop looking. Both can therefore be museum pieces as two solutions to a scientist's puzzle cannot." (p. 347). But they can in science too, and they are: Matisse/Ingres can be replaced by Newton/Einstein, geocentric/heliocetric, etc. Finally: "For the scientist ... the solved technical puzzle is the goal, and the aesthetic is a tool for its attainment." (p. 343). Since this is dogmatically stated without argument it is hard to argue against it on the basis of Kuhn's text, but I will try. If scientists were in their essence puzzle solvers one would expect them to be fond of chess, crossword puzzles, detective novels, etc. But instead they like music, as Kuhn points out elsewhere: "Many mathematicians and theoretical physicists have been passionately interested in and involved with music, some having had great difficulty choosing between a scientific and a musical career." (p. 64). Music is not puzzle solving but a pursuit of beauty within a structured framework.

This is a nice collection of Kuhn's essays on various topics in the history and philosophy of science, which should be of value to anyone interested in Kuhn's thought and specifically in the important theory he put forth in his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In some ways, his approach is similar to Michael Polanyi's, so I thought I'd discuss both of them a bit here.

Writers like Kuhn and Polanyi's subjectivistic approach to science are still popular in some circles, mostly because of the west's fascination with the individual consciousness and ego and with the existential and phenomenological approaches to reality that grew out of that. While this is understandable historically I believe that this approach is still invalid, so I thought I'd say a little more about that. But that will involve my discussing some basic philosophy, so I hope you don't mind if I wax a little nerdy here. I apologize in advance as this is a long review and perhaps a little technical philosophically, but perhaps you'll find my comments on the subject informative or at least useful.

Basically, the most important concept in epistemology is the split between the philosophies of idealism and empiricism. Idealists believe that ideas about the external world are innate. Kant was the last major philosopher to articulate the classical position on this, and his influence is still being felt by contemporary neo-Kantian theories and philosophers. For example, Kant mantained that the ideas of space and time were so fundamental that they had to be built-in, innate ideas. He argued that the test of this is that if one can't imagine a universe without a certain idea, then that idea couldn't have come from external reality. While this is an interesting contention, and there is some support for it (perceptual psychologist Eleanor Gibson showed that even at 1 year of age babies can perceive depth and space very well, in her famous "visual cliff" experiments), it is unlikely that there are truly innate ideas, although there are probably innate abilities like Kant suggested, since as he pointed out, in order for the mind to be actively involved in organizing and structuring the data of the senses, this could not occur unless there were corresponding mental capabilities and constucts to match.

But getting back to the philosophy definitions, as many people know, Locke, Hume, and most of the British philosophers were empiricists; they believed that ideas come from sense data and from external reality. This philosophical split between idealism and empiricism in thinking goes all the way back to Aristotle and Plato, so if you understand what it was about, you basically understand what most of western philosophy was about since then. The one exception here is the British philosopher Berkeley, who was an extreme subjectivist, and his philosophy is known as solipsism. He actually thought that the external world only existed because we perceived it, making it an extreme form of idealism. He did this by arguing that since we ultimately only know our own minds and its consciousness and internal perceptions, that there is no real way to prove that an objective, external reality even exists. While there is some truth to this, it's obviously an extreme position, and as result of recent research over the last 30 years in the neurophysiology and biophysics of sensation and perception, as in the case of David Marr's mathematical and theoretical work and his followers, we know now just how rigorous and analytical the process of perceiving external reality actually is.

Although his work was in the area of mathematical and theoretical neurobiology, it has important implications for the entire field of mind and brain, since Marr's computational and mathematical approach to vision revolutionized the entire area of vision research, after which it was never the same. There are strong hints of this approach in the earlier work of quantitatively oriented perceptual psychologists such as Julesz and Gibson, but Marr's work takes the whole field a quantum leap further, giving it a rigorousness and mathematical elegance never before seen.

For example, to mention just a few of his important ideas, and to give you some idea of how rigorous they were, Marr's demonstrations that retinal receptive field geometry could be derived by Fourier transformation of spatial frequency sensitivity data, that edges and contours could be detected by finding zero crossings in the light gradient by taking the Laplacian or second directional derivative, that excitatory and inhibitory receptive fields could be constructed from "DOG" functions (the difference of two Gaussians), and that the visual system used a two-dimensional convolution integral with a Gaussian prefilter as an operator for bandwidth optimation on the retinal light distribution, were more powerful than anything that had been seen up to that time.

