I

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn attempts to describe how science progresses and changes; in the process, he finds that any single definition of “science” will be misleading. Following this, he crafts an argument (at least implicitly) against many of the common definitions being argued at the time (and many in our own).

Kuhn was writing to philosophers busying themselves with the definition of “science.” It turns out this is actually an incredibly difficult task. Kuhn makes it easier by turning to historical events in lieu of abstracts, which immediately makes it harder: there are distinct periods with different behaviors. Accordingly, he distinguishes between pre-scientific activity (pre-paradigmatic), normal science (under a paradigm), and extraordinary science (post-paradigmatic). Normal science is the heart of the book. One of Kuhn’s central claims is that we’ve been so blinded by the flashiness of extraordinary science that most philosophy of science creates theories solely applicable to that period, like a Philosophy of Football that theorizes everything in terms of fumbles. Very exciting – totally useless for 99% of the game.

At a certain point in any paradigm’s history, normal scientific work runs into anomalies – observations discordant with the paradigm’s broader theory. Some will be resolved, others will add to or rearrange parts of the paradigm, but a few are irreconcilable with the broader paradigm. Then you get a crisis. At least some work during this crisis will try to overhaul the entire structure (most work will be frantically trying to save the old paradigm), and that work is extraordinary science. Finally someone provides a satisfying new theory, there’s a paradigm shift/revolution, and normal science continues.

Most of this essay is about normal science, which might look kind of weird if you only know Kuhn as the crisis-paradigm-shift-revolution guy. Questions I will ignore: what progress means, the definition of truth, whether Kuhn is normative or a descriptive, why Popper got so mad, how paradigm shifts, like, evolve quantum consciousness. He does directly address Popper and the Logical Positivists, but getting into that debate would distract. Kuhn and Popper are way closer than the sheer vitriol suggests, and Popper begrudgingly admitted that Kuhnian normal science was an accurate account of most scientific work. Since that’s my focus, I’m going to pretend that no discord exists.

II

Kuhn is particularly concerned with two semi-popular views of scientific work. The first is something I’ll call the “Baconian” model, though Pop-Bacon is more accurate. It’s not the focus of the book, but it leads into the central problems. In the Baconian model, the best science is done without prejudicial structures – data are taken at face value. There’s a gigantic table of relevant observations and their shared characteristics, and theories emerge from close comparison of it all. This model falls apart pretty much immediately.

It looks closest to what Kuhn calls pre-paradigmatic science. It also looks like post-paradigmatic science, but it can be hard to different pre- and post- (which Kuhn admits) for reasons that will become apparent. Either way: it’s not an accurate description of either, and it’s definitely inaccurate for normal science. Kuhn:

The Baconian “histories” of heat, color, wind, mining, and so on, are filled with information, some of it recondite. But they juxtapose facts that will later prove revealing (e.g., heating by mixture) with others (e.g., the warmth of dung heaps) that will for some time remain too complex to be integrated with theory at all. In addition, since any description must be partial, the typical natural history often omits from its immensely circumstantial accounts just those details that later scientists will find sources of important illumination. Almost none of the early “histories” of electricity, for example, mention that chaff, attracted to a rubbed

glass rod, bounces off again. That effect seemed mechanical, not electrical.

First: there are a lot of coherent explanations for [list of facts], so something else has to be going on. Almost as soon as there’s one theory there’s a bundle, and each of those considers different observations to be important. Kuhn calls this effluvium of activity a pre-paradigmatic period, where different schools vie to explain the strange bundle of facts in very different ways.

Second: Very primitive forms of science often do compile a big list of things, but many of those are rejected and discarded by mature versions of the field. The issue is that there’s no such thing as a “significant datum” outside of its significance to a framework. Different schools accept or reject the same data, not everything is understood as equally relevant. Anything with a theory is already interpreting data according to a certain prejudice, and “anything with a theory” is most of science. It’s not even desirable to lose that bias (whatever that even means) – if you do, you admit a bunch of useless bits that illuminate nothing. It may also be better to say “observation,” because “data” might not be the same paradigm to paradigm – the numbers assigned by one paradigm’s instrument are often incomprehensible to another.

