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]

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.)