Did Thomas Kuhn Make Science Postmodern? with Stephen Hicks

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We're very pleased to have Atlas Society senior scholar Stephen Hicks here today discussing the topic. Did Thomas Kuhn make science postmodern? After Professor Hicks's opening comments, we'll take questions from you, so please request to speak if you have a question, and we'll try to get to as many of you as possible. Stephen, I have personally had some, several academic types refer me to Kewton when I brought up Rand and online debates over the years. So very curious to get your take on him. [00:00:35] Speaker B: Okay, thanks, Scott, for the introduction. I wanted to start by motivating this subject because Kuhn is someone most intellectually active people have heard of. His book structure of scientific revolutions was published in 1962. So in some ways it seems like an ancient piece, but what I want to do to motivate its importance is to use the results of a Google kind of. It's not quite an N gram, but it's a Google count of most cited scholarly works in the social sciences ever. And this is published in the 2010s, so just a few years ago. And so if you think of all of the social scientists and all of the influential books that have been published, say, in the last 200, 250 years, this is the ones that are most cited by this generation of social scientists. So that's then people working in sociology, economics, management, economics, anthropology, psychology, political science and so forth. So just to give you a few examples here, coming in at number 16, most cited is Karl Marx's das Kapital, which is pretty good for a book published then about 100 years earlier. If we go to the 11th most cited book in the social sciences, it's one by Michel Foucault, the history of sexuality. We did a spaces episode on that a few months back. If we move up to position 8th is John Rawls's A Theory of justice. In position seven, another book by Michel Foucault, discipline and punishment. In third place, those of us interested in education and philosophy of education. Paolo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed is the third most cited work in the social sciences. And then coming in at number one, the most cited work is Thomas Kuhn's the structure of scientific revolution. So for being a book that is now 62 years old, it is still a going concern and extraordinarily influential in the social sciences as they are being done today. So what I want to do is just talk through some of Kuhn's main themes with some supporting quotations from the book. Many of you I assume have some familiarity with Kuhn. But in case not. And in case there are some passages that I think are important that are not fresh in your memory, I do want to put those on the table for our discussion. So Kuhn has some. Some terminology. He uses the concept of normal science, which he contrasts to science going through a revolutionary period. He has a concept of paradigm, which is sort of related to the more ordinary concept of theory, but is not quite the same anomaly, which is kind of a problematic datum that has arisen in the science, some problem that needs to be accounted for. And then setting those concepts aside, one of the things that made Kuhn's name was his bringing to bear some first rate, in many respects, history of science into a field that had been dominated by philosophy of science. And one of his critiques was that philosophers of science had often done historical studies of science with. They had to come up with, from their philosopher's armchair perspective, what they thought ideal scientists should be doing. And that needed to be corrected by looking at what actually happened during historic, important episodes in science. So if we look at the darwinian era or the copernican era, it doesn't necessarily seem to follow what this heroic, idealized understanding of what science is all about. But also it's not just the importance of history that Kuhn made famous. He also argued that, of course, the history of science was strongly a going concern. But often the history of science was done in what we might call whiggish fashion, kind of assuming that science is this successful, heroic, progressive enterprise. And the historians of science would then bring to the study of science those whiggish presuppositions, and they would tell an after the fact, good news story about all of the triumphs, and, of course, throw in a few challenges here and there that were successfully overcome, but they were presenting rather a much tidied up, still version of science. And science always was progressive across centuries. So what he wants to argue is that also is a historically inaccurate way of understanding science. And then what we actually should find is Kuhn wants to argue that the notion of progress in science, he thinks is deeply problematic and should be set. Set aside. [00:06:44] Speaker A: Stephen, are you still speaking? [00:06:50] Speaker B: I am still speaking. Okay, good. [00:06:52] Speaker A: I think you just cut out for a moment. [00:06:54] Speaker B: Okay, so how far backtrack should I backtrack? [00:06:58] Speaker A: Just a few seconds. The beginning of your next point. [00:07:01] Speaker B: All right. I think I was starting to say, suppose we think what science is, and then we just start to brainstorm all of the elements, and we start to say, well, science is an integrated collection of facts, hopefully integrated into a theory. But we also have to pay attention to the method by which the facts were arrived at and how they were integrated. So we talk about observation and controlled observation. We talk about experimentation, hypothesis formation, various analytical tools, logic and mathematics that we use. We sometimes will talk about the virtues of scientists, their objectivity, their open mindedness, their willingness to say that they were wrong about things, to modify their hypotheses, and so on. And then hopefully, the idea then is that we