paradigms vs rules (and some out-of-order saturday morning kuhnic speculations)

[dubdobdee]

-- A rule tells you how to use a tool
-- A paradigm helps you recognise which tool is the right one to be using

first point: Increasingly, Kuhn's judgment of whether such and such a story is good history reminds me more of (what I've been learning of) Aristotle's ideas of motion and cause -- that is, that there's no such thing (in intellectual matters) as "action at a distance". Everything is about tight, small, close-up movement of thought: you may wonder if such and such a fact conflicts with that faraway fact over there -- but to decide you need all the in-between steps, the jostling of facts right against others. Philosophy -- assuming this term for a moment doesn't include its critics, such as Kuhn! -- seems to prefer "underlying thought realms", which operate as forcefields of ideas... the marxist term for this (and marxists, as materialists, consider it an error, even though some of them are at the very same moment addicted to it) is "idealism".

(Hence an exemplar of idealist thinking would be the sentence: "It is rockism that allows you to overlook this fact" --at BEST this is a metaphorical shortcut, with the term "rockism" deployed by the speaker as a summation of a whole forest of social facts (and in fact, ironically, helping the speaker overlook exactly the social facts s/he think s/he's invoking).)

second point: in darwinian discussion, there's a concept called (actually rather unhelpfully) "preadaptation" -- this is the argument that a sophisticated and complex organ, such as a wing or an eye, will have evolved from an early organ with an unrelated purpose. So a pre-eye is evolution-fit for something else, possibly very different indeed, and its later eye-ness is not being "evolved towards" (the darwin-critic's question being "what use is half an eye? surely it has to arrive all in one go to make an evolutionary difference?")

(this is not unrelated to the argument that, the past causes the present and not vice versa, in thought as in everything. A proto-truth doesn't somehow know it's going to arrive at status-as-truth; and nor do we. To arrive at a fact, we may end up taking a very long route through what will come to be seen as nonsense...)

third point: it's often argued that culture is lamarckian -- viz that in culture acquired characteristics can be passed on, as they cannot in darwinian evolution. But if Kuhn is correct, maybe this is much less likely to be the case.

Comments

[koganbot]

-- A rule tells you how to use a tool
-- A paradigm helps you recognise which tool is the right one to be using

I don't see how to connect these two statements to the three points that follow.

Does a rule tell you how to use any tool, or does it tell you how to use a particular tool?

For me to have any hope of understanding what you mean, you need to give an example of a tool, give an example of a rule (one that tells you how to use the tool), and give an example of a paradigm (one that tells you which tool to use). And to give me any sense of what the connection is here to Kuhn, you need to quote what Kuhn actually says.

Given the subject matter, it's ironic that I need to prod you to do this.

Of course, it would help if I would type in some more text from Kuhn, which I intend to over the next several days. But here's an example - not quoted from Kuhn, but it's similar to one he might give. Say I'm a tax collector and I'm allowed to give a tax break to anyone who owns a swan. But being into rules, I go to my supervisor and say, "Help me, I need you to give me a rule for how to recognize a swan." He says, "A simple rule: if it's white, it's a swan." Now, this isn't a very good rule, since the category "swan" all of a sudden includes a lot of refrigerators and paper towels etc., and the government is about to lose a lot of revenue. But this problem aside, another problem arises, which is how can we tell when an object is white? I say, "No problem, I already know what white is." But my supervisor asks me, "What's the rule you use in deciding when something is white?" And we discover that I can't tell him, because I don't have such a rule. I just know how to do it, and I tell my boss it's a lot easier making judgment calls about when something is white (versus, say, beige) than it is making judgment calls in regard to gymnastic competitions, which I do on the side for a few extra bucks at the Cassie Ventura School For The Performing Arts.

If we want to, my supervisor and I can come up with a rule for "whiteness" involving light and wavelengths and reflection and such, but of course I haven't previously used such a rule when making judgments about whiteness and nonetheless I rarely have any problem in making such judgments. Anyhow, the department can't afford the equipment that would allow me to apply such a rule.

A developmental psychologist who happens to be observing us runs over and puts me under hypnosis, and she prompts me to recount those episodes from back in my childhood when I was just learning how to speak in which people would use the word "white," including a few times when I was corrected after using the word wrong, through to the time when it finally clicked for me in general when something was "white," after which I was never again wrong.

Kuhn would say that a specific use of the word "white" that I had observed as a youngster, along with its surrounding circumstances and the correct associations I made, is a paradigm, and a number of those similar paradigms are what taught me how to use the word. And Kuhn does say that instances of a father pointing out swans to his child - enough instances so that the child doesn't think that "swan" refers to water lapping against any object, and he doesn't confuse swans with geese and ducks, which are also there in the nature preserve, etc. - are paradigms (and after a couple of hours the child gets to the point where he invariably identifies swans as well as his dad does and all this without the father offering rules or definitions). If my supervisor had been wise he'd have made like the father and given me examples rather than rules.

