11 ms·

Thomas Kuhn changed the way the world looked at science (2012)

67 points by jimsojim 11y ago

Maro 11y ago
I heard about Kuhn at school when I was doing my physics degree. His famous work 'The structure of Scientific Revolutions' is worth the read: http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-Anniversary/dp/0226458121/ http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-...
kwhitefoot 11y ago
He might have changed the way a few scientists and a few more philosophers think about science but most people including most practising scientists don't think about such things at all. The general public, I suspect, isn't even aware that there is a 'way the world looked at science' much less that there is a different way of looking at it. I wouldn't have bothered writing this rant except that the sloppy use of words like 'world' when all that can really be meant is something like 'the world of science' or possibly 'the views of some academic observers of science' is one of the defining characteristics of journalism (both high brow and mass market). When one claims far more than is plausible one does a disservice to the truth and misleads the interested lay person and when that person discovers that the claim is untrue the reputations not only of the journalist but also of the original work suffer.
- jmcmichael 11y ago
  > He might have changed the way a few scientists and a few more philosophers think about science but most people including most practising scientists don't think about such things at all. The general public, I suspect, isn't even aware that there is a 'way the world looked at science' much less that there is a different way of looking at it. There's a word for the state of these scientists and laypeople: ignorance. Edit to add some substance to the name-calling: There's a certain perspective held by many scientists that the scientific method can and will describe the purposes and meaning behind every phenomena both natural and man-made that have any relevance or importance to our lives as humans. If those holding this perspective grant that valuable knowledge lies outside the ability of science to observe and explain, they tend to view it as irrelevant and frivolous. Those who hold this perspective tend to view philosophy as mere wordplay, and the idea of studying science from the perspective of philosophy (as Kuhn did) as pointless or an usurpation of their position at the top of the intellectual ladder. Feynman embodied this attitude when he said, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." It's a belligerent and proud ignorance that puts a black stain on the practice of science today, and an attitude that threatens some of the most valuable academic disciplines in the humanities, to the detriment of our culture. My brief statement above was meant to call attention to this belligerent ignorance and poke fun at it a little bit.
  - vixen99 11y ago
    Can you offer a bit more than name calling. That's what you get mostly in the Guardian comment section and it's pretty depressing.
    - jmcmichael 11y ago
      Yes, updated. Sorry to have (hopefully temporarily) made this thread look like a Guardian comment section...
  - conistonwater 11y ago
    > Feynman embodied this attitude when he said, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." Your comment still does not explain how philosophy of science should be useful to scientists. It would be much more convincing if it did.
    - theoh 11y ago
      See also Barnett Newman's use of the same metaphor in reference to aesthetics.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      Self-awareness is always a good thing, no? Kuhn's key point is that scientists (like many humans) tend to be herd animals. When you get results that are inconsistent with the public record, not to mention current dogma, there's a tendency to dig seriously for systematic errors. And when you start getting results that are consistent with the public record, you tend to get on with the writeup. Being aware of that stereotypic behavior is the first step in being free of it. No?
      - jules 11y ago
        I agree, but doesn't this mean that scientists should read about the history of science, or sociology of science, not philosophy of science?
- paulojreis 11y ago
  To be honest, Kuhn's work had its influence on my academic (and not so academic) writing: no more invoking the word "paradigm" in vain. :)
- zevets 11y ago
  I read Kuhn in my second year of grad school and his bit on the structure of a scientific paper I found very helpful. His section on what goes in an introduction to was supremely helpful in demonstrating how to frame your work so that it finds acceptance. After reading that portion, I observed that I was getting much nicer peer reviews, and I've since recommended it to several people.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Kuhn's book can be argued to be one of the most important books of the last 100 years, because it shows the difference between how we think we learn things and how we actually learn them.
- duaneb 11y ago
  Kuhn's book is mostly crap. He cherry picks his revolutions to argue his point better. But the overall idea is solid, if not useful--in some ways it's just Marxism applied to academics.
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    Compared to Feyerabend Kuhn is 24K solid gold
captn3m0 11y ago
I did a course recently on the Sociology of Science, and it covered a study of Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Karl Popper's theory of falsification, and Mertonian norms (aka Ethos of Science). I found that to be a really good foundation for scientists, and highly recommend these three to anyone in academia or science.
westoncb 11y ago
I found a copy of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" sticking out of a dumpster when I was in college, grabbed it, and read it. It was surprisingly enjoyable, and surprisingly personally influential. I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about what it was in the human brain that caused this pattern of 'normal science' versus 'revolutionary science' to be stable—and it was time well spent, I think.
OliverJones 11y ago
Derrida and the other postmodern semioticists, theologians, and literary critics can't hold a candle to Kuhn in the way they banished modernity. Each of our personal "social locations" has a huge effect on how we think.
pohl 11y ago