are contrasting then science, say, to unscientific ways of thinking about the world, perhaps faith and mystical and dogmatic approaches to knowledge as well. Part of what Kuhn den does is he has a kind of analytic framework in mind. So he wants to talk about the context within experimentation happens and what the status of observation. And when we call something a theory, whether that's the right word or not, or whether we need a new concept or not. So I want to talk through just a few of Klune's important points about all of those. So, one of them is at the beginnings of science. Now, often we will say that science begins with observation. One of the interesting things that Kuhn wants to say is that the initial observation stage of science is that he thinks of that as pre scientific because it's largely random. It's driven by the scientist's subjective, that's the language that he uses, often arbitrary elements. So there's nothing scientific systematic about it. And so when he talks about, for example, Darwin out in the field, or Charles Lyell, the famous geologist, out in the field, wandering about and collecting things and so forth, he wants to make the claim that that is all pre scientific, because it's too arbitrary, it's too unique, and so forth. Where science begins, he wants to say, is when much of that will be attempted to be put into a kind of theory. We'll just call it a theory for now. But he wants then to say that in that case, what we already have is a theory in place, and that the theory comes first and the observation is fit into the theory rather than we start with a lot of observations, and I try to come up with a theory theory that fits all of those observations. So when we talk about these theories, we're talking about mature individuals, typically, who are thinking pretty abstractly, they're thinking big picture ly. And what Kuhn wants to emphasize is the idiosyncratic nature of the rote that most of these theory formers, most of us call them theory formers right now, will have come and he wants to emphasize that there's always a largely arbitrary element in all of this that cannot be, cannot, cannot be, cannot be captured and reduced. Partly also, though, he wants to say that in addition to the individual subjectivity, that scientist who's coming up with the theory will have been educated in an existing, say, scientific framework and have been exposed already to a number of other scientific theories. And usually that scientist has been exposed to a leading scientific theory. And when that scientist was a student, he, in the history of science, it was mostly he, but he or she, you know, did not have the status to challenge, really, what the professors were saying or what the textbooks were saying, didn't have the knowledge to challenge. And for the most part, what was going on. There was a kind of indoctrination. The teachers in, say, high school science, they just want you to learn what the textbook says, and they're going to grade you as correct or not, certify you, give you the grade in science class, pass you to the extent that you agree with what the textbook says. And the same thing is going to happen when you go off, typically to universities, particularly in older european style universities, professors are not, you know, asking to be challenged, and in many cases, they. They explicitly appeal to authority. I am the professor. You will do what I say. So the way that Kuhn describes scientific education, then, is in terms of a form of indoctrination. Let me see if I can quickly find the passage here. I'll just read a little bit here. The education which quote prepares the student for membership in a particular scientific community, with which he will later practice carrying on the quotation because he there joins men who learn the basis of their field from the same concrete models. His subsequent practice will seldom evoke overt disagreement over fundamentals. So the idea then is the vast. [00:12:53] Speaker A: Oh, you cut out for another moment, can you? [00:13:04] Speaker B: I think I'm here. Let me know when I'm back. [00:13:06] Speaker A: I can hear you. [00:13:07] Speaker B: Okay, so saying the point that the vast majority of people who go on to be professional scientists, they will be pretty smart, but when they are young, they will learn from a textbook written from a perspective that is already dominant in the profession. They won't graduate from the class unless they learn to agree with it. Parrot might be a little bit too strong. They will not get jobs unless they have already agreed with the theory. And then, of course, they will be assigned particular functions, working on experiments and so forth within that theory, according to the head scientists, who also already agrees with that theory. And while they are pretty smart, most of them are not going to be genius level smart, such that they are in a position to challenge the theory, find any problems in it, and then you come up with alternative theories as well. So men whose research is based on shared paradigms, and that's just use the word theory for now, are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. Many of them, he will argue, were interested in observing the world themselves. But Kuhn goes on to say fact collecting, which is the essential to the origin of many scientific adverse. Nonetheless, one hesitates to call the literature of that results scientific. That's just fact collecting. That's not really part of science. So we have, then, a quasi indoctrination kind of education. What then happens by the time we have mature scientists is they are working within a scientific theory. And now let's call it a paradigm. Now, Kuhn wants to introduce this concept of paradigm because he thinks the word theory has too much baggage, and he wants to drop some of that baggage. But some of that baggage is that science has this high prestige reputation that it is about objectivity, it's about facts, it's about truth, it's about progress and so