Eventually, one of the many theories proves convincing enough to be adopted by some critical mass of practitioners, at which point it becomes the field’s paradigm. More carefully phrased: a series of experiments, models, and vague theorizing is adopted and emulated. From here on out, the pseudo-Baconian period is finished. A technical jargon develops for that field, it no longer draws quite as readily on other fields, etc. Scientists now learn the paradigm itself and restrict themselves to its problems. That is to say: they do not accept a random allotment of phenomena uncritically, nor do they need to concern themselves with ascertaining some theoretical connection from the ground up. They become specialists in a paradigm, and now they perform normal scientific research.

This is the vast majority of actual scientific activity. Much of it is getting precise measurements, reappraising old phenomena, etc. The most “important” (at least for us) is what Kuhn calls “articulating the paradigm” theoretically. This sounds like what it is: no paradigm is perfectly complete – it’s more like a guide – so scientists labor to expand upon it. They add new techniques, more theoretical backing, etc.

Kuhn’s preferred metaphor for normal science is puzzle-solving. This is extremely close to Popperian problem-solving, but there’s a major difference: problems don’t say anything about how one should solve them, nor do they delimit solutions. Puzzles do. There’s the correct order to the pieces, there’s a certain “image” that the completed puzzle should convey, and there’s the far-more-general sense that “completing a puzzle” is gone about in a certain way. The reason that practitioners of normal science restrict themselves to a given problem set is for much the same reason. Theories don’t just tell you how to interpret phenomena. They also tell you what questions to ask. Kuhn:

If it is to classify as a puzzle, a problem must be characterized by more than an

assured solution. There must also be rules that limit both the nature of acceptable solutions and the steps by which they are to be obtained. To solve a jigsaw puzzle is not, for example, merely “to make a picture.” Either a child or a contemporary artist could do that by scattering selected pieces, as abstract shapes, upon some neutral ground. The picture thus produced might be far better, and would certainly be more

original, than the one from which the puzzle had been made. Nevertheless, such a picture would not be a solution.

There are a lot of examples of this (most of the book is, properly, history), but I’m not sure it’s necessary to really go into any. It’s pretty apparent on the surface that, e.g. particle physics restricts a practitioner’s concerns, methods, and analysis to a particular range of problems, and that 1) these are not the same problems as, say, botany, 2) no particle physicist will spend their time recreating Newtonian proofs of corpuscular motion and, 3) the methodology is not random.

Critically, this is equally true for anomalies. Under [paradigm], the behavior of [object] should be X. The empirically observed behavior of [object] is instead Z. Note that the object’s behavior is not “anomalous” in itself any more than a puzzle piece can be mismatched on its own. If Bacon was gathering his list of data, it wouldn’t be bracketed off to the side or underlined in red: “Exceptionally Important and Confusing.” The pre-paradigmatic scientist would treat it just like any other observation. How could they not? It’s not anomalous-in-itself. Only the broader paradigm/puzzle makes it so.

Similarly, assigning import to anomalies is basically post-hoc. Consider Mercury’s wobble. Newtonian physics predicted a particular orbit for Mercury – it came close but not quite, and no subsequent work could resolve the problem. It took the complete reevaluation of physics, i.e. Einstein, to provide any coherent explanation for what was going on. A) Newtonians needed relativity to resolve it, but Newtonian physics was equally necessary to register it as “a problem.” B) Kuhn points out that it didn’t really lead anyone to doubt Newtonian physics. Other issues came to the fore – only in light of the new paradigm did Mercury’s wobble become something very significant.

In other words, violated expectations are key, but that also tells you something about the necessity of normal scientific work. Articulating a paradigm sounds boring when compared to creating a new one, but it’s a critical stage for determining the failures of a given paradigm. If you already knew where a theory failed, you’d have moved on to a new theory. Anomalies are found organically and accidentally, normally by work-a-day observation rather than creative geniuses.

III

Kuhn is most famous for the anti-Baconian view of science, and paradigms often get conflated with something like “theory.” This is deeply unfortunate: the anti-Baconian model isn’t strictly Kuhnian, and “paradigms” are meant as a response to the list of rules.

The “list of rules” model is easiest to understand as a reaction to the Baconian model. Science can’t only be unbiased observation, because [everything above]. It can’t just be empiricism, because everything above is empiricism + [many]. Still, something must separate scientific activity from non-scientific activity. There’s an assumption that “Science,” if properly understood, must be something defined by a narrow, carefully defined list of rules. More to the point, everyone more or less understand that there are big changes that require a reworking of everything before them. Perhaps because of that, it certainly feels like a set amount of rules should separate Newton from Einstein.

