Moderate Kuhn and Radical Kuhn

We have seen in a number of posts that dating back even to Thomas Hobbes, the communal, historical and non-logical process of scientific discovery has been seen as a threat to scientific realism which I will define as the claim that science gives us necessary, certain and universal truth regarding the natural world. Indeed, if one looks at moderate ideas of Thomas Kuhn (rather than the radical ideas of Kuhn having to do with incommensurability), they are hard pressed to find a single, unanticipated idea. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the intellectually tumultuous environment of Kuhn was more responsible for his works success than were his actual ideas.

At the time of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, logical positivism, despite its numerous and significant shortcomings, was fully entrenched as being, in one form or another, a standard for what is and is not science. It thus followed that since there was such a thing as science, that logical positivism necessarily described what some people were doing in the world. This model endorsed, if not fueled the naïve scientific realism which was so prevalent in the 1950’s, for the standards of logical positivism were taken not only as criteria for science, but also as criteria for truth. Science was not the mere functionalist interpretation of experience as had been advocated by Fleck, Whewell and others, but was instead a revelation of reality as it actually is.

Out of such a conception of science rose the history of science as a legitimate school of thought. This discipline was dedicated, more or less, to chronicling the linear progress which necessarily characterized scientific progress as falsified ideas are replaced with accurate or at least more accurate ones. Notice how this conception of science follows directly from the conception of science advocated by the logical positivists. According to such a view, science is constituted by observation conditions, logic and mathematics, and once a theory was logically falsified by experience, it was either replaced by a better one, or tentatively not replaced at all. Thus, science either stayed still or went forward, never backward due to its logical structure.

Thus, as the historians of science were busy figuring out who was right and who was wrong over time (but according to what standards?), Kuhn stepped on the scene and asserted that the wrong questions were being asked altogether. The question which Kuhn asked was what the nature of scientific discovery was? The view endorsed by logical positivism was one of the scientists discovering or uncovering logical relationship which were simply waiting to be found. To this, Kuhn strongly objected. Science was not an impersonal process of logical discovery, but rather a process of non-logically construing and interpreting our experience of the world.

Kuhn noticed that scientific experiments were necessarily equivocal, in that different people took the exact same data as evidence for mutually contradictory conclusions, and that such differing interpretations were not due to one being more or less logical than the other as the logical positivist would have us believe. It will be remembered how the structure of science, according to the logical positivist, was one of hypothesis, prediction and observation; the rest was logic. Kuhn simply pointed out that such a picture was incomplete and utterly misleading. Instead, the structure of how science is actually practiced is one of hypothesis, prediction, assumption (one of which being that all relevant assumptions have been identified) and then observation. The role which such assumptions play in science precludes a purely logical structure; for disconfirmation can be avoided all too easily by simply modifying the assumptions at work in any given case. Thus, science is a process of interpretation more than it is one of discovery according to Kuhn, and interpretation should not be characterized a one of necessary progress.

The account which Kuhn offers to replace that of the logical positivists can be divided into two forms which I shall call moderate Kuhn and radical Kuhn. Moderate Kuhn is constituted primarily by the criticisms which he brought against the logical positivists with the important idea of a paradigm. While identifying what, exactly a paradigm is has been problematic it is not difficult to have a rough grasp of the idea at hand. A paradigm is basically a worldview which is native to a scientific community, a worldview which embodies the various assumptions and relevance criteria which underlie a scientific explanation which is taken by the community as being satisfactory. A paradigm is roughly the way in which relevant problems as well as solution are defined to a scientific community.

Radical Kuhn takes the idea of a paradigm and runs with it as far as he possibly can. According to such a view, paradigms not only define what is accepted as fact, but a paradigm actually determines what facts actually are. Furthermore, since there is no paradigm-independent point of view, there is no way in which we can possibly compare one paradigm to another. Even more outrageous in the minds of many, is the claim that due to the nature in which the meaning of terms is determined holistically by use within a particular paradigm, two different paradigms are completely different and incommensurable languages. Thus, not only is the changing of scientific paradigms not a logical one, as the moderate Kuhn held, but it is not even a rational one since any reason for change must be limited to one paradigm or the other.

I think that it is relatively safe to say that radical Kuhn is radically wrong, although it has been difficult to point out where, exactly, he goes wrong. Personally, I think that his mistake is in his over-expanding science to encompass far more of our cultural worldview than it actually does. It is my claim that we do in fact have a meta-paradigm of sorts in the form of the language and culture which is common across scientific paradigms, and this meta-paradigm determines most of the felicity conditions as well as defined most of the scientific terms which are used within the relatively limited scientific paradigms. We do not define mass primarily in terms of F=ma or E=mc2. Rather, we define mass primarily in terms of the way in which we interact with it upon a day to day basis. Given that the more abstract and theoretical entities of science, such as electrons and quarks, are defined in terms of these basic level categories any strong notion of incommensurability seems implausible.

As to felicity conditions and progress, the same relationship can be said to hold between science and culture/language. While Kuhn’s criticism of the idea that change within science is necessarily progressive in nature, it is possible to hold that we change scientific theories because we interpret them as progress in terms of criteria which are determined by our cultural meta-paradigm. Scientific change does not necessarily entail an increase in scope, predictive success or control, but rather we rationally (but still not logically!) adopt new scientific theories in response to our recognition that the new theory is a change for the better in some way. Notice, however, that such a view is not at all in line with the idea of science as the description, discovery or revelation of what nature is really like. Instead, science is simply the interpretation of our experience of reality.