forth. And Kuhn is gonna put a question mark against all of those, all of those claims. So what he wants to do is to say a paradigm is a way of looking at the world that includes some network beliefs about the way the world works, some methodological principles about how to do the science according to that paradigm. And so that's the Kuhn new piece of terminology that has become very popular in the science literature. Now, how Kuhn then describes not the acquisition of science, but science education, how a scientist is trained, but the practice of science by the vast majority of scientists. And what he wants to argue is they are working within a paradigm. They do not challenge its fundamentals. Instead, they are working on trying to confirm particular elements of the scientific paradigm as they are assigned by the paradigms kind of chief scientists. And Kuhn somewhat disparagingly describes their work as mop up work. And that's an interesting choice of work, because you would think of people who do mop up work. It's kind of like they're on the janitorial crew. There's nothing particularly glamorous or exciting or high prestige about it. But this is precisely Kuhn's description of the way most scientists do most of their career. I'll read the relevant quotation here. This is from chapter three. Now, normal science, rather, consists in the actualization of that promise, that is to say, the various predictions and promises that the paradigm has made an actualization achieved by its extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays is particularly revealing, et cetera, et cetera. By further articulation of the paradigm itself, few people who are not actually practitioners of mature science realize how much mop up work of this sort. A paradigm leaves to. Paradigm leaves to be done, and those points do need to be understood. Mopping up operations are what engage most scientists through most of their careers. So the notion that scientists are somewhat heroically thinking about the fundamentals, challenging the fundamentals, considering alternatives. Kuhn wants to argue that sociologically, that is not true of the vast majority of scientists. Nor does he think that most scientists are even open to the idea of doing that sort of thing. The idea of challenging the theory, challenging the paradigm that they're looking for, actively looking for disconfirming results of their experiments. He says, psychologically, that's exactly not rather what scientists want to do. So here's another quotation. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena, unquote. Scientists are not trying to discover new things. Carrying on the quotation again, indeed, those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all, unquote. That is to say, scientists have blinders on and things that. [00:19:07] Speaker A: Oh, you just cut out for another moment, see if maybe moving around slightly may help. You seem to have come back quickly before. Hopeful this is just a temporary. [00:19:32] Speaker B: Let me know. [00:19:33] Speaker A: There you go. [00:19:35] Speaker B: All right. Okay. Maybe my phone screen saver is doing something or other. I'll try to tap my phone more. All right, so what Kuhn has been arguing, according to these quote, is that scientists are not interested in thinking outside of the box. They're not able to see anything that doesn't fit what their paradigm wants them to see. And then he goes on to argue that scientists are not actually open to criticisms and challenges. And this is another quotation here. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and often they are intolerant of those invented by others. All right, so science students and scientists, science practitioners accept theories on the authority of teacher and text, not because of the evidence. All right? Now that then, is a description of science education, the practice by most scientists through most of their careers. Bakun, then does argue that various paradigms run into troubles of various sorts, that whether they want to or not, scientists run into problems, facts or observations or internal logical problems that get pointed out that they just can't avoid. They pile up, and then a scientific paradigm reaches a crisis stage, and then science will enter into what he calls a revolutionary stage, revolutionary science. And a new paradigm is going to emerge out of that. And what will come along is then some other idiosyncratic scientist who's had some different subjective experiences will come up with some brand new ideas, and through some marketing methods, we'll get the attention of a certain number of younger scientists, another competing scientists, and there will be a stage at which then there are now two competing paradigms, and they're competing for the allegiance of all of the scientists that are out there in the world. And what Kuhn then goes on to argue is that this has the decision that scientists make about whether to remain loyal to the old paradigm or whether to adopt the new paradigm. This decision is not made on logical grounds or any sort of objective grounds, by appealing to the evidence, appealing to the math, appealing to any sort of long winded analysis. Instead, what Kuhn wants to argue is that that is philosophically impossible. And he argues that it's philosophically impossible because every paradigm defines its own terms and defines its own methodologies, and that those terms and those methodologies are the words he uses are incommensurable. That is to say, they can't be translated back and forth into each other. So they are. Each paradigm, then, is internally trying to be inconsistent. But there is no way to translate across the definitions and the rules of procedures from each of those paradigms. You have to kind of jump from one paradigm. I jump out, rather, of one paradigm and try then to rewire your brain or rewire your thinking to define everything differently and to structure everything completely differently. But there's no way to