I loved reading SoSR in the Philosophy of Science course I took as an undergrad. I wrote a term paper about how the discovery of quasicrystals didn't fit his model. I'd probably be embarrassed to go back and read it, but I had fun writing it.
fecklessyouth 11y ago
One less obvious area in which Kuhn has exerted tremendous influence, and one not mentioned in this story, is on philosophy, and especially the history of ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre's framing of moral thinking as "history-constituted tradition" was sparked by Kuhn's similar framing of scientific thinking. Except MacIntyre uses this approach to discredit the entirety of academic moral philosophy, from Hume to Rawls. And, while doing so, exposes popular ethical maxims as the arbitrary parodies of such work. He now advocates a return to "Thomistic realism," initiated by Aristotle and developed by Aquinas. Here's one of his papers that outlines the application of Kuhn to philosophy: http://www.ifac.univ-nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/Texte_de_Macintyre_1977_-_Intervention_de_Vincent_Boyer.pdf http://www.ifac.univ-nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/Texte_de_Macintyre_19... On a slightly different note: >Kuhn, like Popper, thought that science was mainly about theory, but an increasing amount of cutting-edge scientific research is data- rather than theory-driven. Science always proclaims to be "data driven." Galileo and the Ptolemaics were working with the same "data." When Aristotle examined the bones of animals, he was working with the same "data" as Darwin. What changes is how they interpret it: what standards of truth and observation they observe in its collection and synthesis. There is no such thing as "raw data."
- robinsloan 11y ago
  Re: "There is no such thing as 'raw data'" -- and of interest to Kuhnians everywhere -- this is a terrific book about climate data, climate models, & computation => https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vast-machine https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vast-machine
- mkempe 11y ago
  Galileo did not work with the same data as the Ptolemaics. He was first-handed, observing and measuring the world himself, which is exactly what those other people were NOT doing.
leephillips 11y ago
Kuhn's really great book is The Copernican Revolution. He was a uniquely insightful historian of science. It's amusing that he took some lessons from the history of science, well known to scholars in that field, simplified and distilled them to the point where even academic philosophers of science could understand them, wrote a short book consisting largely of multiple repetitions of these ideas, and it is this book that made him a superstar among undergraduates and philosophers. Well, good for him.
osullivj 11y ago
Anyone who enjoys Kuhn's Structure should go on to read Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and Farewell to Reason. To summarise: there is only one rule in science, and that is "anything goes!". There are interesting parallels between scientific method and software methods...
- leephillips 11y ago
  I found Against Method to be intellectually dishonest. Feyerabend cherry picks anecdotes from history, and distorts history, to support his pet idea that there is no such thing as the scientific method or falsifiability.
  - osullivj 11y ago
    Anything goes!
  - foldr 11y ago
    Could you mention some specifics? In which respects was it intellectually dishonest?
    - leephillips 11y ago
      I read this book in college (1970s), but the bit that sticks in my memory was his discussion of observations through Galileo's telescope. His observation, and others' confirmation, of Jupiter's moons, the phases of the planets, and other phenomena helped end the Ptolemaic era, and had a profound effect on the development of science. Feyerabend starts with the idea that "anything goes" and tries to support it by describing some anecdotes of people who looked through Galileo's telescope and said they couldn't see anything. He thinks these anecdotes should be weighted equally with the body of detailed astronomical observation, and thinks it was arbitrary to base scientific models on observations of what, after all, were real things. He starts with his conclusion and finds anecdotes to support it. I suspected at the time that he wasn't even taking himself seriously, but plenty of other people seem to have been.
nerd_stuff 11y ago
Am I the only one who read the article and thought the Whig interpretation was more accurate? The "revolution" of quantum mechanics didn't overthrow Newtonian mechanics, Relativity didn't either. They added to Newton's view and corrected it in a few places but to this day the first thing you learn in physics is Newton. There was no revolution. Newton was right with the caveat that if things are very large, very small, or very fast things may look different. To this day if something disagrees with the core of what Newton said it's almost certainly wrong. The fact that the "paradigm shift" from deterministic to probabilistic left most of science untouched should show how paradigms aren't all that important. Quantum mechanics has multiple "paradigms" describing the exact same things and they're doing close to nothing in terms of pushing science forward, some think they're holding it back because so much time is spent arguing about them.
- ctulek 11y ago
  You cannot explain the motions of planets with Newton. Not Mercury at least. You cannot launch a rocket with Newtonian physics either. It will explode, and it did indeed. I don't think you can make efficient photocells either by just using Newtonian physics. So, the new paradigms were a shift from Newtonian physics for sure.
  - nerd_stuff 11y ago
    I've given you a corrective upvote. I agree you need physics Newton never dreamt of for photocells. Explaining Mercury's precession was a big deal for Relativity as well. Out of curiosity, what's non-Newtonian in a rocket launch?
    - ctulek 11y ago
      Sorry, my bad about rocket part (There is a difference in Newtonian and Relativity calculations but it is too small). For space technology it is not the rocket launches but, for instance, GPS satellites, that work with the principles of relativity, that cannot be explained by Newtonian physics. Off topic: I have no idea how this voting stuff works, and I don't know why mine is -3
mkempe 11y ago
Kuhn's theory corresponds neither to the facts and nor to the history of science. Galileo and Newton are ample counter-factuals.

