yet more kuhn stuff
Feb. 2nd, 2009 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dubdobdeeP29:
i: "In normal change, one simply revises or adds a single generalisation, all others remaining the same. In revolutionary change one must either live with incoherence or else revise a number of interrelated generalisations together. If these same changes were introduced one at a time, there would be no intermediate resting place. Only the initial and final sets of generalisations provide a coherent account of nature."
ii: "the most nearly cumulative"
iii: "resonators, in any normal sense of the term, cannot behave as these do"
iv: "to permit the new behaviour, one must change, or try to, laws of mechanics and of electromagnetic theory"
v: "An integrated picture of several aspects of nature has to be changed at the same time"
vi: "meaning change and... change in the way words and phrases attach to nature, change in the way their referents are determined"
vii: "A newly discovered property... may... be called upon (usually with others) to determine the presence of [list of various phenomena], and thus to pick out the referents of the corresponding terms... Such discoveries need not be and usually are not revolutionary."
viii: "Normal science, too, alters the way in which terms attach to nature. What characterises revolutions is not, therefore, simply change in the way referents are determined, but change of a still more restricted sort."
ix: "criteria by which terms attach"
P29-30:
i: "The distinctive character of revolutionary change in language is that it alters not only the criteria by which terms attach to nature, but also, massively, the set of objects or situations to which those terms attach. What had been paradigmatic examples of motion for A -- acorn to oak or sickness to health -- were not motions at all for Newton. In the tradition, a natural family ceased to be natural; its members were redistributed among pre-existing sets; and only one of them continued to bear the old name."
P30:
i: "What characterises revolutions is, thus, change in several of the taxonomic categories prerequisite to scientific descriptions and generalisations... (intervening sentences also pertinent)... [T]his sort of alteration is necessarily holistic. That holism... is rooted in the nature of language, for the criteria relevant to categorisation are ipso fatso the criteria that attach the names of those categories to the world."
ii: "Language is a coinage with two faces, one looking outward to the world, the other inward to the world's reflection in the referential structure of the language."
iii: "the most difficult of the three for me to see"
iv: "repay further exploration"
v: "All of my examples have involved a central change of model, metaphor, or analogy -- a change in one's sense of what is similar to what, and what is different."
vi: "Sometimes, as in the A example, the similarity is internal to the subject matter. Thus, for As, motion was a special case of change, so that the falling stone was LIKE the growing oak..."
vii: "the pattern of similarities that constitutes these phenomena [is?] a natural family, that places them in the same taxonomic category" [note missing verb supplied is a guess]
viii: "Elsewhere the similarity is external."
ix: "Thus, P's resonators were LIKE B's molecules, or V's battery cells were LIKE Leyden jars, and resistance was LIKE electrostatic leakage."
x: "In these cases too, the old pattern of similarities had to be discarded and replaced before or during the process of change."
P30-31:
i: "All these cases display interrelated features familiar to students of metaphor. In each case two objects or situations are juxtaposed and said to be the same or similar. (An even slightly more extended discussion would have also to consider examples of dissimilarity, for they, too, are often important in establishing a taxonomy.)"
P31:
i: "Whatever their origin -- a separate issue... -- the primary function of all these juxtapositions is to transmit and maintain a taxonomy."
ii: "The juxtaposed items are exhibited to a previously uninitiated audience by someone who can already recognise their similarity..."
iii: "If the exhibit succee ds, the new initiates emerge with an acquired list of features salient to the required similarity relation -- with a feature-space, that is, within which the previously juxtaposed items are durably clustered together as examples of the same thing and are simultaneously separated from objects or situations with which they might otherwise have been confused." (brief discussion of this chunk here)
iv: "the education of an A associates the flight of an arrow with a falling stone and both with the growth of an oak and the return to health" (rest of para expands on this)
v: "metaphor-like juxtapositions... are... central to the process by which scientific and other language is acquired."
vi: "the production and the explanation of generalisations about nature" (para that follows is details but important)
vii: "In much of language learning these two sorts of knowledge -- knowledge of words and knowledge of nature -- are acquired together, not really two sorts of knowledge at all, but two faces of the single coinage that a language provides."
