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]

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.)