At first glance, this seems promising, and it’s extremely important to emphasize the following: Kuhn isn’t saying that there aren’t rules for science. It’s pretty clear that there are above, and the rules he discusses are basically what you’d expect: “explicit statements of scientific law and about scientific concepts and theories,” “a multitude of commitments to preferred types of instrumentation and to the ways in which accepted instruments may legitimately be employed,” “higher level, quasi-metaphysical commitments,” and at the very highest level “[the concern] to understand the world and to extend the precision and scope with which it has been ordered.” He’s simply saying that there’s no such thing as a “complete list” – you could subtract all of those from the paradigm and there’d still be a remainder, something else is going on underneath the explicit commitments.

More to the point: even those rationalizations, when attempted, may be extremely different. There are different fields, subfields, problems, etc., and most of the scientific work done there has trained the specialists to think a certain way:

An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum. Presumably both men were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through their own research training and practice. Their experience in problem-solving told them what a molecule must be. Undoubtedly their experiences had had much in common, but they did not, in this case, tell the two specialists the same thing. As we proceed we shall discover how consequential paradigm differences of this sort can occasionally be.

IV

Kuhn likes to pull from Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein, not Tractatus Wittgenstein). How close the two are sounds like a monstrous tangent best avoided, but Kuhn clearly chose “rule” to play on Wittgenstein’s point about games: trying to define a game by its rules somehow fails to get at behavior within it, some other quality is needed – as in (from Wittgestein’s Philosophical Investigations):

For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game, and what no longer does? Can you say where the boundaries are? No. You can draw some, for there aren’t any drawn yet. (But this never bothered you before when you used the

word “game”.) “But then the use of the word is unregulated —– the ‘game’ we play with it is unregulated.” —– It is not everywhere bounded by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one may throw the ball in tennis, or how hard, yet tennis is a game for all that, and has rules too.

And yet – we all recognize a game and not-a-game. Paradigms are much like that. One way to put it that telegraphs the twist ending: paradigms are illegible, and “lists-of-rules” are attempts to make them legible.

The Wittgenstein quote shows you one aspect – trying to define a single paradigm is impossible – but Kuhn is more focused on the abstract “Science” itself, arguing against the view that “science” is a concept that can be easily defined. After all, he’s debating a bunch of people who all though that they had defined it (their massively different definitions notwithstanding). You might wonder why this seems important, but note that we do this all the time. Debates over what is or is not science is pretty much a constant. Probably because of this, Kuhn is much more focused on behavior, and that behavior shows radical differences paradigm to paradigm.

It might be easier to think of paradigms as a way of centering “sciences” plural rather than “science” singular. These sciences don’t seem to concern themselves all that much with the abstract – they take rules as necessary from their paradigm, but the paradigm itself is mostly about legitimacy of problems for their field. If there a hard-and-fast rule for [scienceing], we should expect a practicing scientist to be able to provide it. Ask a Tyson: “What’s the Constitution of Science?” Not only do we not see this, we quite often see the opposite. Following Wittgenstein, Kuhn compares it to the difficulty of trying to carefully define what all games have in common.

This is more or less the first in a series of four points on why we should accept ambiguity (or paradigms) rather than rigid rules when trying to describe science. In order, the anti-list-of-rules argument is:

1) The hunt for explicit and articulable rules – that is, binding and explicit statements about what [field] is or what “Science” is – almost always fails. There’s no example of a perfect list of rules for any given paradigm – historical or present, compiled by scientist, historian, or philosopher of science.

2) Scientific education itself is almost never composed of “rules.” That is to say, it may employ various facts and many examples, but the “set of rules that makes this a science” is illusive. Indeed, the process of learning that Kuhn discusses spends much more time on concrete examples than it does the “grounding” of those:

Scientists, it should already be clear, never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves. Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start encountered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications. […] That process of learning by finger exercise or by doing continues throughout the process of professional initiation. As the student proceeds from his freshman course to and through his doctoral dissertation, the problems assigned to him become more complex and less completely precedented. But they continue to be closely modeled on previous achievements as are the problems that normally occupy him during his subsequent independent scientific career. One is at liberty to suppose that somewhere along the way the scientist has intuitively abstracted rules of the game for himself, but there is little reason to believe it.

The “little reason to believe it” is clearly a reference to (1), i.e. if this were the case, we’d expect there to be at least one person capable of providing the rules of the game. Instead, the “copying a model” based learning looks a whole lot more like an apprentice to a craft. It also provides something to test against that isn’t just theory or a phenomenon.

