On The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Part 2: Kuhn's Epistemology

Here's the second part of my post. These are the points that are more closely connected to the various discussions I had that motivated me to read Thomas Kuhn in the first place. I do want to reiterate that I think that his idea of paradigm- and revolution-based science history is usefully descriptive, and I mostly like it very much. I do take some exceptions here and there, however, and have some disagreements with respect to its universality. Mostly, I'm interested in challenging it against this epistemological paradigm that I've gone and developed in spite of myself.

A TEXTBOOK MISTAKE
Kuhn generally equates the current mature scientific paradigm to the stultifying stuff taught in textbooks. I have a few texts written before 1962, but those tend to be either highly specialized (not yet obviated I guess by new ways of looking at things) or else artifacts that I picked up and keep around as souvenirs instead of sources of information. Maybe things were a little different forty years ago. I mean, yes, textbooks serve to indoctrinate people into the current state of knowledge, but no, I don't think that these texts define very well what science is. To some smaller points of his, advanced book-writing isn't really frowned upon, and I also disagree somewhat that science separates itself from the larger community quite so much. There's a reputation of intellectual superiority that I think scientists vainly like to keep, but on the other hand, premier publications such as Nature and Science, really aim for general understanding of highly complicated fields. Or (I just added) go read the Feynman lectures (these clock in a couple years after Kuhn's essay). My introductory college textbooks often talked about past and current controversies, including the paradigms that stuck and the ones that didn't. The story of a gestalt switcheroo that turns a bug into a feature is an enduring favorite. The sort of triumphant narrative of toppling a progression of barriers that made Kuhn bristle? I don't know if I got that one quite as much, and when I did, it was more concerning the early discoveries. (We'll go back to classical waves, in other words, but not to a continuum of angels.) In my observation, the idea of thriving within a heady open-ended scientific crisis period is closer to the idealized self-congratulating story of many "top tier" scientists (as a colleague once liked to say) today. Even here in the dregs of applied science, "innovation" is the name of the game.

I think anyone working in a research field understands that scientific paradigms are articulated almost like a correspondence, a slow-motion argument consisting of innumerable published articles, conferences, and less-formal meetings. Underlying this communication is the normal science that Kuhn describes, but I don't think the subject matter is chosen solely to gratify a bunch of expected hypotheses. The popular sessions at a conference are the ones chasing after the sexy new field and lighting up the current controversies. Scientists, at least certain kinds of scientists, are just plain hungry for anomalies to fight about. They go looking for a crisis. And even for the bigger paradigm busters, there's plenty of room for brilliant kookery (e.g.) out there on the fringes.

Kuhn made a lot of hay about the seminal insights that John Dalton, a meteorologist, brought to the early days of chemical theory. The mode of thinking that he brought from a different discipline gave him tools to look at chemistry problems in a new way. Again, I don't know what it was like in the early 1960s, and maybe it's Kuhn that helped to begin this newer intellectual paradigm, but much like sexy research, digging around for nuggets in other fields is accepted, common, and encouraged these days. "Interdisciplinary" has become a buzzword too.

WHERE DOES A PARADIGM END AND NORMAL SCIENCE BEGIN?
Kuhn often implies that not all paradigm changes are the same, that there's a gradation in revolutionary goodness. Roentgen did more than just articulate his paradigm when he discovered x-rays, but on the other hand, he was no Copernicus. We can scale down and down too. Every scientific experiment (or thought experiment) has a challenge and a reconciliation built into it. It's meant to test the paradigm and explain the results. Most researchers will be presented with anomalous measurements even in the course of normal science—if everything goes as expected on the first try, then you really are doing common engineering—which they might ignore, fail to notice, or suitably explain within the existing paradigm. Paradigm shift, Kuhn explains, is a consequence of this kind of normal puzzle-solving difficulty, a question of only how important and persistent the anomalies seem to the community. Kuhn also notes that one person's anomaly is another's puzzle problem, depending on what viewpoint they subscribe to. There is no bright line.

Furthermore, while "paradigm" describes the full body of communication, everyone carries around an individualized understanding of it. If other fields (perhaps even the impure ones) are allowed to come in and interact, it can be a source of competing ideas. As we introduce the idea of competing paradigms, subdivided fields, when we don't let the unpopular ones quite fade away, then we might observe that all of these ideas, dead and alive, can always be compiled into a paradigm-of-paradigms that we can never approach from the outside. I don't have much to add to that, except to note that it does give an unpleasant point from which to voice disagreement, and also from which to advocate, when a paradigm can have a broad or a narrow meaning as the discussion demands.

DOES AN UNDERSTANDING OF PARADIGMS INVALIDATE THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD?
Prior to reading, as well as throughout the text, I imagined the description of scientific paradigms as a meta-construction built around the normal operation of science. Kuhn calls out normal science as the process of hypothesizing and delivering (until the point where this process fails to deliver) expected results. The anomalies he discusses, the ones that are seen as significant enough (and timely enough, and seen by the right eyes) to demand a new way to look at things, he stresses do come out of the normal operation of science. I don't think he means his views to invalidate this established investigatory process (even if they might require us think of it differently).

