Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 12:25:37 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: Schrodinger's Cat


To Rahul:
     I have been generally sympathetic, but I think that
you have overdone it.  Is it not the case that there are
lots of empirical dissertations in "hard sciences" that
essentially amount to measuring precisely something that
is fully understood within the existing paradigm/theory?
If the measurement found something anomalous, there might
be a whoop, but more often than not everything is as expected
and the individual in question gets their academic union card.
Little originality involved other than access to some new data.
     There are many dissertations in the "social sciences"
which are virtually the same.  I see scads of them in economics.
They are done according to scientific methodology and they simply
reinforce what is already believed or known within existing
paradigms or theories.  What is dramatic is when someone finds
an anomaly, e.g. the recent study by Card and Krueger which challenged
the textbook stories about a higher minimum wage causing greater
unemployment.  It is an accumulation of such things that break paradigms.
     I fully agree that the line between a Kuhnian "paradigm" and
a "theory" is not well defined.  I think that what we are dealing with
is simply a matter of the generality or "fundamentality" of the theory
in question. 
Barkley Rosser


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