kuhnstuff (note only)

[dubdobdee]

p13-23 (note FOOTNOTES listed later):

P13:
i: "two types of scientific development, normal and revolutionary"
ii: "a standard image: normal science is what produces the bricks that scientific research is forever adding to the growing stockpile of scientific knowledge... that cumulative conception of scientific development [blah blah]... But scientific development also displays a non-cumulative mode..."

P14:
i:"a sufficient basis... on which I shall be drawing"
ii: "normal change is... the sort that results in growth, accretion, cumulative addition to what was known before"

P14-15: "discoveries that cannot be accommodated within the concepts in use before they were made. In order to make or to assimilate such a discovery one must alter the way one thinks about and describes some range of natural phenomena."

P15:
i: "discovery (in cases like these "invention" may be a better word)"
ii: "the concepts... deployed in that law differed from those in use before the law was introduced, and the law itself was essential to their definition."
iii: "a... fuller, but more simplistic example is provided by the transition from [Astronomy P] to [Astronomy Q] "
iv: "changes in laws of nature but also changes in the criteria by which some terms in those laws attached to nature"
v:"criteria... in part dependent upon the theory"
vi: "When referential changes of this sort accompany change of law or theory, scientific development cannot be quite cumulative. One cannot get from the old to the new simply by an addition to what was already known."
vii: "the new in the vocabulary of the old"
viii: "the two attachto nature differently"
ix: "univocal reading"
x: "Only a small part of it... can be considered here, and even about it I shall be schematic."
xi: "My account will inverthistorical order and describe [what is] required to reach [a concept]."
xii: "The route... travelled backwardwith the aidof written texts... [the route] travelledforward with no text but nature to guide..."

P16:
i: "clearly in mind"
ii: "admired codifierof logic" --
iii: "emergenceof the modern biological tradition"
iv: "talents have desertedhim so systematically"
v: "Aristotle stumbled... totally collapsed"
vi: "Suddenly the fragmentsin my head sorted themselves in a new way, and fell into place together."
vii: "... egregious mistakes now seemed... near misses within a ... successful tradition."

P17:
i: "the pieces suddenly sorting themselves outand coming togetherin a new way"
ii: "Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemeal, one step at a time. Instead, it invokes some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux suddenly sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before."
iii: "... though Aristotle recognizes that the various subcategories are not alike in ALL respects, the basic characteristics relevant to the recognition and analysis of motion must apply to changes of all sorts. In some sense that is not merely metaphorical; all varieties of change are seen as like each other, as constituting a single natural family."
iv: "Aristotelian physics invertsthe ontological hierarchyof matter and quality..."

P18:
i: "this neutral substrate, a sort of sponge, is sufficiently impregnatedwith qualities like [list of examples] to give it individual identity. Change occurs by changing qualities, not matter, by removing some qualities from some given matter and replacing them with others."
ii: "... these and other aspects of A's viewpoint... begin to fit together, to lend each other mutual support, ... to make a sort of sense collectively that they individually lack"
iii: "But it is precisely seeing motion as change-of-quality that permits its assimilationto all other sorts of change."
iv: "The conception of motion-as-change and the conception of a qualitative physics prove deeply interdependent, almost equivalent notions, and that is a first example of the fitting or locking together of parts."
v: P19: "A sick man often grows healthy by himself, but an external agent is needed, or believed to be needed, to make him sick. One set of qualities, one end point of change, represents a body's natural state, the one that it realises voluntarilyand thereafter rests."
vi: "They are realising their natural propertiesjust as the acorn does through its growth."
vii: "Another... part of the A doctrine begins to fall into place."
viii: "locking individual bitsof A physics into placein the whole"
ix: "lend each other mutual authority and support"
x: "the status of, say, a square circle"
xi: "The argument has force..."
xii: "If there could be a void, then the Aristotelian universe or cosmos could not be finite."

P20:
i: "In a void a body could not be awareof the location of its natural place. It is just be by being in contactwith all positions in the universe through a chain of intervening matter that a body is able to find its way to the place where its natural qualities are fully realised. The presence of matter is what provides space with structure."
ii: "There is no way to 'correct' A's view of the void without reconstructingmuch of the rest of his physics."
iii: "the way in which A physics cuts up and describesthe phenomenal world"
iv: "how pieces of that description lock together to form a whole, one that had to be broken and reformedon the roadto N mechanics"
v: "so-called 'piles' (of coins)"

P21: (nothing noted)

P22:
i: "the unit cellconsists of the two pieces of metal in contact"
ii: "the sourceof an electrical tension"
iii: "generatinga contact potential, which neutralisethe initial effect"
iv: "The bimetallic jar is a condenser or Leyden jar, but one that charges itself"
v: "The pile of coins is, then, a linked assemblage or "battery" of charged Leyden jars, and this where, by specialisation from the group to its members, the term "battery" come from in its application to electricity."
vi: "'the crown of cups'"
vii: "Why does Volta include two half cells? (...) In Volta's diagram there are no half-cells."
viii: "The cells themselves are the bimetallic horseshoe strips."
ix: "reverses the direction of current flow"
x: "a process like turning the latter inside out"
xi: "what was previously current flowinternal to the cell become the external current and vice versa"
xii: "in the modern diagram both the direction of flowand the polarityare reversed"
xiii: "Far more important conceptually is the change in the current source..."

P23:
i: "When both viewpoints were briefly in the fieldat once, the first was known as the contact theory, the second as the chemical theoryof the batterys."
ii: "the electrostatic view of the battery"
iii: "what we would think of as an external circuit is simply a discharge path like the short circuit to ground that discharges a Leyden jar"

Comments

[koganbot]

These are quite good, and interestingly don't match up all that much with what I myself noted down, a fact that nicely illustrates a hypothesis of mine, which is that "similarity" covers a range of ways of being similar that are - you know - both similar and dissimilar.

Also, some good similarity action recently posted by petronia back on Kuhn 5: First General C&Q Thread.