I tend to think of the scientific method mostly as a flowchart, starting with observation, study or review, followed by hypothesis, tests for agreement, and conclusions based on results of the test, adding and constantly revising the body of work. I've said that I don't think of this dogmatically, and see it mostly as a general guideline. Kuhn mentions that scientists tend to proceed day-to-day without thinking very much about the rules they're following, and this is true in my experience. I agree that research is goals-biased, and certainly test methods, standards of proof, and so forth are informed by (or are) the paradigm. The scientific method might count as a rough approximation of the quotidian work ("hey, let's see if this idea works"), and even if it's an imperfect decision-making hierarchy, it gets reinforced at the higher level in the conventions of scientific reporting (the customary sections of a paper—Introduction, Experiment, Results and Discussion, Conclusions—restate it outright) and also at the level of scientific funding decisions (write a proposal, and get money to see if it works). The scientific method is a beloved part of our current science philosophy paradigm, but much more than that, it is also part of a fundamental literary one. It maps the process of investigation on to a classic story: what is our subject like, what happened to him, and how did he change.

We like to construct narratives around science, just like everything else. If that can be seen as a template for the scientific method, then can the paradigm approach be mapped that way too? Is the articulation of normal science equivalent to a background study? Is investigating the anomaly the test of normal science? Do the conclusions and revisions amount to the delivery of a revolutionary new paradigm (or the reconciliation with an old one)? Well sure, if we are willing to speak broadly enough.

WHAT DISTINGUISHES SCIENCE?
There remains a need to evaluate theory with respect to observations, and when Kuhn discusses the acceptance of new theories, he addresses this in terms of scientific validation. He denies a Popperian sort of straight-up falsification (rightly I think), and also more probabilistic sorts of validation (that is, accepting things more strongly when they agree better; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence). We might take on a new paradigm that's popular, or elegant, or simpler, or seems to promise richer articulation, or fits with the other ones, or maybe it's all just arbitrary. Kuhn speculates that what makes it science isn't necessarily the acceptance criteria, but maybe the fact that it's imagined as intellectual progress. I don't agree with that. I think what makes it science instead of something else is that it's evidence-based.

I remember a quote from my freshman physics book, paraphrasing, that in reality, electrons are neither particles nor waves, they're electrons. Kuhn eventually gets to a similar point and cites it as the resolution of a scientific revolution. I don't want to give him this one. I think that the probabilistic way of looking at things, more than Kuhn's, suggests that nature is an independent thing, and that more than one view can be held simultaneously, within some range of validity. Of course, that could be just me thinking like an engineer, bringing in a less-than-pure-science viewpoint of my own, which perhaps has more of a most-workable-understanding-given-the-data sort of culture. I prefer to couch my understanding of science as a series of known assumptions and constraining rules (maybe the same thing as a paradigm as Kuhn means it), under which some theory is known to be useful, sometimes only good-enough useful, and sometimes only preferred because it's consistent with other theory. I don't feel anyone has to take one rigid outlook to the table.

I concede that science revolutions may not always go to the best theory (it's too early to tell when they're busy being all radical), and certainly doesn't result in the best possible one, but to say that it's a competition between existing paradigms doesn't, to me, refute very well a probabilistic validation approach. At a minimum, there's a requirement of descriptiveness that contributes to the appeal of a new paradigm.

BEWARE OF FALSE SYLLOGISMS!
The old understanding of the scientific method is also useful for categorizing ideas. It's good to keep in mind that a "hypothesis" is a proposal, while a "theory" is well-understood within its definition and constraints. Mostly, this serves as a helpful tool for dealing with poorly-informed blowhards.

One thing that a probabilistic validation is good for (and which I think a paradigm model deals with less effectively) is to keep down the poorly supported competing theories. It's a continuation of the point, but it deserves a special heading. It's true that all iconoclasts don't fit in within the popular paradigm. On the other hand, just because you are out there taking a chisel to everyone's favorite statues doesn't mean you're a revolutionary. Maybe you're just an asshole. It's good to have some rules of thumb here. You'd better have a damn good argument if you want to show me your perpetuum mobile.

WHY PICK ON SCIENCE?
I am most comfortable spotting paradigms outside of science, as well I might be. Politics and economics seem, to me, to be filthy with the things, and far more than with scientific study, they are unburdened by the rigors of empiricism. Why do people come to suddenly believe in Communism, in consumerism, in American party politics, in popular revolution, in abolition? These are more gestalt-style shifts, nudged on, I often like to think, by events as well as the evolution of scientific paradigms, but colored more heavily by the whimsical human imagination. The failure of old networks to address perceived social crises, suddenly perceived broadly enough, precipitates revolutions of a more political (and generally violent) sort. Kuhn touches on this at the end (it may have been his starting point), but if you've ever witnessed a debate between an American liberal and conservative, then you've seen very clearly a failure to accept the other's set of assumptions and evaluations, not to mention a rather questionable concept of progress, in addition to a craptastic analysis of data (usually worse for the person with a threatened advantage). Living in a political climate that I loathe is difficult, especially when the tools I have for analyzing it are also the ones it provides. I give the social dissenters some major props, including, and maybe especially, those who can spot the system and find a way to conscientiously object to it. I think that much of the alternative social paradigms come from literature and art (and science may owe more to these than is usually acknowledged—I liked Kuhn's point that in the Renaissance, there was little distinction between science and art). I love to see when scientific principles are applied in a more honest manner than number-crunching your way to a foregone economic conclusion from dubious assumptions, and it's governed a lot of my reading in the past few years. My minor observation is that a more evidence-based approach would do wonders for the world.

Boring! But it's out of my head.