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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