67 points by jimsojim 11y ago

Maro 11y ago

I heard about Kuhn at school when I was doing my physics degree. His famous work 'The structure of Scientific Revolutions' is worth the read: http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-Anniversary/dp/0226458121/ http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-...

kwhitefoot 11y ago

He might have changed the way a few scientists and a few more philosophers think about science but most people including most practising scientists don't think about such things at all. The general public, I suspect, isn't even aware that there is a 'way the world looked at science' much less that there is a different way of looking at it. I wouldn't have bothered writing this rant except that the sloppy use of words like 'world' when all that can really be meant is something like 'the world of science' or possibly 'the views of some academic observers of science' is one of the defining characteristics of journalism (both high brow and mass market). When one claims far more than is plausible one does a disservice to the truth and misleads the interested lay person and when that person discovers that the claim is untrue the reputations not only of the journalist but also of the original work suffer.

jmcmichael 11y ago
> He might have changed the way a few scientists and a few more philosophers think about science but most people including most practising scientists don't think about such things at all. The general public, I suspect, isn't even aware that there is a 'way the world looked at science' much less that there is a different way of looking at it. There's a word for the state of these scientists and laypeople: ignorance. Edit to add some substance to the name-calling: There's a certain perspective held by many scientists that the scientific method can and will describe the purposes and meaning behind every phenomena both natural and man-made that have any relevance or importance to our lives as humans. If those holding this perspective grant that valuable knowledge lies outside the ability of science to observe and explain, they tend to view it as irrelevant and frivolous. Those who hold this perspective tend to view philosophy as mere wordplay, and the idea of studying science from the perspective of philosophy (as Kuhn did) as pointless or an usurpation of their position at the top of the intellectual ladder. Feynman embodied this attitude when he said, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." It's a belligerent and proud ignorance that puts a black stain on the practice of science today, and an attitude that threatens some of the most valuable academic disciplines in the humanities, to the detriment of our culture. My brief statement above was meant to call attention to this belligerent ignorance and poke fun at it a little bit.
- vixen99 11y ago
  Can you offer a bit more than name calling. That's what you get mostly in the Guardian comment section and it's pretty depressing.
  - jmcmichael 11y ago
    Yes, updated. Sorry to have (hopefully temporarily) made this thread look like a Guardian comment section...
- conistonwater 11y ago
  > Feynman embodied this attitude when he said, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." Your comment still does not explain how philosophy of science should be useful to scientists. It would be much more convincing if it did.
  - theoh 11y ago
    See also Barnett Newman's use of the same metaphor in reference to aesthetics.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Self-awareness is always a good thing, no? Kuhn's key point is that scientists (like many humans) tend to be herd animals. When you get results that are inconsistent with the public record, not to mention current dogma, there's a tendency to dig seriously for systematic errors. And when you start getting results that are consistent with the public record, you tend to get on with the writeup. Being aware of that stereotypic behavior is the first step in being free of it. No?
    - jules 11y ago