Hence, there is very little reason anymore to insist on the fundamental subjectivity of perception in the Kantian sense. It is true that there are visual illusions at the higher levels of sensory perception, but those are now regarded as special cases, and they are being shown to be explainable in terms of mathematical visual field-distortion theories of these mechanisms that can be quantified just like the basic sensory processes.

But getting back to what I was saying before, Kant's view is still popular in some circles, and actually, he was right about certain things, such as the mind having certain built-in capabilities to understand reality, as I mentioned above in the case of idealism. The linguist, Noam Chomsky, and his ideas about an innate language capability are an example of this neo-Kantian approach, actually, which has been supported by developmental studies and by studies of feral children in regard to a critical period between 6 and 8 years of age, which is required for language developement.

However, most scientists and philosophers since the early 20th century are probably either Logical Positivists or Critical Naturalists rather than Idealists or neo-Kantians in the strict sense. The problem with neo-Kantianism is that a systematic ghost of an illusion pervades even the finest specimens of this theory, since there is no strong connection to external reality anymore. Both Critical Naturalism and Logical Positivism were strongly influenced by scientific theories about reality, and Logical Positivism is really just the philosophy and analysis of scientific method and of the logic of scientific hypothesis and theories rather than traditional philosophy in the usual sense. Some of the famous Logical Positivists were people like Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer, and Reichenbach, whose names many people know. Critical Naturalism does get more into traditional philosophical topics like metaphysics and ontology but again, they tend to take their ideas about reality from what science has discovered in quantum theory and cosmology and what that implies as far as figuring out the metaphysics and ontology of the real world.

Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell were two famous 20th century philosophers who were examples of the Critical Naturalism school, and both of them were mathematicians as well as philosophers. Whitehead was Russell's math professor, and in fact, they both wrote a famous work on mathematical logic, The Principia Mathematica, in which they show that the basic mathematical operations can be derived from logic.

Since we're on the subject, I thought I'd make several comments specifically on Kuhn's theory as set forth in his famous book, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's idea qualifies as a psychohistorical explanation of the nature of scientific progress, because scientists must have already made a cognitive shift to a new mindset before acceptance of the new theory can occur.

Other people have commented on similar ideas in the works of Feyerabend, Popper, and Polanyi, so I won't repeat any of that here. What I will say, however, is that this theory, while interesting, makes as little, or as much sense, itself, as the irrational science it purports to explain.

First, Kuhn's explanation of the process seems plausible psychologically but in fact is not supported by the psychological literature itself. People change deeply held convictions and ideas not because of an external paradigm shift, but because they become convinced internally that the new idea is superior to the old. Why? Because it explains the facts better, makes more powerful predictions, or is simpler. In other words, it is a fairly logical, reasonable process. This should surprise no-one but Kuhn.

Second, Kuhn's theory ignores the innumerable scientific hypotheses, theories, and advances that displaced earlier explanations with very little or no resistance.

Third, Kuhn misinterprets the initial resistance to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The real problem with the acceptance of this theory is that when it made its debut (especially in the case of Einstein's General Theory), few physicists themselves could even understand the mathematics and physics involved. Ignorance should not be confused with scientific irrationalism or just stubborn refusal to accept the truth.

Well, I hope you didn't mind my little philosophy digression, but I thought I'd make a few comments about the evolution of these ideas since Kuhn and Polanyi's theories are best understood in the context of the development of philosophical ideas over the last several centuries.

In the last few lines of Magellan's "A few comments on the evolution of the philosophy", Thomas Kuhn was strongly criticized. This criticism perhaps originates from the same misunderstanding of human nature that produced Confusianism and Maxism.
What is brave about Kuhn is that he dared to point out the weakness of mankind. Indeed scientists eventually accept new ideas and theories because they are closer to truth as revealed by the new experimental observations and findings. But this paradigm shift can indeed be painfully long as people first try to exhaust all the means to rescue the old paradigm. Scientists should be trained to have the ethnics of merely pursuing truth and only truth. However, as human beings (shame on them), some scientists care more about their reputation and survival than about what is true. When the majority of a community is like so, the paradigm shift indeed begins as an external process, i.e., the shift is forced upon and not voluntary.

Thomas Kuhn's writings on the History of Science are, IMHO, the most honest, succinct, and courageous available. Nobody who considers themselves a "scientist" or Historian should pass this author by!

"Science progresses, funeral by funeral." - Max Planck

Dorje