So, now, using the example I just gave you, and using "rule" and "paradigm" in the way that Kuhn does in such instances, tell me what the tool is (or tools are), what the rules are that tell you how to use the tool, and what the paradigms are that tell you which tool to use.

[koganbot]

(Trying to do this myself, I can't. The only rule in my example is "Owners of swans get a tax break," and it's the paradigms that tell you how to apply the rule. And the "rules" that we're subsequently looking for - rules that tell you how to apply the word "white" and the word "swan" - are absent, missing, nonexistent (or in the case of "all swans are white," dysfunctional, and in the case of "white is reflected light in a range of wavelengths from A to (A + B)," unavailable and unusable). It'd be a stretch to use the word "tool" here at all, except very loosely (the swan exemption is a tool for getting owners of swans to vote for us, the paradigms are tools that make it possible for me to make sense of and apply the rule that allows tax exemptions for owning swans).)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I don't know if the rules/paradigm thesis does connect with the three points (or if they really connect with each other) -- I should have made clearer this was just random jottings of ideas after reading the afterword black body, not any type of an argument yet. The three points really are just speculations -- things that came to mind after I finished reading. It seemed a pity not to say them at all; but I have no idea how directly relevant or helpful they'll turn out to be (or if I'll even still think them in a few weeks time).

I'll read (and reread) with a view to seeing whether Kuhn coincides with my claim about rules and paradigms: it's meant to be my idea of what he says (or acts as if he thinks), but it's no more (at the moment) than an idea to be tested. However I think it's the first time I've directly tried to answer your repeated question -- so it's sort of a start (at last).

[koganbot]

I don't understand your third point at all. The closest I can come is, if we think of "paradigm" in the broad sense ("disciplinary matrix," meaning a constellation of beliefs, values, formulas, techniques, analogies, exemplars, etc.) as analogous to a body, then a paradigm shift is like changing your body, and in transmitting its information to a future body - its offspring - it can't transmit acquired information? If so, your point seems wrong, so it's probably not what you mean. But if it is what you mean, (a) some information isn't transmitted at all (as with the characteristics in biological evolution that don't get transmitted to the offspring), given that that's what makes paradigm shifts "noncumulative," but (b) where characteristics are transmitted, they most certainly can be acquired characteristics (unlike in biological transmission, where changes come from combining characteristics of two parents and from mutations and biochemical changes). If you're thinking of a paradigm ("disciplinary matrix") being like a species rather than a body, the evolutionary idea (and there's disagreement about this) is that the evolution of species is nonetheless carried on by individuals, who generally don't pass along their genetic information to other individuals who are not their offspring (well, this isn't totally true, but let's say it is) and don't pass along characteristics that they learn or acquire in their lifetime, since these aren't genetically encoded.

Anyway, if your thought is that "preadaptation" has implications for whether or not characteristics can be acquired, I don't follow you. Whether or not a characteristic is acquired rather than transmitted genetically has nothing to do one way or another with the fact that it can be employed in ways that are different from what made it confer an evolutionary advantage on the individual who possessed it, and these new ways may also provide evolutionary advantages.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well "culture" is much too vague a word for what i'm getting at: obviously all kinds of non-genetic information (in the form of "facts"?) can be acquired and passed on, and is, all the time --- what i'm fumbling for is a term for that aspect of culture which is broader, like "comprehension" or "wisdom"

The ability to see colour is inherited genetically; it doesn't derive from a basic explanation. Part of the ability to name colour is passed on culturally: the facts (as in the names of the colours) are transmitted verbally (with a suitable caveat for transmission in deaf and blind communities). But the ability to distinguish? Is this genetically hardwired or culturally introduced? I think I'm arguing that "understanding" so stands on basic inherited animal skills -- albeit skills corralled by example and transmission within cultural matrices to produce shareable wisdoms -- that it's a real mistake to think of it as transmissable in a Lamarckian sense.

(I'm not sure how interesting this idea now I pin it down a bit... and it doesn't necessarily have much to do with pre-adaptation... or if it does I haven't seen how quite yet.)

[koganbot]

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.

