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Kuhn's philosophy is a direct descendant of incompleteness. In a sense, all of postmodernism is too.
by guscost 6y ago
Kuhn's philosophy is a direct descendant of incompleteness. In a sense, all of postmodernism is too.
- pfdietz 6y agoOk, I don't see that at all.
- guscost 6y agoI don't think you grok it yet ;) Hint: Every scientific theory is built on top of a formal system.
- pfdietz 6y agoIt has jack shit to do with the social aspects of what scientists actually do, though. And I am sure the vast majority of scientists do not care at all about the formal foundations of mathematics.
- guscost 6y agoIt doesn't matter who cares about it, Godel proved that anything Kuhn calls a "paradigm" must be inconsistent and/or incomplete, and therefore must fail eventually. If that were not true, then some complete paradigm would arrive eventually and be dominant forever.
- pfdietz 6y agoI'm sorry, but from the point of view of a working scientist, or someone benefiting from science, or someone trying to understand how scienists work socially, this is just bafflegab and silliness. It's just irrelevant and of zero value, and has nothing to do with what Kuhn was trying to explain. Sure, science cannot explain everything. There was never any chance it was going to. Incompleteness has nothing to do with it.
- guscost 6y ago"What is the relation between Godel’s theorem and whether we can formulate the theory of the universe in terms of a finite number of principles? One connection is obvious. According to the positivist philosophy of science, a physical theory is a mathematical model. So if there are mathematical results that can not be proved, there are physical problems that can not be predicted." - Stephen Hawking
- pfdietz 6y agoThat doesn't contradict anything I wrote.