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This is one of my favorite subjects, and I love the idea of negative and positive heuristics. On the other hand, has anyone ever seen this happen? > But, accor

This is one of my favorite subjects, and I love the idea of negative and positive heuristics. On the other hand, has anyone ever seen this happen? > But, according to Lakatos, when the time comes, a revolution is driven by logic and method, not irrational mob psychology: ‘the Kuhnian “Gestalt-switch” can be performed without removing one’s Popperian spectacles’. Even the consensus adoption of General Relativity took decades (long enough for an entire generation of older scientists to die), and the author provides no other examples to back up his claim that "results were mixed" in the history of science. I'd love to hear some counterexamples.

guscost 6y ago
By the way, I'm working on a long and meticulous essay/rant which argues that we're reaping the whirlwind of Kuhnian post-modernism with the COVID-19 situation, and the consequences will be absolutely devastating for science in the long term. If anyone knows a magazine publisher who would go for such a controversial and possibly-wrong piece, they would be welcome to distribute it for free (and exclusively for one month). Contact my username at the normal place.
pdonis 6y ago
> has anyone ever seen this happen? My take on this, largely from reading Kuhn, is that the picture of "scientific revolutions" that philosophers have doesn't really apply to anything that has happened in any particular field of science since that field became a science. That's not an accident: it's because the examples the philosophers were actually thinking of in a particular field happened before that field became a science. For example, when Kuhn talks about paradigm shifts in physics, what he's actually thinking of is the shift from Aristotelian to Galilean/Newtonian physics. That was a truly revolutionary shift, but it was a different kind of shift from, say, the shift from Newtonian physics to relativity, or from classical physics to quantum physics. Steven Weinberg, in a review of Kuhn's book published years ago in the New York Review of Books, notes that, in the latter cases (i.e., in any transition to new paradigms in physics since physics really became a science), the old theory lives on as a special case or particular approximation within the new theory. Newtonian physics still gets used extensively today, because it's a valid approximation to relativity when gravity is weak and speeds are slow compared to the speed of light, and classical physics still gets used extensively today because it's a valid approximation to quantum mechanics when there are a large number of degrees of freedom and quantum interference effects are negligible. By contrast, nobody does Aristotelian physics today, nor has anybody done it since Newtonian physics took over. Aristotelian physics is not a special case or an approximation to any physical theory we have today; it's a totally different theory of physics that simply is not useful any more, because we've found a much better and more accurate way of modeling the world. So comparing Aristotelian to modern physics is much, much more of a "gestalt switch" or "paradigm shift" than trying to compare Newtonian physics with relativity, or classical physics with quantum physics. And that kind of shift is what Kuhn was actually describing. Lakatos seems to recognize that there are limitations to Kuhn's approach, but I don't think he really grasps the degree to which all modern science is one thing, and all fits together, and the sort of "revolution" that took us from Aristotelian to modern physics simply doesn't happen once a field becomes a science.
- guscost 6y ago
  Modern science is absolutely not a single paradigm. QM has been in conflict with GR since its invention. Lambda-CDM is in conflict with MOND and other cosmological paradigms. String theory is a paradigm. And that's just talking about theoretical physics. I appreciate your argument, and yes if there have been no paradigm shifts in the past few centuries that would neatly resolve the problem. But I can't possibly agree, and regardless I would still love to find a counterexample where something which anyone considers a paradigm shift happened in a non-political manner. For a great example outside of physics, I can't imagine how anyone could read the story of plate tectonics and not understand it to be exactly what Kuhn was talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Development_of_the_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Development_of...
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > Modern science is absolutely not a single paradigm. I think you're confusing "paradigm" with "model". See below. > QM has been in conflict with GR since its invention. "Conflict" in the sense that neither one can possibly be a final fundamental theory, yes. But whatever final fundamental theory we come up with is going to have our current QM and our current GR as special cases/approximations in the relevant regimes. In terms of any such final fundamental theory, current QM and current GR would simply be particular models built for particular applications. So current QM and current GR are not different or conflicting "paradigms" in the sense that Aristotelian and Newtonian physics are. They're just our best current models. > Lambda-CDM is in conflict with MOND and other cosmological paradigms. These aren't paradigms, they're models. Both of them accept the same underlying framework for model building. They just make different claims about which models are more accurate. > String theory is a paradigm. String theorists like to make it seem that way, but it's really not any different from any other quantum field theory in the fundamentals. It's just QFT using strings instead of point particles. The original justification for it as a fundamental theory candidate was that gravity just pops out (since the simplest closed string mode looks like a massless spin-2 particle at low energies, and that's the graviton), so it seemed to be an easy way to get a quantum theory of gravity that would reduce to GR in the classical limit. (I think it's fair to say that the jury is still out on whether this promise has been realized.)

