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

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions

by jimsojim • 11 years ago

67 83 11 years ago

Maro• 11 years 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-...

kwhitefoot• 11 years 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.

jmcmichael6• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

conistonwater2• 11 years 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.

zornthewise• 11 years ago

My reading of Feynman is a little different: I think the point is that philosophy of science has only analysed history so far and has never by itself brought about a change in the way science is done.

This is not to say that the philosophy is useless or that it will never influence science in the future - Feynman is just stating how things have been.

Put another way, I simply don't see philosophy of science as it is helping someone do better science. I would be very interested if this were false.

jules5• 11 years ago

This is a popular view that philosophers have about scientists, but as usual it fails to mention how exactly philosophy of science has been or is to be useful to scientists. Ironically, science has been very influential in advancing the state of philosophy.

nerd_stuff10• 11 years ago

I don't think what Feynman said was any more belligerent than kicking an unwanted guest out of one's house.

JesperRavn• 11 years ago

I agree with the sibling comment[0] on the interpretation of Feynman's quote. Also, rejecting the usefulness of philosophy of science doesn't imply accepting the view 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. I think the following is a good summary of Feynman's lack of commitment to any philosophical viewpoint[1]:

I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it, that would be very nice to discover.

If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is, but whatever way it comes out its nature is there and she's going to come out the way she is, and therefore when we go to investigate it we shouldn't predecide what it is we're trying to do except to try to find out more about it. If you say your problem is, why do you find out more about it, if you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you're going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature, but I don't look at it [like that]. My interest in science is to simply find out about the world, and the more I find out the better it is, like, to find out.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10176173 [1] http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/DCARead?standardNo=0738...

mirimir3• 11 years ago

I don't know what Feynman was talking about, when he said that. Much philosophy of science is bullshit, in my considered opinion. But Kuhn's and Popper's work, for example, are not. And I'd be very surprised if Feynman claimed that they were.

Also, maybe Feynman was just fucking with the interviewer. He was like a physics version of Lenny Bruce. But warmer, like Bill Clinton.

paulojreis• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

selimthegrim5• 11 years ago

Compared to Feyerabend Kuhn is 24K solid gold

captn3m0• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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_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• 11 years 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

mkempe3• 11 years 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.

leephillips4• 11 years 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.

osullivj2• 11 years 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...

leephillips4• 11 years 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.

osullivj2• 11 years ago

Anything goes!

foldr6• 11 years ago

Could you mention some specifics? In which respects was it intellectually dishonest?

selimthegrim5• 11 years ago

Feyerabend didn't understand QM whatsoever, not just on some philosophical level. Among his other sins, he went around parading van Leeuwen's theorem like it was some deeply profound philosophical statement.

Yes, I can dig up references if someone asks, I'm just lazy atm.

foldr6• 11 years ago

Could you? I couldn't find anything by Feyerabend that mentions that particular theorem.

pvitz• 11 years ago

I would rather suggest to read Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery or works of Lakatos before reading Feyerabend's Against Method. Feyerabend was a former assistant of Popper and mainly criticised his methodological views.

nerd_stuff10• 11 years 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.

ctulek3• 11 years 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_stuff10• 11 years 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?

mkempe3• 11 years ago

Given his methods and genius, I trust if Newton had had the (modern) data about Mercury's orbit he would have developed further insights in his understanding of the laws of nature.

He explicitly rejected dogmatism and did not claim that his identifications were to be used against new facts if and when such would be discovered.

akamaka3• 11 years ago

You're right, and it's the article fault for poorly explaining Kuhn's thinking.

Newton's laws have never been overturned, merely refined, so we've never truly shifted away from a Newtonian paradigm.

A better example (and one that Kuhn himself used), would be phlogiston theory, which was fully overturned when oxygen was redefined as an element and not as simply being "dephlogisticated air".

nerd_stuff10• 11 years ago

You have a point but I forgot we were going back to Alchemy and before.

Phlogiston theory was overturned but the idea of oxygen is still standing strong despite the major advances in chemistry since 1773. Other puzzle pieces have been placed around it but they're additions to it. Even if the universe turns out to be a hologram the idea of oxygen will survive.

Once the big puzzle pieces are found they're rarely removed. Since the big shift towards empiricism most "revolutions" and paradigm shifts are happening in new areas or at different scales than the old ones. Much of what are being called revolutions I would call explorations of the unknown.

analog313• 11 years ago

I would describe the "revolution" in the following sense. Workers were aware of both successes and failures of the classical model, and did want to throw the baby out with the bath water. They adopted as a ground rule, that any candidate for a new theory had to contain the old theory as a corner case.

Rather than describing a dichotomy between conservatism and revolution, I'd say that the revolutionaries searched for and found a hybrid of the two.