      I agree, but doesn't this mean that scientists should read about the history of science, or sociology of science, not philosophy of science?
paulojreis 11y ago
To be honest, Kuhn's work had its influence on my academic (and not so academic) writing: no more invoking the word "paradigm" in vain. :)
zevets 11y ago
I read Kuhn in my second year of grad school and his bit on the structure of a scientific paper I found very helpful. His section on what goes in an introduction to was supremely helpful in demonstrating how to frame your work so that it finds acceptance. After reading that portion, I observed that I was getting much nicer peer reviews, and I've since recommended it to several people.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Kuhn's book can be argued to be one of the most important books of the last 100 years, because it shows the difference between how we think we learn things and how we actually learn them.

duaneb 11y ago
Kuhn's book is mostly crap. He cherry picks his revolutions to argue his point better. But the overall idea is solid, if not useful--in some ways it's just Marxism applied to academics.
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  Compared to Feyerabend Kuhn is 24K solid gold

captn3m0 11y ago

I did a course recently on the Sociology of Science, and it covered a study of Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Karl Popper's theory of falsification, and Mertonian norms (aka Ethos of Science). I found that to be a really good foundation for scientists, and highly recommend these three to anyone in academia or science.

westoncb 11y ago

I found a copy of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" sticking out of a dumpster when I was in college, grabbed it, and read it. It was surprisingly enjoyable, and surprisingly personally influential. I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about what it was in the human brain that caused this pattern of 'normal science' versus 'revolutionary science' to be stable—and it was time well spent, I think.

OliverJones 11y ago

Derrida and the other postmodern semioticists, theologians, and literary critics can't hold a candle to Kuhn in the way they banished modernity. Each of our personal "social locations" has a huge effect on how we think.

pohl 11y ago

I loved reading SoSR in the Philosophy of Science course I took as an undergrad. I wrote a term paper about how the discovery of quasicrystals didn't fit his model. I'd probably be embarrassed to go back and read it, but I had fun writing it.

fecklessyouth 11y ago

One less obvious area in which Kuhn has exerted tremendous influence, and one not mentioned in this story, is on philosophy, and especially the history of ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre's framing of moral thinking as "history-constituted tradition" was sparked by Kuhn's similar framing of scientific thinking. Except MacIntyre uses this approach to discredit the entirety of academic moral philosophy, from Hume to Rawls. And, while doing so, exposes popular ethical maxims as the arbitrary parodies of such work. He now advocates a return to "Thomistic realism," initiated by Aristotle and developed by Aquinas. Here's one of his papers that outlines the application of Kuhn to philosophy: http://www.ifac.univ-nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/Texte_de_Macintyre_1977_-_Intervention_de_Vincent_Boyer.pdf http://www.ifac.univ-nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/Texte_de_Macintyre_19... On a slightly different note: >Kuhn, like Popper, thought that science was mainly about theory, but an increasing amount of cutting-edge scientific research is data- rather than theory-driven. Science always proclaims to be "data driven." Galileo and the Ptolemaics were working with the same "data." When Aristotle examined the bones of animals, he was working with the same "data" as Darwin. What changes is how they interpret it: what standards of truth and observation they observe in its collection and synthesis. There is no such thing as "raw data."

