logical bob wrote:

think wrote:Neither scientific nor artistic development is merely cumulative ... It seems to me it also doesn't fully support Cito's distinction between linear and cyclical time.

I don't think you're going to be able to get away from the cumulative nature of scientific progress. You're certainly not going to be able to do so using Kuhn, since he's quite clear that each successive paradigm solves more problems than its predecessor. Cumulative ability to get stuff done, as opposed to simple realism with regard to current theory, is at the heart of Kuhn's account of science.

Regarding your question "what was lost when Newtonian mechanics was subsumed"; I think in order to understand what is meant by "Kuhn-loss" we first have to look at ....

Kuhn wrote:the physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means identical with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name.

Indeed, and as I said the point of Kuhn's account is that realism with regard to the current theory is less important than the cumulative solving of problems. It's hard to see how finding a better way to do things constitutes a loss.

The thing with the paradigm shift model is that it's as elusive as Marxism. One tells the familiar stories of Newton/Einstein and Ptolemy/Kepler, and then when someone gives an example of scientific progress without paradigm shifts one concludes that in that case we are still in the "normal science" phase, with the paradigm shift coming as inevitably as the Revolution.

Well first of all, as I have already had to remark a few times here, I'm not trying to "get away from" the cumulative nature of scientific progress. I'm not even trying to get away from the idea of scientific progress, though I certainly don't think it is necessary to hold to either of these ideas. I pointed out earlier the stronger argument against linear progress is Nietzschean; Kuhn must have a progressive view (though not at all of the sort presented by SoS or Cito) since his interpretation of science is fundamentally Hegelian.

How do we define progress in the absence of something like a asymptotic or teleological approach to a final "ideal scientific theory" which unifies and interprets all phenomena perfectly? I think you are right that Kuhn's view of science is still that it is progressive but not toward any ideal knowledge, only toward creating and solving a greater number of puzzles. We subsume the puzzles of previous paradigms or disciplinary matrices in their quantitative dimension, but lose the physical referent. We must be able to solve all the mathematical problems, but we are not talking about the same "mass". So I think you are basically correct when you say Kuhn's view of scientific progress is that we are increasing our "ability to get things done".

The key point here is that for Kuhn, we cannot be getting better at "explaining" the world because there is no unitary world -- a paradigm shift is a world shift precisely because Kuhn does not abstract any stable, unitary "world-in-itself" -- world (or the empirical objects which populate the world) cannot be abstracted from the theory that constructs and interrelates them.

So, I think SoS's comment that there can be no paradigm shift outside an ontological position is off the mark; from Kuhn's perpsective "just the fact's m'a" is an ontological position in so far as it assumes one can apprehend theory-neutral facts. Why not say, "just the theory m'am". (I'll admit my personal bias here (forget philosophy for a moment) -- the theory is just so much more interesting! Don't you guys find that maths is what makes physics so compelling? Now that physics is at a stage where I am incapable of understanding the maths, the facts mean nothing to me; who cares if those crazy physicists found such and such blip on their particle accelerator??? Just thinking about this fact makes me depressed...while I still maintain that, contrary to Cito, we cannot privilege the individual knower over the social institution, sometimes I can't help lament how specialized physics has become. So many interesting things are happening, but I'll be forever behind the understanding of it .)

think wrote:The key point here is that for Kuhn, we cannot be getting better at "explaining" the world because there is no unitary world -- a paradigm shift is a world shift precisely because Kuhn does not abstract any stable, unitary "world-in-itself" -- world (or the empirical objects which populate the world) cannot be abstracted from the theory that constructs and interrelates them.

So, I think SoS's comment that there can be no paradigm shift outside an ontological position is off the mark; from Kuhn's perpsective "just the fact's m'a" is an ontological position in so far as it assumes one can apprehend theory-neutral facts. Why not say, "just the theory m'am".

'Explaining the world' is a narrative that philosophers like you continue to diddle and diddle. So is 'progress'. The point I made a few pages back is that scientific knowledge is cumulative in a sense that you can't really diddle too much. Scientific data is knowledge of how the results of experiments proceed from the methodology of experiments. Hit yourself on the head with a brick. It's an experiment of sorts, and one that teaches you that you don't need to repeat the experiment.

