Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 13:27:23 +1000
From: Shaun Rawolle <s201330-AT-student.uq.edu.au>
Subject: Objectivity, Kuhn and Bourdieu


George, 

Its interesting that you pick up the thread of paradigms from Kuhn,
considering how quickly it is forgotten the impact, habitual in nature, of
Bourdieu's own inculcation in the French philosophy of science, esp.
Bachelard and Canguilhem, with their concerns with epistemic blockages and
ruptures, and paths of normalisation (follow the link here to Foucault's
more general notion of episteme).

Bringing this point out more clearly, it seems that Kuhn's later works,
where he begins to recant on the framing that Paradigms gives in the
external/internal debates, seems to follow these links in a fruitful way.
For example, in the final article to Lakatos and Musgrave's 'Criticism and
the Growth of Knowlewdge' Kuhn makes the concession that... 
 
'a new version of my Scientific Revolutions would open with a discussion of
community structure.  Having isolated an individual specialists' group, I
would next ask what its members shared that enabled them to solve puzzles
and that accounted for their relative unanimity in problem-choice and in
the evaluation of problem-solutions.  One answer which my book licences to
that question is 'a paradigm' or 'a set of paradigms'.  For it I should now
like some other phrase, perhaps 'disciplinary matrix': 'disciplinary',
because it is common to the practitioners of a specified discipline;
'matrix', because it consists of ordered elements which require individual
specification'.  (Kuhn, 1970, p 271; emphasis added).

It seems to me that the links between Bourdieu's notions of scientific
habitus and scientific fields and Kuhn's later ideas on scientific
communities could be more fully explored!

Bye, Shaun  

>It is divided into different competing subgroups (if I
>may use these plain terms rather than Bourdieu's more rigorous concepts of
>field). Thus, a scientific "apprentice" may be socialized into any number of
>habitus.
>
>BTW, you could also think about Kuhn's notion of paradigm here as
>representing a similar notion.
>
>George
>
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____________________________

Shaun Rawolle
Doctoral Candidate

Graduate School of Education
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
The University of Queensland

Phone:   07 3365 6508

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