do any sort of one to one translating back and forth. So the point of arguing then, becomes important, pointless, because argument requires that you have some shared premises, some shared definitions of terms and so on. And that just is not possible. Kuhn wants to argue. So any argument that is going to be made on behalf of a paradigm is always going to be circular. It's always going to be ultimately a form of begging the question. You either have to accept the terms or you don't, and nothing logical or objective can force that. So the change is not logical. It is then going to be something else when we move on. We're now marching way through up to about chapter ten. What Kuhn wants to argue is that the way the change occurs is much more like what occurs when people change their political beliefs or they change their religious beliefs. And he starts to use the language of conversion and the language of faith. He starts to introduce it and then makes it more explicit that, yes, what goes on when a scientist changes from one paradigm to another is exactly like someone changing from being a Baptist to being an atheist, or from being Muslim to being Christian or whatever. It's an act of faith. Or if you imagine someone changing from being a Marxist to being a conservative. So, quote, the competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs. And then he makes the argument that I just highlighted here equally. It is why, before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time forced by logic and neutral experience a little bit later. The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a convergence experience that cannot be forced just a little bit later. The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by the problem solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith. So what Kuhn is realizing, or arguing, rather by the end of chapters and eleven and twelve of his book, is that there is no substantial or methodological difference between political thinking, religious thinking and scientific thinking. Each has its own paradigms. Each is largely a matter of faith and then changes for one to the other is a kind of conversion experience. He wants to also make explicit that he's rejecting any sort of objectivity. So it's not the case that you are then looking at the world, but from a different perspective or with a different set of tools. He wants to argue that also the world that you are looking at itself changes that. Rather, the subjective paradigm, that is to say, the theory, the beliefs, the definitions that you've accepted on faith and so forth, those create the world that you look at. And he uses a famous illusion example that there's the duck rabbit experiment, that you can look at this kind of impoverished line drawing and you can see it as a duck, and then you can kind of change your focus and you can see it as a. As a rabbit. He wants to say, science is the same sort of thing. You can look at the same, uh, facts, so to speak, but you. And you actually do see it as a duck. Uh, uh. But then if you change your view, it becomes a rabbit. And for. For one set of people, they're thinking they're really looking at a rabbit. And the other set of people, they really are are looking at the duck. And then the. Kuhn's line is, to put it this way, quote the history of the historian of scientists may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. What were ducks in the scientists world before the revolution are rabbits after world. And then a little bit later, in a sense that I am unable to explicate further. Proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds, and that's important. It's not that Kuhn is saying that there is the world, right? And that we're all in the same world, even if we have different theories about the world. We literally are in different worlds because we have different theories or different paradigms. So it's a strong subjectivism. So Kuhn then wants to go on to argue that we need to drop. And this is in the final chapter, chapter 13. The concept of progress. The idea of, of making scientific progress, he thinks, makes no sense. What are we making progress at? There is no way of jumping outside of these paradigms that we have adopted on largely on scientific authority or appeals to authority, that we are largely blindly or with our blinders on trying to make everything fit into the theories boxes, intolerant of criticisms. So there is no way of saying Kuhn wants to argue, and I'm not going to lay out all of the subarguments that he makes. But just as we don't say we've made progress in religious theory, we've made progress in philosophy, we've made progress in politics, if you want to make progress, all you can do is you can say, well, maybe from within a given paradigm's perspective, we find tuned fine tune, rather this, that, or the other thing. And we now have a more baroque articulation of the theory. But to say that somehow it's truer than other theories before, well, you know, we can't really compare our theories to those other theories because they are incommensurable. So the notion of progress becomes nonsensical. So scientific progress is out, scientific objectivity is out. The phrases scientific progress and even scientific objectives. And Kuhn is one of those who starts to put both of those in quotation marks whenever he uses them, indicating some. Some distancing or ironic dismissal of those, of those concepts. So then finally, the concept of truth, which is the big one, and this is in the final chapter, and I'll give you a quotation or two here. That mission would inevitably raise the question whether truth in the sciences can be won. And Kuhn then goes on to point out that here I am in the final paragraphs of my final chapter of my book. And basically, it is now time to notice that until the very last few pages, the term truth had entered into this essay only once, in a quotation from Francis Bacon. So Kuhn had included a quotation from Francis Bacon right at