3) If explicit rules are relatively unimportant for normal science, then most scientists should’t really concern themselves with the rules. Or, “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” Indeed, this is mostly true, up until a crisis.

While paradigms remain secure, […] they can function without agreement over rationalization or without any attempted rationalization at all.

Of course, it’s obvious that scientists can work without an explicit sense of “rules” – one doesn’t need philosophers of science to tell them how to science. Then again, if we recognize that “science” takes place somewhere beyond rigid and meticulously observed rules, we should be wary of them as the full definition of science.

4) Changes in paradigms may be extremely localized, and rule changes even more so. That doesn’t seem compatible with a particularly rigid set of rules for the abstract Science. If that were the case, paradigm shifts should impact everything all the time, but they’re generally restricted to fields. Within a paradigm, if the rules were too rigid then it would constantly be in revolution – every rule change should change the paradigm. In practice, though, new rules are created (whether these are data points, methods, instruments, etc.) without much major revision of the field. You’ll say this is obvious – of course there aren’t scientific revolutions with each new discovery – but that’s kind of Kuhn’s point. There must be some “give” there, which makes hunting for the abstract list foolhardy. NB: he’s accusing most other philosophers of doing this.

V

If “paradigm” seems incredibly amorphous, that’s because it’s meant to be. Kuhn:

Scientists can agree that a Newton, Lavoisier, Maxwell, or Einstein has produced an apparently permanent solution to a group of outstanding problems and still disagree, sometimes without being aware of it, about the particular abstract characteristics that make those solutions permanent. They can, that is, agree in their identification of a paradigm without agreeing on, or even attempting to produce, a full interpretation or rationalization of it.

Since “rules” aren’t how science proceeds – at least not normally – you might wonder what, exactly, happens. That more or less comes from the name itself: Kuhn thinks that working-by-models is much closer to how science actually functions.

…the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today often seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.

Kuhn compares this to the common law system: one tests a case against certain over-arching principles, sure, but those aren’t the only thing of import. Previous rulings are equally important, even if their relationship to the Ideal Law is somewhat obscured. Accordingly, whole lot of science is testing experiments against the paradigm, rather than nature itself. This is mostly obvious from the Bacon section, but should be stated again.

One result of this is that “science” is never a constant thing because its rules are never the same. Since scientists aren’t testing against The Form of Science, and they aren’t testing against straight-unbiased-phenomena, then the paradigm starts to become very central. Hence, science under Newtonian physics, or science as Lavoisier’s early chemistry is more accurate than just saying “Science.” There are family resemblances (Kuhn steals that from Wittgenstein, too) but no more. It’s almost closer to a “culture” than anything else, understood by its practitioners but not necessarily in a way that can be vocalized beyond the thing done:

Close historical investigation of a given specialty at a given time discloses a set

of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations of various theories in their conceptual, observational, and instrumental applications. These are the community’s paradigms, revealed in its textbooks, lectures, and laboratory exercises.

In other words: concrete>abstract, specialist>scientist. And this, according to Kuhn, explains scientific progress.

Paradigms are adopted precisely because they’re loose – a stray fact may be helpful or interesting, but (by definition) there’s no more work to be done on it. A paradigm with holes, on the other hand, requires work. Its holes must be filled. Due to the nature of paradigms, though, filling these holes leads to revolutions. The puzzles that normal science enjoys are provided it by the paradigm itself, and most scientific work is just filling in the blanks – either theoretical, mechanical, or empirical. Kuhn:

Their achievement [paradigmatic works] was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve. Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as ‘paradigms,’ a term that relates closely to ‘normal science.’ By choosing it, I mean to suggest that some accepted examples of actual scientific practice—examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together— provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research.

These same principles point out anomalies – something just doesn’t match when you try to compare it to the paradigm. They aren’t congruent or similar or [other geometry].

VI

Not all anomalies lead to paradigm shifts, but all crisis periods are marked by this kind of frantic, rule-based theorizing. As a result, It was always assumed that someone would come along and resolve the problem. He’s pretty vague on why exactly this happens, mostly because he thinks it looks different each time. Again, concrete> abstract. For some, it’s a function of time – long-standing problems have stood long enough that the specialists have exhausted all possible avenues. The Copernican revolution is one example of this. For others, instruments bring new data points (cathode rays), others are theory-induced (Leyden jars), etc. Some characteristics of crisis, however, are the same:

Those characteristics include: the previous awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance.