P31-32:
i: "The reappearance of the double-faced character of scientific language provides an appropriate terminus"
P32
i: "If I am right, the central characteristic of scientific revolutions is that they alter the knowledge of nature that is intrinsic to the language itself and that is thus prior to anything quite describable as description or generalisation, scientific or everyday."
ii: "To make the void or an infinite linear motion part of science required observation reports that could only be formulated by altering the langage with which nature was described. Until those changes had occurred, language itself resisted the invention and introduction of the sought-after new theories. The same resistance by language is... the reason for P's switch from 'element' and 'resonator' to 'quantum' and 'oscillator'."
iii: "Violation or distortion of a previously unproblematic scientific language is the touchstone for revolutionary change."
FOOTNOTES
p14 footnote 2:
i: "the distinction between observational and theoretical terms"
ii: "the notion of an antecedently understood term is intrinsically developmental or historical"
iii: "areas of overlap"
iv: "traditional approach"
v: "elegant apparatus"
vi: "concept formation"
vii: "intimate association"
viii: "A more systematic way of preserving an important part [of a distinction]... by embedding it in a developmental approach..."
ix: "a hierarchy of theoretical terms, each level introduced within a particular historical theory"
x: "The... picture of linguistic strata shows intriguing parallels"
xi: Metaphors deployed within cited booktitles: "Aspects of ..."/"Logical structure..."/"Structure and Dynamics"/"Archeology"
p17 footnote 3:
i: "a concept of change that is broader than that of motion. Motion is change of substance, change from something to something. But change also includes coming to be and passing away, i.e. change from nothing to something and from something to nothing..., and these are not motions."
p19 footnote 4:
i: "Place, for A, is always the place of body or, more precisely, the interior surface of the containing or surrounding body."
i: "In normal change, one simply revises or adds a single generalisation, all others remaining the same. In revolutionary change one must either live with incoherence or else revise a number of interrelated generalisations together. If these same changes were introduced one at a time, there would be no intermediate resting place. Only the initial and final sets of generalisations provide a coherent account of nature."
ii: "the most nearly cumulative"
iii: "resonators, in any normal sense of the term, cannot behave as these do"
iv: "to permit the new behaviour, one must change, or try to, laws of mechanics and of electromagnetic theory"
v: "An integrated picture of several aspects of nature has to be changed at the same time"
vi: "meaning change and... change in the way words and phrases attach to nature, change in the way their referents are determined"
vii: "A newly discovered property... may... be called upon (usually with others) to determine the presence of [list of various phenomena], and thus to pick out the referents of the corresponding terms... Such discoveries need not be and usually are not revolutionary."
viii: "Normal science, too, alters the way in which terms attach to nature. What characterises revolutions is not, therefore, simply change in the way referents are determined, but change of a still more restricted sort."
ix: "criteria by which terms attach"
P29-30:
i: "The distinctive character of revolutionary change in language is that it alters not only the criteria by which terms attach to nature, but also, massively, the set of objects or situations to which those terms attach. What had been paradigmatic examples of motion for A -- acorn to oak or sickness to health -- were not motions at all for Newton. In the tradition, a natural family ceased to be natural; its members were redistributed among pre-existing sets; and only one of them continued to bear the old name."
