File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9811, message 83


Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 14:24:56 -0800 (PST)
From: Judy <jaw-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Paradigms Lost


>>There are many many different readings of Kuhn, many in contradiction with
>>each other. Which reading of paradigm theory are you saying is overrated?
>>In what way?  Depending on the way that you mean this, Kuhn might agree
>>with you.
>>judy
>
>
>Kuhn might agree agree with me, but which clone of Kuhn do you mean?
>
>At the risk of stepping into deep waters before I have learned to swim,
>there seems to be at least three Kuhns here for me. (Many of which
>admittedly are simulcra.)
>
>First of all, from the philosophy of science perspective, Kuhn's theories
>have been criticized by Popper and Weinberg among others.  I believe it is
>also possible to critique him along lines set down by C.S. Pierce.

There are many points of contact in Kuhn and Pierce. Kuhn has answered
Popper's criticisms. Weinberg recently published (10/98 New York Review of
Books) what I would call a Popperian critique; I didn't read anything in it
that went beyond Popper. Kuhn has answered them persuasively for me. Of
course, I don't know what you have in mind here by Kuhn's philosophy of
science and which of Popper's criticisms you are thinking of. I think
Kuhn's criticisms of Popper's Myth of the Framework are good, and as far as
I know, Popper didn't give an answer to them.

>At stake here is the status of scientific knowledge. Are we prisoners of the
>paradigm or is there a development over time in science that leads to the
>accumulation of knowledge? (Knowledge within a community of interpretation
>subject to falsibility and operational in the sense that in order to achieve
>x, it is necessary to perform steps  y1+y2+yn)

Popper's "Kuhn" says scientists are prisoners of paradigms. There is no
metaphor like this in Kuhn's own writing. For Kuhn, paradigms are ways of
seeing and working with nature that are  highly performative and
germinative, playing an essential role in advancing scientific knowledge,
not necessarily in a cumulative sense; the evidence for that is highly
questionable for Kuhn--but in a progressive sense just the same (progress
from without saying progress toward).

As you say, your three Kuhns are not taken from any close reading of Kuhn,
but from interpreters, and I share your frustrations with these.

>I am contesting these virtual Kuhns, these images of paradigm theory because
>I think they are too often confused with what being postmodern is all about.
>(The anything goes slacker mentality whose watchword is ...whatever.) I
>don't think this is what Lyotard is saying and I don't personally believe
>that being committed to a postmodern perspective logically entails that we
>have to accept this relativistic, social constructionist, pop version of
>science.

Yet Kuhn's theory of paradigms captures something that the standard view of
science leaves out which I find illuminating. I also have found fruitful
for my own thinking about my personal experience as a social scientist
Kuhn's line of demarcation between science and other fields in terms of his
paradigm theories, i.e. that science has paradigms while fields like
psychology do not. On the surface, that idea made no sense to me, but after
reading very closely to get what Kuhn (both a physicist and a behavoral
scientist) meant, I got it, and as a result, have made sense out of some of
my frustrations with social science, my feelings of alienation. In Kuhn, I
find validation for the argument that social sciences should be encouraged
to experiment and explore freely in their efforts to deal with human
conditions and should not require superficial methodological similarity to
physical sciences for their legitimacy as pursuits. This is my own use of
what Kuhn wrote, and as far as I know, is not something Kuhn ever said.

Judy








   

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