the very beginning of the book. But then his point is that he has now gone on to give an entire description that is satisfactory to him of the scientific project, and he's been able to describe science entirely without using the concept of truth. So maybe then we don't need the concept to of truth, and maybe there is no way philosophically to ground a concept of truth in an account of science. And that's what Kuhn then goes on explicitly to say, quote, we may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or explicit, that changes of paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth. And that's the conclusion that Kuhn is perfectly happy with. So the point of doing this spaces on Kuhn is that right down to our time, Kuhn as the number one sighted social scientist. These are the reasons why he is the number one social scientist. It's not just that he has a highly provocative account of science, but of course, we sometimes think of ourselves as living in a postmodern intellectual era, and certainly in academic social sciences. There's a significant amount of postmodernism. And Kuhn is almost always cited by people who want to argue a kind of postmodern understanding of science. And typically, that's going to be a dismissive understanding of the older understanding of science, the enlightenment objectivist, that's to say, small o objectivist at this point, truth seeking, heroic understanding of science. So Kuhn is a very useful tool in the postmodern, the critical theorists, and not even those who are quite so extreme as those people who are much more modest epistemologically about what they think science and social science are all about. Kuhn is a key ally for them. All right, so those are my introductory remarks. How about if we turn things over to Scott as moderator and open things up for discussion? [00:33:36] Speaker A: Great. Thank you for that, Stephen. That's very rich, and you've said a lot. I do want to go to our founder, David Kelly. I've got some questions as well, and I want to invite other people up here if you have questions for Stephen, but go ahead. David, welcome. [00:33:54] Speaker C: Thank you. [00:33:59] Speaker A: You were there before. Unmute. [00:34:08] Speaker C: How's that? [00:34:09] Speaker A: Good? [00:34:09] Speaker B: Better? [00:34:10] Speaker C: Okay. Yeah. Stephen, thank you so much. You're an amazing intellectual historian. I remember reading Kuhn back in, probably in graduate school, many more years ago than I like to remember. But two questions, which you can take either one or, you know, throw them in the mix, one is, Kuhn would often be described, I think, as a sociologist of science, as well as an historian or philosopher of science. And so my first question is, did the sociology of science start develop after Kuhn, or was it always there? I've always thought, you know, the people who do sociology of science are like, you know, like what they say about intellectuals and teachers, you know, those who can become scientists, those who can't become sociologists. But so that's one question, and the other one is, I think you're saying that he is a genuine relativist. Subjectivist. Relativist. And is that the crux of why you considered him one of the sources of postmodernism? I was kind of surprised to think in those terms because he was so early in 1962. I had no idea the book went that far back. So let me just leave it there. First question about sociology of science, and second question about his relativism and its impact on postmodernism. [00:36:07] Speaker B: Yes. Okay. Yes. Kuhn is doing sociology of science. And I. My view is that his is an honorable contribution to the sociology of science. And in many cases, the historical episodes he sews, where scientists are, many of them acting exactly as he describes. It's perfectly fine and perfectly accurate. So I think all of that data does need to be integrated into an understanding of how science is actually practiced. Now, I do think there are lots of corrections, because he leaves totally out of his account. Scientists who do not engage simply in mop up operations. The vast majority of students, scientists who are independent thinkers, challenge their think. Their. Their teachers don't read just one textbook and so forth, who are much more independent. So I think he is a provocative sociologist, but he is a good sociologist. And. And part of the, part of the conversation there, and I think subsequent sociology of science has included a lot of challenges and corrections to Kuhn's sometimes one sided presentations of how the scientific project goes on. Now, part of your question, though, I think, was whether he was the first sociology of science science, and that I don't know the answer to. I think there are lots of people in the earlier part of the 20th century who are, you know, like Durkheim and inspired by Compton and even some of the Marxists and so on who are doing sociology, and part of the sociology that they're doing includes some. Some account of sociology. But I don't know how. Rich. Rich that rich that is. Second question about Kuhn as a relativist. Yeah, I think for sure he begins the book saying that he's not necessarily going to be a relativist. He just wants to get away from the too much rah rah, good news. Totally progressivist understanding of science, that we shouldn't go in with that, that understanding of science necessarily as being true, that before we do all of that normative evaluation of science, we should try to be historicist and get inside the minds of scientists operating in their own historical time and do the history of science that way, setting aside our later understandings of how things developed and so on, I think that's a methodologically useful thing to do. But it does very quickly move from that to saying that once we've adopted that, we cannot get out of that, and that the scientists themselves cannot get out of that, that we all are time bound and theory boundaries creatures. So the historicism stops