robinsloan 11y ago
Re: "There is no such thing as 'raw data'" -- and of interest to Kuhnians everywhere -- this is a terrific book about climate data, climate models, & computation => https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vast-machine https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vast-machine
mkempe 11y ago
Galileo did not work with the same data as the Ptolemaics. He was first-handed, observing and measuring the world himself, which is exactly what those other people were NOT doing.

leephillips 11y ago

Kuhn's really great book is The Copernican Revolution. He was a uniquely insightful historian of science. It's amusing that he took some lessons from the history of science, well known to scholars in that field, simplified and distilled them to the point where even academic philosophers of science could understand them, wrote a short book consisting largely of multiple repetitions of these ideas, and it is this book that made him a superstar among undergraduates and philosophers. Well, good for him.

osullivj 11y ago

Anyone who enjoys Kuhn's Structure should go on to read Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and Farewell to Reason. To summarise: there is only one rule in science, and that is "anything goes!". There are interesting parallels between scientific method and software methods...

leephillips 11y ago
I found Against Method to be intellectually dishonest. Feyerabend cherry picks anecdotes from history, and distorts history, to support his pet idea that there is no such thing as the scientific method or falsifiability.
- osullivj 11y ago
  Anything goes!
- foldr 11y ago
  Could you mention some specifics? In which respects was it intellectually dishonest?
  - leephillips 11y ago
    I read this book in college (1970s), but the bit that sticks in my memory was his discussion of observations through Galileo's telescope. His observation, and others' confirmation, of Jupiter's moons, the phases of the planets, and other phenomena helped end the Ptolemaic era, and had a profound effect on the development of science. Feyerabend starts with the idea that "anything goes" and tries to support it by describing some anecdotes of people who looked through Galileo's telescope and said they couldn't see anything. He thinks these anecdotes should be weighted equally with the body of detailed astronomical observation, and thinks it was arbitrary to base scientific models on observations of what, after all, were real things. He starts with his conclusion and finds anecdotes to support it. I suspected at the time that he wasn't even taking himself seriously, but plenty of other people seem to have been.

nerd_stuff 11y ago

Am I the only one who read the article and thought the Whig interpretation was more accurate? The "revolution" of quantum mechanics didn't overthrow Newtonian mechanics, Relativity didn't either. They added to Newton's view and corrected it in a few places but to this day the first thing you learn in physics is Newton. There was no revolution. Newton was right with the caveat that if things are very large, very small, or very fast things may look different. To this day if something disagrees with the core of what Newton said it's almost certainly wrong. The fact that the "paradigm shift" from deterministic to probabilistic left most of science untouched should show how paradigms aren't all that important. Quantum mechanics has multiple "paradigms" describing the exact same things and they're doing close to nothing in terms of pushing science forward, some think they're holding it back because so much time is spent arguing about them.

ctulek 11y ago
You cannot explain the motions of planets with Newton. Not Mercury at least. You cannot launch a rocket with Newtonian physics either. It will explode, and it did indeed. I don't think you can make efficient photocells either by just using Newtonian physics. So, the new paradigms were a shift from Newtonian physics for sure.
- nerd_stuff 11y ago
  I've given you a corrective upvote. I agree you need physics Newton never dreamt of for photocells. Explaining Mercury's precession was a big deal for Relativity as well. Out of curiosity, what's non-Newtonian in a rocket launch?
  - ctulek 11y ago
    Sorry, my bad about rocket part (There is a difference in Newtonian and Relativity calculations but it is too small). For space technology it is not the rocket launches but, for instance, GPS satellites, that work with the principles of relativity, that cannot be explained by Newtonian physics. Off topic: I have no idea how this voting stuff works, and I don't know why mine is -3

mkempe 11y ago

Kuhn's theory corresponds neither to the facts and nor to the history of science. Galileo and Newton are ample counter-factuals.