[koganbot]

xpost

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

no, i'd think of it more as a kind of negative model: that (to put it a bit stupidly) culture that isn't science DOESN'T operate like science

to use a mathematical metaphor, it's about degrees of freedom -- kuhn's picture of science seems to be one of extreme (and very deliberate) restrictions on number of degrees of imaginative freedom at any given point of enquiry, tamping down possible movement precisely to induce the correct jumps in the correct direction (which may mnot be the expected direction), and to reduce the chances of science falling off into ordinary non-scientific discourse

(as you have long known i find this an incredibly hard species of discipline to follow for any length of time, which is why i'm finding this exciting -- but it's also taking a long time, which i suspect YOU are finding maddening)

[koganbot]

Btw, I think your points one and two are rich, which may be why I jumped on the other ones first, since they took less rumination to deal with. Kuhn's anti-teleology is an exact match for Darwin's; it's harder to come up with something equivalent in Kuhn to Darwin's idea of natural selection, but Kuhn does try to use it. The question here is this: natural selection depends on there being a variety of characteristics for evolution to choose from, that there be characteristics that differ from individual to individual within a species. So, if normal science features the consensus and convergent thinking that Kuhn says it does, how is it that time and time again normal science generates revolutionary science, that scientific disciplines undergo paradigm shifts? A related question would be what motivated people like Copernicus and Kepler to, as it were, become the variation, to break away from the idea of an earth-centered universe. Kepler's Laws gave plenty of people reason to embrace the heliocentric universe, but Kepler didn't know the laws when he was starting out, and of course Copernicus died almost eighty years before the laws. Anyway, just to sketch out Kuhn's ideas here, he thinks that scientists have "values," and he gives as an example these five: accuracy, consistency (i.e., coherence), scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness, this last meaning "fruitful of new research findings," disclosing "new phenomena or previously unnoted relationships among those already known." (Kuhn isn't saying these are the only five.) And his point here is that different scientists can differ as to the extent they value one of these over another. So a new theory that breaks with an existing paradigm (disciplinary matrix) may nonetheless have advantages - say in simplicity, or in making at least one set of phenomena more consistent - despite its causing chaos elsewhere in the constellation of elements that make up the paradigm. So this is where you get the variety, in that different weights given to different values can cause different scientists to have good reasons to advocate different ideas.

If this is how you get variety, how is it that the sciences (unlike other endeavors) pulls together into consensus? That's a question I'll leave for later except to say that there isn't a reason you can state, I don't think, except that the theories that win out end up winning on all fronts, eventually. And to the question "Why does this happen in sciences rather than nonsciences?," the (circular) answer is that we call something a science when this occurs, and don't call something a science when it doesn't. So, for the question "What is special that the sciences do to achieve consensus?" the answer is, "They achieve consensus, otherwise we wouldn't call them sciences."

[koganbot]

Over the last week I've been dipping into Mary Hesse's article in the Encyclopedia Of Philosophy about "Action At A Distance And Field Theory," and I'm in the middle of the field theory part and haven't made my way yet to modern physics. My impression as to the latter is that quantum physics does require action at a distance, and this is one of the things that puts it at odds with general relativity. But I'm talking through my hat. In the field theory section there are definitely field theorists who oppose the idea of action at a distance, so the assumption would be that in, e.g., magnetism, something must cross the distance, but that this something doesn't necessarily require a medium to travel through.

One way to think of this, for our purposes, is to think of the resemblance people (e.g., Wittgenstein, but he wasn't the first) as getting rid of the dichotomy between universals and particulars. So you most definitely can talk about someone's negative past experience with games as creating a general negative attitude towards games, which manifests in her reaction to this or that new game, even if the game doesn't altogether match up with any other game she's ever played before. So there doesn't have to be a universal "gameness" or a set of characteristics common to all games for her to nonetheless have a general disposition towards games in general. But I'd say that, even though her disposition was caused by a whole bunch of social facts, what the disposition applies to isn't limited to those social facts, just as what the word "game" can potentially designate isn't limited to what it's designated so far (though it is constrained by the requirement that it more or less resemble some of those things).

Your rockism example is accurate as to how people use the word "rockism," but a similar example with less of a negative result might be this: "Well, the immediate cause of Gregory's snapping at me was that I said X, which riled him up, but his snapping at me didn't really have much to do with his attitude either towards X or towards me but rather was owing to his underlying paranoia." And here there really is an underlying state of paranoia, despite there not necessarily being a set of single characteristics that applies to every manifestation of Gregory's paranoia. Which is to say, "paranoia" isn't a shortcut summary of a whole forest of social facts, it's a pulling together and understanding of those social facts in a way that couldn't be done without the concept "paranoia," even though the word "paranoia" wouldn't have any meaning without those social facts. And someone trying to understand paranoia would need to witness concrete examples of "paranoia" or to have such examples well-described before understanding the concept; I gather that these examples would be what you mean by action not at a distance.

(I think the term "rockism" was doomed at the start by the accident that Pete Wylie's gag line, "the race against rockism," ended with "ism." Of course that was also a reason for the word's popularity, in that it seemed to denote an identifiable syndrome, and so people could latch onto the word as containing explanatory power that it didn't actually have. The problem is that the work was never done to give it explanatory power, since "ism" implied that the work had been done and the power was there. The advantage of my metaphor "PBS" was that it wasn't going to have any explanatory power I didn't give it, so I had to attempt to provide the explanations and examples myself. The disadvantage was that only forty or so people ever paid attention.)