One thing that's really really really important to remember is that, except during a period of scientific revolution, scientists who share a paradigm in the broad sense of "disciplinary matrix" - that is scientists who are in the same discipline or subdiscipline - share the same constellation of values, beliefs, techniques, symbolic generalizations, models, exemplars, etc. As far as I can tell, this is true of no nonscience except maybe mathematics. Kuhn's insights into normal and revolutionary science can't be transferred directly to either normal or revolutionary nonscience. This doesn't mean we can't use his insights elsewhere, just that we can't transfer them without modification. But it does mean that we can't use The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions as a model for the evolution of nonsciences much less as a model for overall cultural evolution, or that his ideas of how a science propagates its ideas can be used as a model for how a nonscience propagates its ideas.
And of course the reverse is true as well. We can't simply transfer our experiences from the nonsciences to the sciences, or project our model of how we talk about the nonscientific things onto what Kuhn is saying about the sciences. And it's my insistence that we can't do so that is making me something of a killjoy here. This doesn't mean that there's no value in making speculative leaps, but it's my job to make sure that those grand speculative leaps don't end up propagating conventional ideas, don't drown out what's potentially new to us in Kuhn's ideas.
So: what Kuhn says about scientific evolution can't be applied without modification to the evolution of other social practices, and what we've learned from our experience of the nonsciences can't be applied without modification to Kuhn.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-03-08 05:10 pm (UTC)And of course the reverse is true as well. We can't simply transfer our experiences from the nonsciences to the sciences, or project our model of how we talk about the nonscientific things onto what Kuhn is saying about the sciences. And it's my insistence that we can't do so that is making me something of a killjoy here. This doesn't mean that there's no value in making speculative leaps, but it's my job to make sure that those grand speculative leaps don't end up propagating conventional ideas, don't drown out what's potentially new to us in Kuhn's ideas.
So: what Kuhn says about scientific evolution can't be applied without modification to the evolution of other social practices, and what we've learned from our experience of the nonsciences can't be applied without modification to Kuhn.