being just a methodological injunction and does become a philosophical position in Kund. Now, for me, David, you cut out about halfway through when you were asking the question about relativism. So please forgive me if I've left out part of what you were asking there. [00:39:58] Speaker C: Oh, thanks, Stephen. It was just. It was whether his relativism and the subjectivism that you pointed out by in this book were a contributing factor to the postmodern phenomenon that has worse so much today and which you know so much about. [00:40:18] Speaker B: Yes, yes, absolutely. All of the postmodernists have read and loved Kuhn. So I do want to say that the first generation of post moderns, Richard Rorty, of course, Jacques Derrida, they were doing their formative work and publishing their key pieces around the same time that he was published. So they already had arrived, I think, even more robust. Subjectivism and relativism by the early 1960s. But very quickly, the connections were made during the 1960s between what Foucault was doing and what Kuhn was doing. And so all of this subsequently, postmodern philosophy, postmodern economics, postmodern sociology, and so forth, would be citing Foucault, Derrida, and Kuhn. So he very quickly entered into the pantheon. [00:41:36] Speaker C: Just one more quick follow up, and I'm sure this is, and I want to take too much time from other people, but you look at the world just in my lifetime, the scientific advances in medicine, physics, astronomy, and other fields are just astounding. I mean, it's amazing what people have learned. Does any of that register on Kuhn or his followers. [00:42:08] Speaker A: Stephen, that you're not. We're not showing you speaking. [00:42:13] Speaker B: Okay, am I back? Am I back? [00:42:15] Speaker A: Yes, now you are. [00:42:17] Speaker B: Okay. I know Kuhn did a. Some mild revision. There was a second edition to his book that came out about eight years later. Don't quote me on that, but I think it was 1970. 1st edition was 1962, where he was subjected to some pretty vigorous criticism by, you know, small o objectivist philosophers of science, some of them poperian followers of Karl Popper, some who were pragmatists of the more healthy sort, like Susan hack, I would say. And Kuhn didn't really change anything in the first 13 chapters of the book, but in the postscript, he did soften a little bit some of his formulations and basically say, you know, maybe some of these things need to be reworked and so forth. But he didn't actually commit himself to any of the changes. But there are no hardcore kunis. But I have not followed the Kun specifically literature. Instead, I have been in my work more, noting all of the postmoderns and critical theorists whom I've been reading, the regular frequency with which they will cite Kuhn, and then how they are mobilizing KUHN and using it for their sometimes political, sometimes historiographical. Historiographical or critical race theory or critical legal theory and so forth. [00:44:00] Speaker A: Great. Just to add on to what David was saying a little bit, I mean, just, you know, you take something like electricity and, you know that it was a paradigm shift. How does he say that? That was just something that was arbitrary, that people just decided to go along with? [00:44:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know what he says specifically about electricity. I know he mentions Franklin and Faraday and, you know, at various points, but I don't know that he did a study of the developments in electricity. The ones that Kuhn is most famous for as historian of scientists are his studies of the darwinian shift, some the shift from Newton to Einstein, where he wants to argue that it's not just that Einstein is. Is making a modification of a newtonian framework or a friendly amendment, but it is a radically different paradigm shift and a fundamental rejection of Newtonianism. And then the biggest one that he's most noted for is his study of the Copernican revolution. So I don't know specifically how to answer your question about electricity, Scott. [00:45:27] Speaker A: It sounds like he's focused much more on theoretical science. I am curious when it comes to his view of paradigm shifts and revolutionary science. I mean, that sounds like someone with a marxist worldview that, you know, just sees revolutions as how things change, and he's trying to apply it to science. [00:45:55] Speaker B: Well, I. Do you mean by Marxism, the political component or the philosophical component only? Well, just my understanding is that Kuhn was, we might say, kind of an ordinary political conservative. And I know he was somewhat disturbed later in life, seeing how people on the far left were loving KUHN and getting great mileage out of using Kuhn's theories to advance political agendas that he thought were wrong headed. But it's hard to feel any sympathy for that, because I think if I think better, the way I would put this is to say that both Marxism and cunism have the same epistemology. Ultimately, they are both subjectivist, they are both social subjectivists. Just as Marx wants to argue that one is born into an economic class, and different economic classes shape one's worldviews such that your. Your cognition and your values are incommensurable to using the kunian language with the cognition and values of people who are raised in different economic circumstances. Kuhn is making the exactly parallel argument, not in the case of economic circumstances, but scientific circumstances. People are trapped in their scientific worldviews, just as Marxists would argue. And so there is no way, logically, for different people in different marxist economic classes to reason out their differences. It's the same argument that Kuhn is making, that there's no way for people in different scientific paradigms, rather to argue out their differences. So ultimately, it has to be a personal faith conversion or a forced conversion. And what is interesting, I