tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post6059571106708369209..comments2024-03-23T04:01:39.348-04:00Comments on Understanding Society: Kuhn's paradigm shiftDan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-87756008119908037912019-09-22T07:17:16.644-04:002019-09-22T07:17:16.644-04:00Can we say that paradigm shift depends on the scie...Can we say that paradigm shift depends on the scientific thinking to society? Or the scientific thinking depends on the paradigm shift? Is it a product of necessity or a product of curiosity? And how could this result to the manifestation of each premise?Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03713304560171041585noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-69541629137634087302010-09-26T16:10:07.061-04:002010-09-26T16:10:07.061-04:00This is one of the basic branches between logical ...This is one of the basic branches between logical positivist philosophy of science and post-positivist philosophy of science. Positivists focused on justification, whereas more historically minded (and research-community minded) philosophers and historians were at least as interested in the process of science and the ways in which a scientific research community operates. See Imre Lakatos's work on the methodology of scientific research programmes.Dan Littlehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-7569736398453902532010-09-25T08:35:44.981-04:002010-09-25T08:35:44.981-04:00hi, I'm looking at the advantages of the appli...hi, I'm looking at the advantages of the application of Kuhn in social sciences and was quite caught by this line in your blog- "For one thing, it shifted the focus from the context of justification to the context of discovery." by any chance do you have a reference for it? <br /><br />Thank you,<br />LaAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-4563256770927718712009-10-05T21:30:02.448-04:002009-10-05T21:30:02.448-04:00You're surely right to say that the largest le...You're surely right to say that the largest legacy of Kuhn's book was to shift the focus of philosophy of science onto the practices of scientists. One thing that I think is easy to overlook is the dual or twin nature of a paradigm. <br /><br />I think the largest thrust (such as Lakatos, Laudan, etc.) of post-Kuhnian research within philosophy involved thinking of a paradigm as a conceptual scheme. However, a conceptual scheme is merely one way of working out *one part* of what a paradigm is supposed to be, on Kuhn's account.<br /><br />Before the 1970's (after which I'm not really sure Kuhn himself was any longer clear on what a paradigm is supposed to be), Kuhn was fairly clear that a paradigm has a dual nature. It is both a practice/event, and a way of thinking about that practice/event. Calling a paradigm a conceptual scheme is, of course, one way of fleshing this out. But a paradigm can also be something much less formal, and Kuhn's examples in Structure often highlighted this. A paradigm was most often a general way of thinking about the field that was not set out explicitly. <br /><br />This latter sense of paradigm was, I think, the one that had the most import to the philosophy of social science, particularly Polanyi and the Edinburgh/Bath schools.Matthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03975959479383090484noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-31217842216990365882009-10-04T21:13:23.016-04:002009-10-04T21:13:23.016-04:00Hi, Daniel-
Let me take you up on some of those q...Hi, Daniel-<br /><br />Let me take you up on some of those questions. Firstly, Kuhn's ideas apply to any area of knowlege, even to areas of non-knowledge, even BS, insofar as they have rote and habitual ways of conceptualizing things or talking about things. I think that (i.e. groupthink) characterizes all fields, including business and economics, as we find recently, even religion, etc. The paradigms might not be as richly detailed and conceptualized, but they are just as immovable.<br /><br />This also indicates that science has two significant advantages in overcoming its own problems of "stuck" paradigms- the rich and detailed content of scientific paradigms that make then susceptible to explicit anomalies and difficulties (i.e. to the point of being expressed mathematically), and more importantly, the intellectual rigor to test hypotheses, accept the empirical standard, and accept new and changed information/models.<br /><br />So my position is that, while it is true that scientific training does inculcate adherence to various conceptual schemes, but that they <i>can</i> also evalute them, since the overall ethic and rigor of science supercedes the paradigms at work. While I agree with Kuhn generally, I am more optimistic, since practicioners vary substantially in their ability to adopt new paradigms. Some people are hopeless and do indeed have to die off rather than change their minds, but many others are quite capable of changing their minds, so the field goes in new directions, if more slowly than optimal. <br /><br />Plate tectonics may have taken a few years to take the scientific field by storm, but it did so in less than a generation, and the same is true of countless other changes, like various paradigms of cancer etiology, the etiology of ulcers, etc. The more thorough-going and bizarre the new paradigm is, the more difficult it is to displace the current system, but caution is surely warranted to some degree. <br /><br />The various current deep controversies, like the nature of dark energy, the missing mass of the universe, and the nature of consciousness, the multiverse hypothesis, string theory, etc. all suffer from a lack of data above all. There may be clever or balmy paradigms out there waiting to explain these conundra, but the fields are in a state of acknowledged suspension because nothing compelling has yet emerged, either on the theory side or on the data side.Burkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11158223475895530397noreply@blogger.com