When a crisis happens, scientists work in a totally different way. They suddenly go back to careful and rigorous explication of their “rules”:

Normal science can proceed without rules only so long as the relevant scientific community accepts without question the particular problem-solutions already

achieved. Rules should therefore become important and the characteristic unconcern about them should vanish whenever paradigms or models are felt to be insecure. That is, moreover, exactly what does occur. The pre-paradigm period, in particular, is regularly marked by frequent and deep debates over legitimate methods, problems, and standards of solution, though these serve rather to define schools than to produce agreement.

It is as though something were compelling them to justify themselves. One tries to create rules when they did not exist before. Scientists suddenly go back to metaphysics, and a plethora of theories spring up, all possible but all disagreeing. Or, somewhat comically, practitioners resolve anomalies by changing certain small assumptions, in the process annihilating half of the most secure theories.

Furthermore, debates like these do not vanish once and for all with the appearance of a paradigm. Though almost non-existent during periods of normal science, they recur regularly just before and during scientific revolutions, the periods when paradigms are first under attack and then subject to change. The transition from Newtonian to quantum mechanics evoked many debates about both the nature and the standards of physics, some of which still continue. There are people alive today who can remember the similar arguments engendered by Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and by statistical mechanics. And earlier still, the assimilation of Galileo’s and Newton’s mechanics gave rise to a particularly famous series of debates with Aristotelians, Cartesians, and Leibnizians about the standards legitimate to science. When scientists disagree about whether the fundamental problems of their field have been solved, the search for rules gains a function that it does not ordinarily possess.

It’s telling that a perfect rule-system is never created. The theoretical commitments don’t persuade anyone. Before a paradigm is adopted, it has to demonstrate not a logical consistency, nor a compelling explanation of the phenomena, but a series of paradigmatic examples along with enough holes for other scientists to be productive. This makes perfect sense from a Kuhnian perspective: they need results and models to test against, not theory.

That does not mean that those theoretical commitments are unimportant. They perform a massive amount of work during the crisis period. They simply don’t determine the entire course of the argument. This also does not mean that crises are “bad.” They’re necessary and desirable. The only danger is if one gets caught in the crisis itself. Kuhn:

Though history is unlikely to record their names, some men have undoubtedly been driven to desert science because of their inability to tolerate crisis. Like artists, creative scientists must occasionally be able to live in a world out of joint—elsewhere I have described that necessity as “the essential tension” implicit in scientific research.

VII

Consider everything below a hypothesis. Or, perhaps, better to say hypotheses, because some might be right and others wrong, and if they’re fully articulated parts might contradict.

“Paradigms,” ironically, seem ridiculously amorphous precisely because they’re so concrete. Rather than dealing with “science” as an abstract, Kuhn forces us to deal with something like this science or that science, and concrete actions are rarely easy to actually define. It’s much easier to apply an abstraction (“Games are rules”) than to really describe the behavior – “this is what it is to play [game].” Of course, those abstractions are only ever rough maps. Take them too literally, and you’ll run into issues. I have a strong suspicion that this is also the reason that Kuhn’s more nebulous view of paradigms has been replaced by the abstract “paradigm is theory,” despite that being the exact thing you’re not allowed to do. It is hard to discuss such things.

The characteristics of normal science are that it has relatively limited scope, a specific and technical vocabulary, is learned by modeling successful practices rather than really getting at the deeper “why” behind those, describes problems in its own language and finds solutions that aren’t really understood by outsiders, and is heavily focused on the concrete tasks before it. It’s very empirical, but in a particular way: it always makes sure to test itself against the tradition. The paradigm itself determines whether a question is legitimate, whether a method is, etc.

Outside the paradigm, scientists understand one another’s work less by hard-and-fast rules than by a kind of family resemblance between them. You can almost understand it as “farming” (abstract) vs. “farming in this particular region.” All of the behavior might be different, but a farmer still recognizes some kinship, while also recognizing concrete differences. Of course, that’s how I want you to understand is, because that’s how I understand, because Kuhn is describing metis.

VIII

Metis is best described here, you won’t understand the rest of this without that, a (really) rough description is that it’s “know how” over “know why.” It’s something between tradition and hyper-empiricism, learned and taught within small communities according to concrete objectives and specific environments, often shrouded in a kind of local language impenetrable to outsiders. Where “metis” relates to set communities, I think of it more broadly as a worldview from which know-how springs. To get it, you have to already be thinking in a certain way, and you take “rules” from that worldview and test against the worldview itself. This has results (i.e. you wanted to appease rain god, but doing so empirically makes the crops grow), but for all its empiricism there’s weird other step.