didn't read this quotation, but Kuhn does make an explicit mention of George Orwell's 1984, arguing that in many cases, the practice of normal science is politically authoritarian, and that those who are not towing the scientific party line, just as in Orwell's novel, people who are not towing the political party line are dealt with pretty harshly until they are forced into line. Kuhn does explicitly say that George Orwell's 1984 is pretty much an accurate description of the internal political structure of sort science, and that's another parallel to marxist science. So if we think of Lysenko, those who've seen the opening five minutes, and I recommend of the opening five minutes of the three body problem, the new Netflix series, a rather graphic representation there and so on. So I'm starting to ramble a little bit there, but let me put it back to you on the Marxism connection, Scott, is that I think that's great. [00:49:38] Speaker A: You could probably argue Chernobyl falls into that category, as well, so I guess is he. [00:49:46] Speaker B: That's a big anomaly. [00:49:49] Speaker A: Well, is he, you know, lamenting that science is like that, or is he saying that's the way it has to be? [00:50:02] Speaker B: I. It's hard to read. I never met Kuhn personally, but I don't get the sense that he is lamenting. He's not saying, you know, any of that sort of language. I get the sense that he is philosophically relativist and subjectivist, and he's perfectly comfortable with letting the chips fall where they. Where they lie. I think we have to speculate here, and I think it would require probably having some first person knowledge, maybe some conversation with Kuhn. Maybe some of the intellectual biographers of Kuhn have spoken to this about whether Kuhn was secretly gleeful about this or whether he was sorry about it. I just don't know. [00:50:59] Speaker A: Sure, that's fair. Well, we've got seasoned with a question. Seasoned. Thanks for joining. Have to unmute yourself. [00:51:10] Speaker B: Oh, hey, sorry about that. Can you guys hear me now? [00:51:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:51:13] Speaker B: Hey, Steven, I'm a big fan. Thank you for all your work. I just want to ask, who would you say has written maybe, like, the best response to this? I'm thinking maybe like Imre Lakatos or is there anybody else you might think of? Yeah, I don't know. I don't do. I did in graduate school, I did my, my minor in the history and philosophy of science. Most of my work was in kind of epistemology and foundations, foundational stuff. And since graduate school, I've not followed the literature there. So I don't know the answer to that question. I know Lakitosh was hot at the time. Some of the later Karl Popper stuff was taking into account Kuhn. Some of the more reasonable pragmatists, as I think of it, were trying to take into account Kuhn and rework their theories and so on. I do remember reading, but it was just one article by Jim Lennox, who's an objectivist, historian and philosopher of science, that I thought was a good diagnosis of the problems that Kuhn was putting forth. But I don't know that there has been a good response to Kuhn all the way through. And partly I think that's because what it is going to take is a very good account of objectivity, which is the fundamental issue that Kuhn is attacking. And I don't know anyone who is working seriously in philosophy of science who has a good account of objectivity yet integrated with a first rate understanding of science and the overall philosophy of science. So if you have recommendations, please let me know. Thank you very much. Great. [00:53:07] Speaker A: Maybe we could make some of the 2025 conference a lot about objectivity. But, you know, I guess, is it the lack of certainty and the kind of attack on objective knowledge? Is it fair to call him kantian in that sense? [00:53:29] Speaker B: Yes. Okay. Now we're scaling out to big, big picture, and. Yes, I think that's right. Kuhn is working very broadly within a. A kantian framework. And I think it's fair to say that the working out of Kant's copernican revolution, the shift from a deep objectivity to a deep subjectivity, as all of the implications of that get worked out, what that means not only for observation, but for concepts, for propositions, for the status of logic, for mathematics, for theory building, and so on. All of that is being worked out for a century and a half after Kant's death in 1804. And I think much of it had been worked out in the generation prior to Kuhn. So, in one sense, Kuhn is himself engaged in a mopping up operation. If you see the philosophy of science as having reached a certain dead end, we can't show that observation is direct. We can't show that concepts are objective. We can't ground logic and mathematics in reality. And all of that has been argued, and we reach a dead end. And then positivism and kind of the earlier generations of pragmatism, all of them had reached dead ends in philosophy, the philosophy of science, by the 1950s. And then Kuhn basically is coming along and integrating that with some historical studies. To say, therefore, here I put it all together. This is the new picture of what science looks like, having taken all of those skeptical subjectivistic and relativistic conclusions, uh, seriously. So, um, the way I want to say no, though, is that what Kuhn is also doing is arguing against a kantian idea that the. The subjective categories or the subjective framework or the, uh, this is not quite accurate language, but the. The unconscious paradigm through which we filter and construct our apparent reality. For Kant, that was fixed and universal to the species, that is something that is importantly abandoned by the post kantian generations, Hegel and Marx and others. So I think you would have to say that the kantian subjectivity and the attack on subjectivity remains, but we have to then add the idea that even those underlying categories themselves are subject to change