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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.
-- 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.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-08 04:48 pm (UTC)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.)