Kuhn is very set against the rigid list of rules, as the inherent looseness of a paradigm is what allows progress. I think this is analogous to why James Scott is incredibly hesitant to call metis tradition. Not only does that fail to capture it, “tradition” implies that metis is calcified, rigid, set-in-stone. In reality, the practices adapt, new ones are adopted, old ones dropped, when they no longer work – metis is dynamic. Yet there’s some kind of continuity – the “way we do things here” is always the same, even if specific practices change. There’s reason the introduction of a new crop doesn’t rupture the entire system.

If normal scientific work is analogous to metis, then that makes the “list of rules” model something closer to episteme. That makes a whole lot of sense, too. Episteme is scientific-ish, but it’s better understood as taxonomy, closer to rationalizing than rationalism, pattern-matching and abstracting instead of creative work. The analytic behavior associated with episteme makes a comparison to science inevitable, but Scott is very careful to point out differences. Perhaps it’s better understood as a kind of science fan-fiction – has the same aesthetic and characters, but the heart just isn’t there. Pointing out where they differ has always been very hard, but Kuhn starts to help – one reason we associate “science” with episteme is precisely because we’re thinking of “science” as a rigid list of rules.

Similar to the metic villager, if one were to ask a given scientist why they’re doing [thing], they’d almost certainly be able to tell you why they were doing that particular action. “[Experiment] should yield [result],” etc. Still, it’s not like the idea of metis precludes explanations – in basically every case, the villager could pretty easily tell you what the result of a thing was, “We’re setting these crops on fire because that makes food grow more readily.” The issue always comes from the deep-deep justification. It’s “because of the gods” is meaningless unless you’re part of the community that cares for those gods. And that seems much closer to what Kuhn is trying to get at, where the philosophical justifications are either absent or… well, useless, unknown, not understood by the practitioners, unnecessary. As much as I’ve always hated the “useful to birds” Feynmann quote, he’s right (if Kuhn is right – dead wrong if Popper is right). It would be like teaching a farmer molecular biology so that they can plant their orchard. The list of rules could easily stall out scientific progress in a whole lot of fields. It looks a lot like applying abstract, alien techniques to local regions. Doing “Science” rather than doing “biology.”

In a broader sense, the paradigm looks a whole lot like the worldview component of metis, especially where it blurs the line between end-goals and means of achieving those end-goals. Just like Scott, Kuhn tends to refer to issues between paradigms as “translation problems,” which makes perfect sense. The data points aren’t intelligible one to the other, the questions aren’t the same, their justifications are incompatible. Trying to move from one to the other is much closer to moving from one language to another than a minor dialectical difference in the Language of Science.

Because it’s formulated as a kind of communal structure, norms and values take the forefront, and these aren’t easily codified. Kuhn goes into a bunch of historical cases where theories or experiments were proposed or accepted despite a certain “unsicentificness” (in our sense) to them. They couldn’t be easily falsified, or the measurements were off, or… If called to justify them, the community might have serious difficulties – rules were broken – but everyone kind of understood what the person was going for, and it looked just right enough to be ok. Spirit of the law, not letter of the law. That looks like the analogue to local knowledge, particularly when it comes into conflict with state forms of justice.

IX

This is cool and whatever, but lots of things are cool and whatever. The real interest here is the following: I think Kuhn’s model begins to explain what exactly happened with High Modernism. Of course, no small part is power differentials. I’ve talked about that, it’s more important, moving on. Also: plenty of the issues with episteme had nothing to do with science, so this only applies to the ones that do. There’s still a lingering question about the scientists themselves. Didn’t they recognize that whatever they were doing was actually terrible science? Otherwise careful scientists seemingly brushed aside all forms of empiricism, which probably requires some explanation.

I think there are three things going on here, they kind of conflict, I’m unsure which claim goes where:

First, and most obvious: the pre-paradigmatic period is the one that Kuhn claims involves the heaviest debate over the rules of the field. Under the current theory, that would make it the most epistemic period – unsure of itself, unaccustomed to the metic behavior of normal science, much more prone to making harsh distinctions between “science” and “not science” through abstract categories. It would look less for behavior that approximated the paradigm, and more for rules followed.