and evolution across time. So it's always going to be evolving categories and evolving paradigms. There's never going to be any one fixed paradigm, one true picture of the universe. [00:56:47] Speaker C: If I can jump in for a second. Stephen, you wrote a wonderful essay called Kant at the masked wall for reason papers, which I highly recommend on this issue. It doesn't directly mention Kuhn, as I remember, but it was a wonderfully erudite but also witty piece. [00:57:09] Speaker B: So thanks, David. [00:57:12] Speaker C: Anyone who's interested might look that up on reason papers. Reason papers.com archives. Look for Stephen. [00:57:25] Speaker B: Okay, thanks, David. Yeah. Counting the mass ball that just came out last year. Yes. Okay, good. [00:57:36] Speaker A: Well, thanks for the plug, you know, so I guess what he's saying is, even with the Copernican revolution, it's not because people figured things out about the world and, you know, scientifically, that there were just too many contradictions in the old way. [00:58:02] Speaker B: Summarizing. Yes, yes. Sometimes you want to say the old way. The old paradigm had too many contradictions. Sometimes it would have. Not necessarily contradictions, but there would be new observations or new facts, but using the word fact in quotation marks that we can't quite fit into the theory. But what we then do is we will make up some ad hoc other assumption and tack that onto the theory in order to accommodate the new theory. And then we'll just do that and we'll keep doing that. But at some point, it just starts to seem ridiculous doing that even to ourselves. So an example I'm thinking of right now was by Anthony Flew. He was using this example, actually a philosophy of religion, but it's a kind of Karl popper example where, you know, he says, do I have a couple of minutes left to go through this. [00:59:11] Speaker A: Or should we just, you know, it's up to you. Take the time. We would love to hear. [00:59:16] Speaker B: So the way it would go is, you know, Anthony flew, it's a, it's a lovely example. It's on about theology and the arguments for and against the existence of God. And he's taking up the design argument. He says, you know, imagine two travelers in the jungle days away from civilization, and they come to this open space where there's just lovely flowers and everything is beautiful. There seems to be a pattern. And, you know, one of the jungle travelers looks and says, wow, you know, who would have thought that there would be a garden right out in the middle of the jungle? Look at all of these plants over here that are sun loving plants, and they're all planted in a place where there needs to be a. Be a sun. There's lots of sun. And over these, where there's lots of water, ones that need a lot of water are located and so on. This can't be accidental. This must be a garden. And the other guy's a little bit skeptical, the other jungle traveler. And he says, well, I don't know that there has to be a gardener. You know, maybe there's just, you know, kind of natural evolution. And the sun loving plants survived over here and the water loving plants survived over there gives a quasi evolutionary account of why there seems to be a very structured order. So what they decide to do is they decide to wait around and see if there's a gardener that shows up. So, you know, if there is, in fact, if it's a garden, then there must be a garden gardener. And so eventually the gardener would show up to tend his garden. So they set up camp and they wait a few days and they wait a few weeks and no gardener ever shows up. And then the skeptical guy says, well, you see, this is just natural evolution. There is no, there's no gardener. But the first guy says, no, no, no, there must be, must be a gardener. Instead, he must be an invisible gardener. And that's why we've never seen the guy. All right, so what we're doing is we're introducing this ad hoc assumption. The gardener is now an invisible person. And that explains why we've never actually seen the person. And so then they said, okay, well, let's wait around a little bit and see how we can detect somehow an invisible garden. So these guys are very well equipped. So they set up an electrical fence all around our tripwire around, thinking that if there's an invisible gardener and when he shows up to tend his garden and maybe he's doing at night when they're sleeping, and that's why they've never seen him either or heard him. But this electrical tripwire will detect the guy. So they set it up and they monitor it and they take shifts and so on. And the, the wire is never tripped except by occasional animals. And then after a month or so, the skeptical guy says, see, there is no injury. Invisible gardener. And then the guy says, therefore, we have to explain this not in terms of there being a gardener at all. But the first guy says, no, no, no, it must be that it's an immaterial invisible gardener who's tending the gardener. So the idea here then is that the guy is adding increasingly ad hoc assumptions and more and more of them. And at some point, unless this guy is just completely dogmatic, committed to this hypothesis, he has kind of a shred of scientific dignity, he's going to recognize that he's got too many ad hoc assumptions and then internally he will start to question his own paradigm, and at some point he will be open to being converted over to some other sort of paradigm. So something like that, I think Kuhn would say, is what goes on? [01:03:00] Speaker A: That's a great answer. Thank you so much for doing this topic. I do love the idea of expanding on objectivity. That's something that David's been talking about for 30 years. And I know you just any kind of, even at conferences. But this has been great, wonderful topic. I really appreciate you doing it. And everyone who joined. And we'll be back next week with Rob Traczynski. [01:03:31] Speaker B: All right, thanks for hosting, Scott. Thanks, Atlas. [01:03:33] Speaker A: Take care. Thanks.