Narrate all you want about 'world-in-itself'. You'll never make any progress. You'll just continue to accumulate books of poetry. It's no mean feat, if that's the direction your tastes run. Waste of paper if you ask me, and that's the problem with art. I don't denigrate our need for pure entertainment that each member of the audience takes home in a different way.

What you may wish to discuss is 'morality' but all you can do is write poetry with 'morality' in the title. Jeffersonian-marxist put paid to analytic philosophy's attempts to produce a 'rigiourous' ethics. It's the same problem that religious nuts have in accepting that people are animals, which is what science tells you.

Cito di Pense wrote:

think wrote:The key point here is that for Kuhn, we cannot be getting better at "explaining" the world because there is no unitary world -- a paradigm shift is a world shift precisely because Kuhn does not abstract any stable, unitary "world-in-itself" -- world (or the empirical objects which populate the world) cannot be abstracted from the theory that constructs and interrelates them.

So, I think SoS's comment that there can be no paradigm shift outside an ontological position is off the mark; from Kuhn's perpsective "just the fact's m'a" is an ontological position in so far as it assumes one can apprehend theory-neutral facts. Why not say, "just the theory m'am".

'Explaining the world' is a narrative that philosophers like you continue to diddle and diddle. So is 'progress'. The point I made a few pages back is that scientific knowledge is cumulative in a sense that you can't really diddle too much. Scientific data is knowledge of how the results of experiments proceed from the methodology of experiments. Hit yourself on the head with a brick. It's an experiment of sorts, and one that teaches you that you don't need to repeat the experiment.

Narrate all you want about 'world-in-itself'. You'll never make any progress. You'll just continue to accumulate books of poetry. It's no mean feat, if that's the direction your tastes run. Waste of paper if you ask me, and that's the problem with art. I don't denigrate our need for pure entertainment that each member of the audience takes home in a different way.

What you may wish to discuss is 'morality' but all you can do is write poetry with 'morality' in the title. Jeffersonian-marxist put paid to analytic philosophy's attempts to produce a 'rigiourous' ethics. It's the same problem that religious nuts have in accepting that people are animals, which is what science tells you.

Uh couldn't extract anything coherent out of this except that I probably agree with Jeffersonian-marxist; though I'm not sure this point is particular "damning" of analytic philosophy since it may be that analytic philosophy has an internal tendency to remain on the level of the "attempt". Certainly that critique could be operable from a Hegelian perspective. I'd be interested to hear from Jeffersonian-marxist on this point.

think wrote:...
How do we define progress in the absence of something like a asymptotic or teleological approach to a final "ideal scientific theory" which unifies and interprets all phenomena perfectly? I think you are right that Kuhn's view of science is still that it is progressive but not toward any ideal knowledge, only toward creating and solving a greater number of puzzles. We subsume the puzzles of previous paradigms or disciplinary matrices in their quantitative dimension, but lose the physical referent. We must be able to solve all the mathematical problems, but we are not talking about the same "mass". So I think you are basically correct when you say Kuhn's view of scientific progress is that we are increasing our "ability to get things done".

The key point here is that for Kuhn, we cannot be getting better at "explaining" the world because there is no unitary world -- a paradigm shift is a world shift precisely because Kuhn does not abstract any stable, unitary "world-in-itself" -- world (or the empirical objects which populate the world) cannot be abstracted from the theory that constructs and interrelates them.

So, I think SoS's comment that there can be no paradigm shift outside an ontological position is off the mark; from Kuhn's perpsective "just the fact's m'a" is an ontological position in so far as it assumes one can apprehend theory-neutral facts. Why not say, "just the theory m'am". (I'll admit my personal bias here (forget philosophy for a moment) -- the theory is just so much more interesting! Don't you guys find that maths is what makes physics so compelling? Now that physics is at a stage where I am incapable of understanding the maths, the facts mean nothing to me; who cares if those crazy physicists found such and such blip on their particle accelerator??? Just thinking about this fact makes me depressed...while I still maintain that, contrary to Cito, we cannot privilege the individual knower over the social institution, sometimes I can't help lament how specialized physics has become. So many interesting things are happening, but I'll be forever behind the understanding of it .)

I think of facts differently then you do. But I had to use facts because that's what Jack Webb said. Theory, facts, intuition, I don't really give a shit.