A whole lot of the fields employed by High Modernism were incredibly young. Scott famously defines the problem of legibility by analyzing scientific forestry, but “scientific forestry” was like a decade old. A host of other problems related to High Modernism came from primitive social sciences, and most of those were also in their infancy. In a weird way, Scott might be narrating the birth of some of those paradigms: modern urban planning, say, definitely comes after Jane Jacobs in anything but the loosest sense. Related, and for another time: “social sciences” aren’t necessarily mature sciences (Kuhn himself is very on the fence), meaning they might remain in the epistemic, pre-paradigmatic stage today. Cf. all the issues of [everything].

If that’s the most epistemic period for [all these fields], that resolves a whole lot of questions.

Second, related: Paradigm-to-paradigm translation problems also crash into episteme. Discussing historical work in science, Kuhn says this:

When undertaking it, the historian must compare the community’s paradigms with each other and with its current research reports. In doing so, his object is to discover what isolable elements, explicit or implicit, the members of that community may have abstracted from their more global paradigms and deployed as rules in their research.

As anyone who’s learned a second language as an adult can attest, translation problems means you start zeroing in on abstract rules of the foreign language as well as your own. Since a lot of those rules are theoretical commitments, it makes some sense that [High Modern Scientist] would focus on those, find mythology, and discount the entire thing.

This seems particularly true given the fact that even if metis looked sciencey (i.e. fewer gods, more electrons), paradigms don’t justify themselves that way. They focus on puzzle-solving and empirical results, the questions of which and resolutions to which may not be coherent to an outsider. In this metaphor, a whole lot of those are social – maintaining tribal harmony and commitment, etc., but even the common ones (“grow a crop”) require some temporal commitment by the scientist. She’d have to know that these bizarre theoretical commitments actually succeed at that, which means hanging out for a while.

Third, which will undoubtedly insult someone: Episteme has more of a “sciencey aesthetic” than anything scientific. Scott brings this up a lot, I’ve talked about it, whatever. One of the issues that Kuhn brings up is that a certain mere sciencey aesthetic might be necessary for normal science. If it’s to admit of “not-perfectly-Popperian-results,” then the community has to default to other forms of judgment. Some of those are interpersonal (“Science-Guy Todd has always done good work, so…”) but some are just appearance (“sure, it’s not experimental, but look at all those numbers and Greek letters!”). See: physics envy in economics (pdf).

More to the point, the scientist is testing against the paradigm, which means that incredibly divergent practices will be fitted to that. It’s not abstract science, but it’s certainly a kind of aesthetic that metic practices will not have. Note that, unlike the first two, this would not be episteme. It may look like it, but it would properly be the metis of a mature science trampling the metis of a different community.

X

Episteme isn’t bad, any more than the theoretical work done under crisis periods is bad. It’s a necessary reevaluation of an alien situation. I have a strong suspicion it may be more common now due to [many essays later], but losing it would lose many, many goods. Where it goes awry is when it begins to attack organic traditions, trying to make legible what is not legible.

One of the weirder results of Kuhn’s philosophy was an emphasis scientific relativism. A whole generation of philosophers brandished his book as a way to point out a certain groundlessness to the sciences, mistaking “paradigm” for something totally arbitrary, mistakenly demanding a kind of truth that comes from a different language. At the extremes, this tends to mean a total rejection of scientific fact as being “merely contextual fact.” Which is, you know, true, but equally true of everything else. This is particularly jarring because Kuhn provides something that should give you the opposite conclusion.

More than a few times, I’ve associated this a certain ideology around modern science. I still think that’s true (definitely of the ideology), but it’s worth taking the time to make a careful distinction between science, the ideology, and… whatever is under discussion here.

That particular view of science – arbitrary because paradigms – is, somewhat hilariously, the exact thing that High Modernism demands of metis: “Since you can’t reproduce first principles, it must be meaningless.” cf. “Since you think [practice] came from the gods, let’s replace it with pseudoscience.” Whatever role you think the physical sciences have in the modern world, this is not the way to go about that. After all, it isn’t even a description of science. Note the form of the argument: Science fails to reproduce theoretical commitments at all levels, and in doing so, it reveals that it is not Science, but merely an ideology. “Where’s your list of rules? Don’t have them? Must be meaningless.”

If Kuhn is right, we should assume the opposite: it’s precisely the ideology that assumes the rules it wants to enforce.

top from Star Trek

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