guscost 6y ago

By the way, I'm working on a long and meticulous essay/rant which argues that we're reaping the whirlwind of Kuhnian post-modernism with the COVID-19 situation, and the consequences will be absolutely devastating for science in the long term. If anyone knows a magazine publisher who would go for such a controversial and possibly-wrong piece, they would be welcome to distribute it for free (and exclusively for one month). Contact my username at the normal place.

pdonis 6y ago

> has anyone ever seen this happen? My take on this, largely from reading Kuhn, is that the picture of "scientific revolutions" that philosophers have doesn't really apply to anything that has happened in any particular field of science since that field became a science. That's not an accident: it's because the examples the philosophers were actually thinking of in a particular field happened before that field became a science. For example, when Kuhn talks about paradigm shifts in physics, what he's actually thinking of is the shift from Aristotelian to Galilean/Newtonian physics. That was a truly revolutionary shift, but it was a different kind of shift from, say, the shift from Newtonian physics to relativity, or from classical physics to quantum physics. Steven Weinberg, in a review of Kuhn's book published years ago in the New York Review of Books, notes that, in the latter cases (i.e., in any transition to new paradigms in physics since physics really became a science), the old theory lives on as a special case or particular approximation within the new theory. Newtonian physics still gets used extensively today, because it's a valid approximation to relativity when gravity is weak and speeds are slow compared to the speed of light, and classical physics still gets used extensively today because it's a valid approximation to quantum mechanics when there are a large number of degrees of freedom and quantum interference effects are negligible. By contrast, nobody does Aristotelian physics today, nor has anybody done it since Newtonian physics took over. Aristotelian physics is not a special case or an approximation to any physical theory we have today; it's a totally different theory of physics that simply is not useful any more, because we've found a much better and more accurate way of modeling the world. So comparing Aristotelian to modern physics is much, much more of a "gestalt switch" or "paradigm shift" than trying to compare Newtonian physics with relativity, or classical physics with quantum physics. And that kind of shift is what Kuhn was actually describing. Lakatos seems to recognize that there are limitations to Kuhn's approach, but I don't think he really grasps the degree to which all modern science is one thing, and all fits together, and the sort of "revolution" that took us from Aristotelian to modern physics simply doesn't happen once a field becomes a science.

guscost 6y ago
Modern science is absolutely not a single paradigm. QM has been in conflict with GR since its invention. Lambda-CDM is in conflict with MOND and other cosmological paradigms. String theory is a paradigm. And that's just talking about theoretical physics. I appreciate your argument, and yes if there have been no paradigm shifts in the past few centuries that would neatly resolve the problem. But I can't possibly agree, and regardless I would still love to find a counterexample where something which anyone considers a paradigm shift happened in a non-political manner. For a great example outside of physics, I can't imagine how anyone could read the story of plate tectonics and not understand it to be exactly what Kuhn was talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Development_of_the_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Development_of...
- pdonis 6y ago
  > Modern science is absolutely not a single paradigm. I think you're confusing "paradigm" with "model". See below. > QM has been in conflict with GR since its invention. "Conflict" in the sense that neither one can possibly be a final fundamental theory, yes. But whatever final fundamental theory we come up with is going to have our current QM and our current GR as special cases/approximations in the relevant regimes. In terms of any such final fundamental theory, current QM and current GR would simply be particular models built for particular applications. So current QM and current GR are not different or conflicting "paradigms" in the sense that Aristotelian and Newtonian physics are. They're just our best current models. > Lambda-CDM is in conflict with MOND and other cosmological paradigms. These aren't paradigms, they're models. Both of them accept the same underlying framework for model building. They just make different claims about which models are more accurate. > String theory is a paradigm. String theorists like to make it seem that way, but it's really not any different from any other quantum field theory in the fundamentals. It's just QFT using strings instead of point particles. The original justification for it as a fundamental theory candidate was that gravity just pops out (since the simplest closed string mode looks like a massless spin-2 particle at low energies, and that's the graviton), so it seemed to be an easy way to get a quantum theory of gravity that would reduce to GR in the classical limit. (I think it's fair to say that the jury is still out on whether this promise has been realized.)