P30:
i: "What characterises revolutions is, thus, change in several of the taxonomic categories prerequisite to scientific descriptions and generalisations... (intervening sentences also pertinent)... [T]his sort of alteration is necessarily holistic. That holism... is rooted in the nature of language, for the criteria relevant to categorisation are ipso fatso the criteria that attach the names of those categories to the world."
ii: "Language is a coinage with two faces, one looking outward to the world, the other inward to the world's reflection in the referential structure of the language."
iii: "the most difficult of the three for me to see"
iv: "repay further exploration"
v: "All of my examples have involved a central change of model, metaphor, or analogy -- a change in one's sense of what is similar to what, and what is different."
vi: "Sometimes, as in the A example, the similarity is internal to the subject matter. Thus, for As, motion was a special case of change, so that the falling stone was LIKE the growing oak..."
vii: "the pattern of similarities that constitutes these phenomena [is?] a natural family, that places them in the same taxonomic category" [note missing verb supplied is a guess]
viii: "Elsewhere the similarity is external."
ix: "Thus, P's resonators were LIKE B's molecules, or V's battery cells were LIKE Leyden jars, and resistance was LIKE electrostatic leakage."
x: "In these cases too, the old pattern of similarities had to be discarded and replaced before or during the process of change."
P30-31:
i: "All these cases display interrelated features familiar to students of metaphor. In each case two objects or situations are juxtaposed and said to be the same or similar. (An even slightly more extended discussion would have also to consider examples of dissimilarity, for they, too, are often important in establishing a taxonomy.)"
P31:
i: "Whatever their origin -- a separate issue... -- the primary function of all these juxtapositions is to transmit and maintain a taxonomy."
ii: "The juxtaposed items are exhibited to a previously uninitiated audience by someone who can already recognise their similarity..."
iii: "If the exhibit succee ds, the new initiates emerge with an acquired list of features salient to the required similarity relation -- with a feature-space, that is, within which the previously juxtaposed items are durably clustered together as examples of the same thing and are simultaneously separated from objects or situations with which they might otherwise have been confused." (brief discussion of this chunk here)
iv: "the education of an A associates the flight of an arrow with a falling stone and both with the growth of an oak and the return to health" (rest of para expands on this)
v: "metaphor-like juxtapositions... are... central to the process by which scientific and other language is acquired."
vi: "the production and the explanation of generalisations about nature" (para that follows is details but important)
vii: "In much of language learning these two sorts of knowledge -- knowledge of words and knowledge of nature -- are acquired together, not really two sorts of knowledge at all, but two faces of the single coinage that a language provides."
P31-32:
i: "The reappearance of the double-faced character of scientific language provides an appropriate terminus"
P32
i: "If I am right, the central characteristic of scientific revolutions is that they alter the knowledge of nature that is intrinsic to the language itself and that is thus prior to anything quite describable as description or generalisation, scientific or everyday."
ii: "To make the void or an infinite linear motion part of science required observation reports that could only be formulated by altering the langage with which nature was described. Until those changes had occurred, language itself resisted the invention and introduction of the sought-after new theories. The same resistance by language is... the reason for P's switch from 'element' and 'resonator' to 'quantum' and 'oscillator'."
iii: "Violation or distortion of a previously unproblematic scientific language is the touchstone for revolutionary change."
FOOTNOTES
p14 footnote 2:
i: "the distinction between observational and theoretical terms"
ii: "the notion of an antecedently understood term is intrinsically developmental or historical"
iii: "areas of overlap"
iv: "traditional approach"
v: "elegant apparatus"
vi: "concept formation"
vii: "intimate association"
viii: "A more systematic way of preserving an important part [of a distinction]... by embedding it in a developmental approach..."
ix: "a hierarchy of theoretical terms, each level introduced within a particular historical theory"
x: "The... picture of linguistic strata shows intriguing parallels"
xi: Metaphors deployed within cited booktitles: "Aspects of ..."/"Logical structure..."/"Structure and Dynamics"/"Archeology"
p17 footnote 3:
i: "a concept of change that is broader than that of motion. Motion is change of substance, change from something to something. But change also includes coming to be and passing away, i.e. change from nothing to something and from something to nothing..., and these are not motions."
p19 footnote 4:
i: "Place, for A, is always the place of body or, more precisely, the interior surface of the containing or surrounding body."