I also think that if any departure from steady-state is defined as a "revolution," then it's self fulfilling.

brudgers4• 11 years ago

Re-interpretation of Newton in light of quantum mechanics and relativity are part and parcel of scientific revolution according to Kuhn. Science weaves a narrative of progress. The extreme example, and the subject of Kuhn's earlier work was the Copernican revolution: we still get the heliocentric model presented as an astronomical refinement not a form of heresy. The standard science narrative doesn't see Newton through his own eyes, as principally a theologian, either: he spent a lot of effort trying to prove the existence of god [so did Descartes despite Discourse on Method].

None of this is to downplay their intellectual contributions. It is only to illustrate Kuhn's assertion that science constantly redefines past literature as continuous with incompatible contemporary beliefs: any interpretation of Newton's work orthogonally to the existence of god does not accurately depict his views.

nerd_stuff10• 11 years ago

Newton's scientific ideas, which are what matter here, remain largely untouched since they were published in the late 1600's. The fact that you'd resort to bringing up how little science focuses on his beliefs in things like numerology and alchemy doesn't bode well for the strength of Kuhn's work.

There's his scientific work which is widely available, and then there's his personal beliefs. I could really care less if we don't talk about his theology, but if you're accusing science of being dishonest about his mathematical and scientific contributions that's a claim which requires better evidence than you've provided.

jules5• 11 years ago

Newtonian mechanics is the mathematical limit of quantum mechanics for ħ -> 0. It is still taught to every physics major. It is still useful. We use it to calculate whether a bridge will collapse, to simulate car crashes, to simulate water flow, and I believe even NASA uses it to calculate rocket trajectories. The heliocentric model on the other hand is just wrong.

It is important to make this distinction if you want to accurately understand scientific revolutions. It is not accurate to think that quantum mechanics was just this new thing that replaced Newtonian mechanics. One has to keep the precise correspondence between Newtonian and quantum mechanics in mind. This isn't just a narrative that scientists use to feel good about Newton.

This brings into question whether revolution is a good word for this phenomenon.

ScottBurson• 11 years ago

It's true that Newtonian physics has not been discarded, but I think you're greatly underestimating the intellectual chasm that had to be crossed to get from it to relativity and quantum mechanics. The idea that not only velocity but also time, distance, and mass are relative; the wave/particle duality; the uncertainty principle; quantum entanglement; curvature of space-time -- all these were shocking, mind-bending ideas at the time they were first broached. They all seem to fit together neatly now, in retrospect, and we understand that Newtonian physics is a useful approximation that is quite sufficiently accurate in a lot of everyday situations, but the way we think about physics now is almost inconceivably different from the way we thought about it 200 years ago.

unabst• 11 years ago

When a theory is based on evidence, then all it really is is an abstraction of said evidence. So unless the evidence is overturned, the theory still stands as accurately as it had since inception.

What QM has is better accuracy and a different scope. It solves different problems, and where it overlaps, it does better. Also, it is not an extension of Newtonian physics, and hence is a new paradigm. It is not a better version of Newtonian physics.

I disagree that multiple paradigms describe the exact same things with respect to paradigm shifting science. They are merely different models, and are not new paradigms in the Khun sense. In fact, the fact that they are not pushing science forward attests to this. There are versions of reality because we are uncertain. Not because each is a different way of thinking that solves new kinds of problems.

timtas2• 11 years ago

Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology.

It's true that Newtonian mechanics remains useful despite being based on a now falsified premise: time is a constant. Although his laws eventually break down, they do not lose all their power to predict effects from causes under certain common conditions.

Popular myth holds that Ptotomeic cosomology was conceived by dull-minded early men arrogantly imagining that God must have placed us at the center. But no. It was based on centuries of documented observation (now called "data") and brilliant reasoning. The predictive power of this well developed model was excellent, even after it was overturned.

So are these revolutions somehow categorically different? It's easy to think so, but that's based on an illusion of mind. Geometry is somehow much more tangible or "factual" in our minds than time. But is a flaw in the position of objects really more fundamental than a flaw in the understanding of time?

nerd_stuff10• 11 years ago

Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology.......So are these revolutions somehow categorically different?

They're so different that I'm surprised it's even a question. If anything the illusion of mind is bending them to fit a narrative.

When Relativity explained the precession of Mercury's perihelion the existing physics was off by 1/12,000,000th of Mercury's orbit (per orbit.) Not only was the Ptolemic system off by entire degrees (as opposed to arcseconds which are 1/3,600th of a degree) it was highly dependent on the position of the observer, if you stood on Jupiter I imagine the Ptolemic system would give you complete nonsense as to where the planets would be.

More importantly Newton's work has never been thrown out and you can derive classical mechanics as a special case of Relativity. You can also derive it from quantum mechanics. I don't believe you can show that the geocentric model of the solar system is a special case of the heliocentric model.

mkempe3• 11 years ago

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

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

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