Now with reductive explanations there may well be a unitary world as a mathematical structure that explains everything reductively. This would be a destination for asymptotic progress. It kind of looks like this is the case. The whole thing may be one or three primitives on some kind of information structure, like a computer, or more likely something we could never grasp, running some thing like a program that constructs all of this.

I don't hope for that though. I hope for chaotic random swirls in swirls, and that this reductive magic is only local.

But we just don't know.

But who the fuck cares if it's progress in the first place? The only progress for the human race that I can buy into is the inevitable march to extinction or extinctive speciation.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

think wrote:...
How do we define progress in the absence of something like a asymptotic or teleological approach to a final "ideal scientific theory" which unifies and interprets all phenomena perfectly? I think you are right that Kuhn's view of science is still that it is progressive but not toward any ideal knowledge, only toward creating and solving a greater number of puzzles. We subsume the puzzles of previous paradigms or disciplinary matrices in their quantitative dimension, but lose the physical referent. We must be able to solve all the mathematical problems, but we are not talking about the same "mass". So I think you are basically correct when you say Kuhn's view of scientific progress is that we are increasing our "ability to get things done".

The key point here is that for Kuhn, we cannot be getting better at "explaining" the world because there is no unitary world -- a paradigm shift is a world shift precisely because Kuhn does not abstract any stable, unitary "world-in-itself" -- world (or the empirical objects which populate the world) cannot be abstracted from the theory that constructs and interrelates them.

So, I think SoS's comment that there can be no paradigm shift outside an ontological position is off the mark; from Kuhn's perpsective "just the fact's m'a" is an ontological position in so far as it assumes one can apprehend theory-neutral facts. Why not say, "just the theory m'am". (I'll admit my personal bias here (forget philosophy for a moment) -- the theory is just so much more interesting! Don't you guys find that maths is what makes physics so compelling? Now that physics is at a stage where I am incapable of understanding the maths, the facts mean nothing to me; who cares if those crazy physicists found such and such blip on their particle accelerator??? Just thinking about this fact makes me depressed...while I still maintain that, contrary to Cito, we cannot privilege the individual knower over the social institution, sometimes I can't help lament how specialized physics has become. So many interesting things are happening, but I'll be forever behind the understanding of it .)

I think of facts differently then you do. But I had to use facts because that's what Jack Webb said. Theory, facts, intuition, I don't really give a shit.

Now with reductive explanations there may well be a unitary world as a mathematical structure that explains everything reductively. This would be a destination for asymptotic progress. It kind of looks like this is the case. The whole thing may be one or three primitives on some kind of information structure, like a computer, or more likely something we could never grasp, running some thing like a program that constructs all of this.

I don't hope for that though. I hope for chaotic random swirls in swirls, and that this reductive magic is only local.

But we just don't know.

Yeah, I realize your usage of "fact" is a bit idiosyncratic. I like the metaphor of the program constructing information that is partially visible to itself from within.

As for the "reductive magic" being "only local"...why shouldn't the chaos be local as well? So this is part of the debate between "intelligent design" types like the Catholic church and the view zoon put forward a few posts back -- is science part of a higher reasoned order (the Catholic theological view) or merely emerging out of the biological "unreason" of evolution? Is reason a local "bubble" within a larger chaos, or is chaos only apparent because the world is fundamentally ordered? Blah blah blah, not a very interesting debate to my mind; but I would put the question to you why you say mathematical structure is local but leave that qualification absent of the "chaotic random swirls in swirls" ...?

think wrote:[I like the metaphor of ...

You like poetry in general, think. So do I, but let's call a spade a spade.

Cito di Pense wrote:

think wrote:[I like the metaphor of ...

You like poetry in general, think. So do I, but let's call a spade a spade.

Yeah...I love poetry. I don't particularly care for the "call a spade a spade" attitude though. It's a bit stiff.

think wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

think wrote:[I like the metaphor of ...

You like poetry in general, think. So do I, but let's call a spade a spade.

Yeah...I love poetry. I don't particularly care for the "call a spade a spade" attitude though. It's a bit stiff.

Well, maybe you would consider calling a spade a spoon. My long-time associates here will get the joke, even if you don't.

Let me guess...another spoon bending joke?

think wrote:Let me guess...another spoon bending joke?

Call it 'explaining the cosmos' if you like.

