Thomas Kuhn & problems of incommensurability between scientific paradigms
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/#IncoWorlChan
The Austin LessWrong philosophy working group discussed this yesterday. The main ideas discussed:
1. A sense that Kuhn focuses strongly on physics, and that paradigm shifts in many other fields are fuzzy or absent. e.g. in neuroscience or computer science, have there been any?
2. All language is fuzzy, and (in the strongly held view of one pragmatist participant), even "truth is not an exact precise thing", and "all theories have some slop in them". So incommensurability is nothing unusual or specific to scientific paradigms, it's present in all our talk, and we're mostly quite good at grokking what each other mean.
4. Scientists and especially engineers are typically realists about what they're working with. They might technically have incommensurable definitions of "mass", for example, but they get past it essentially by saying, "Let me show you what I mean", and getting out some materials and equipment and pointing at something they do.
It's not essential that the pointing behavior always succeeds in having a real referent. Phlogiston and the ether are examples where the pointing might fail. But enough of the behaviors succeed: e.g. at temperature increases in the case of phlogiston, and light propagation in the case of ether. The successes or apparent successes in "pointing out" things give a realist way of bypassing incommensurability.
5. The pragmatist strongly emphasized that science is supposed to be better than scientists. Particular scientists might be partisans of their theories, but in a field of diverse partisans, the ones with better theories will tend to be more fruitful. Enough new researchers will prefer to go into more fruitful areas that, over time, even a field of all partisans should converge on better theories. (Insert adage about science progressing one funeral at a time.)
I wondered if convergence is sufficient by itself to overcome incommensurability. Paradigms in philosophy, religion, & politics are harder to overcome than in science; what if two people who disagree simply followed this process?:
• They pick a topic and get a big piece of paper to write on.
• They take turns proposing interesting statements they think the other person might agree with.
• If they both agree, they write the statement down.
• They see what kind of consensus they can put together as they fill up the page.
@gabe
"Scientists and especially engineers" seems like an odd phrase. As an engineer, I don't think I'm a scientist in the relevant sense here. Engineers share a strong "does it help get the job done right now?" paradigm. Scientists (quite properly) to a significantly lesser degree.
@ceoln
It should be interpreted as "it's true of scientists and it's especially true of engineers". There's no intended implication that they're the same thing.
@gabe
Ah, I see! Sorry for misreading. :)
3. Kuhn's work itself suggests options for a common language between people using different paradigms. He seemed to presume logic and deductive validity are common across all the paradigms, for example. And he gave 5 characteristics (accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness) for deciding between paradigms, and these 5 are a neutral basis for deciding rather than part of a paradigm.