I know nothing about cosmology, and while I'm sure it is a very interesting field, it's not the topic of the thread.

logical bob wrote:Cumulative ability to get stuff done, as opposed to simple realism with regard to current theory, is at the heart of Kuhn's account of science.

think wrote: I think you are right that Kuhn's view of science is still that it is progressive but not toward any ideal knowledge, only toward creating and solving a greater number of puzzles. We subsume the puzzles of previous paradigms or disciplinary matrices in their quantitative dimension, but lose the physical referent. We must be able to solve all the mathematical problems, but we are not talking about the same "mass". So I think you are basically correct when you say Kuhn's view of scientific progress is that we are increasing our "ability to get things done".

The key point here is that for Kuhn, we cannot be getting better at "explaining" the world because there is no unitary world -- a paradigm shift is a world shift precisely because Kuhn does not abstract any stable, unitary "world-in-itself" -- world (or the empirical objects which populate the world) cannot be abstracted from the theory that constructs and interrelates them.

I think you said what I said but used more words.

think wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

think wrote:...
How do we define progress in the absence of something like a asymptotic or teleological approach to a final "ideal scientific theory" which unifies and interprets all phenomena perfectly? I think you are right that Kuhn's view of science is still that it is progressive but not toward any ideal knowledge, only toward creating and solving a greater number of puzzles. We subsume the puzzles of previous paradigms or disciplinary matrices in their quantitative dimension, but lose the physical referent. We must be able to solve all the mathematical problems, but we are not talking about the same "mass". So I think you are basically correct when you say Kuhn's view of scientific progress is that we are increasing our "ability to get things done".

The key point here is that for Kuhn, we cannot be getting better at "explaining" the world because there is no unitary world -- a paradigm shift is a world shift precisely because Kuhn does not abstract any stable, unitary "world-in-itself" -- world (or the empirical objects which populate the world) cannot be abstracted from the theory that constructs and interrelates them.

So, I think SoS's comment that there can be no paradigm shift outside an ontological position is off the mark; from Kuhn's perpsective "just the fact's m'a" is an ontological position in so far as it assumes one can apprehend theory-neutral facts. Why not say, "just the theory m'am". (I'll admit my personal bias here (forget philosophy for a moment) -- the theory is just so much more interesting! Don't you guys find that maths is what makes physics so compelling? Now that physics is at a stage where I am incapable of understanding the maths, the facts mean nothing to me; who cares if those crazy physicists found such and such blip on their particle accelerator??? Just thinking about this fact makes me depressed...while I still maintain that, contrary to Cito, we cannot privilege the individual knower over the social institution, sometimes I can't help lament how specialized physics has become. So many interesting things are happening, but I'll be forever behind the understanding of it .)

I think of facts differently then you do. But I had to use facts because that's what Jack Webb said. Theory, facts, intuition, I don't really give a shit.

Now with reductive explanations there may well be a unitary world as a mathematical structure that explains everything reductively. This would be a destination for asymptotic progress. It kind of looks like this is the case. The whole thing may be one or three primitives on some kind of information structure, like a computer, or more likely something we could never grasp, running some thing like a program that constructs all of this.

I don't hope for that though. I hope for chaotic random swirls in swirls, and that this reductive magic is only local.

But we just don't know.

Yeah, I realize your usage of "fact" is a bit idiosyncratic. I like the metaphor of the program constructing information that is partially visible to itself from within.

As for the "reductive magic" being "only local"...why shouldn't the chaos be local as well? So this is part of the debate between "intelligent design" types like the Catholic church and the view zoon put forward a few posts back -- is science part of a higher reasoned order (the Catholic theological view) or merely emerging out of the biological "unreason" of evolution? Is reason a local "bubble" within a larger chaos, or is chaos only apparent because the world is fundamentally ordered? Blah blah blah, not a very interesting debate to my mind; but I would put the question to you why you say mathematical structure is local but leave that qualification absent of the "chaotic random swirls in swirls" ...?

Not certain if I have understood but I think the swirls are local. We would have a big helping of proton pudding if it weren't. Something big banged in a chunky way and we get chaotic swirls. That information in the exact way things are arranged is what I consider the closest to the concept of an underlying reality.

Now reduction finds a relationship in two or more swirls. But I can't get over the differences in the swirls myself. I like the differences more than the sameness. I call it god; and I don't have any problem with imagining me as a swirl that reduces swirls to sameness.