Kuhnian paradigm shifts can trivially be integrated into a rational and progressive view of science, turning paradigm shift into a normative rational principle rather than just an observation of irrational habit, by formulating it in terms of parsimony, or in terms of how complex a theory needs to be to account for the evidence at hand. The entire point of coming up with theories, abstract models to believe, is to have an easier, simpler representation of reality to work with than just the whole body of raw observational evidence thus far accumulated. In essence, the point of a theory is to compress the data of the observational evidence into a more compact formula while retaining the same informational content, as in the field of algorithmic information theory; and a more parsimonious theory is precisely one that can better compress the same data with no greater loss of information. On my normative account, the period of pre-science is one in which no single theory has yet been devised that can account for all of the evidence at hand, and so there is no better, easier, simpler, more parsimonious way of describing all the evidence than many different theories used in a patchwork to account for each of the disjointed areas of evidence. Once a theory is devised that can account for all of that evidence, that then becomes the better, easier, simpler, more parsimonious way of describing it all, and so the patchwork of other theories are rationally, pragmatically discarded in favor of it. There may still be other theories that also account for all of that evidence, and so are equally unfalsified, but unless they are in turn even more parsimonious, there is no reason to use them instead, and pragmatic reason not to. But as new evidence accumulates that cannot be reconciled with the existing paradigmatic theory, the best way to describe all the evidence at hand begins to grow again into an unwieldy patchwork of the main paradigmatic theory and all of the exceptions and special cases needed to be made and used to handle the anomalous evidence, until at some point that patchwork becomes so complex that other competing theories, previously rejected as less parsimonious than the paradigmatic one, are now more parsimonious than the old paradigm plus all of its exceptions, and it becomes rational to adopt the best of them instead of trying to cling to the old paradigm and its mess of special exceptions. Any "Kuhn Loss" experienced through the paradigm shift will necessarily be outweighed by the greater explanatory efficiency of the new paradigm, otherwise it would not be useful to shift paradigms and so there would be no motive to do so. E.g. in the example case of "you come home to your apartment" that you give here, sure you have to admit that you don't actually know whether your door is locked or your husband is home alone etc, but in the face of mounting evidence, you've either got to concoct a contrived conjunction of many improbable events to explain the evidence at hand, or else change your background assumptions in a way that makes all of that evidence fall neatly into place, at the cost of admitting that you still don't know a few small things you thought you knew. But if the background assumptions that you had to change to accommodate the mounting evidence had *much larger* consequences on the state of your knowledge, making you question everything you ever thought you knew, then that would be a large (rational, practical, normative) pressure *against* changing those background assumptions, despite the difficulty of fitting all the new evidence elegantly into that background worldview. If the options were (for some reason) either "two strangers broke into my house, killed my husband, disposed of the body and cleaned up, then had sex in our bed" or "I am nothing but a brain in a vat and the entire world I thought I knew is an illusion", it's more practical to assume the former than the latter. If the latter option is just "I'm on a different floor than I thought", though, then it's more practical to adopt the latter. TL;DR: Parsimony gives a rational reason to prefer one paradigm over another.
The issue is that just because something is simpler and more practical doesn’t mean it’s more true. Also using normative claims doesn’t make something more or less rational. Rationality has very clear rules and by adding a normative claim you are no longer using strict rationality. All rationality does is say what arguments are valid it doesn’t say we ought to believe simpler theories. The presenter has done a video called “is science rational” which explores these ideas in more detail. If on the other hand you use science for its pragmatic value and suspend judgement on its truth value then you are an instrumentalist just like the presenter.
"A more parsimonious theory is precisely one that can better compress the same data with no greater loss of information." How are you measuring better compression? To be consistent with your assertion that unless a new paradigm is better, "it would not be useful to shift paradigms and so there would be no motive to do so," your premise must be that it's the most useful compression, which is entirely subjective. The best model of reality for me involves discrete objects colliding because my goal is not to bump into things and my observations are the photons hitting my retina. If my goals were different, the best model might be of atoms only bound to or repelling each other by EM, or of ripples in spacetime.
@@duder6387 Rationality and normativity are intrinsically linked: rationality is a kind of epistemic normativity, saying that certain kinds of inference are epistemically better or worse than others, as opposed to the postmodernist "eh there's not really such a thing as better or worse". More generally, there are pragmatist accounts of truth, so your claim that "just because something is simpler and more practical doesn’t mean it’s more true" is controversial. On a pragmatist account of truth of descriptive propositions meaning usefulness for predicting empirical experiences, the primary qualification for truth is correspondence with all of the experiences thus far had. But a simple list of every observation thus far made is enormously impractical, so a theory that implies all those observations from a much smaller more easily understood formula is equally "true" in that sense and also much more useful in general towards the ends that define truth more generally. The parsimonious norm for paradigm shift I described before is just an extension of that: having a formula is more useful than having just a huge list of individual observations, and having *one* formula is more useful than having a big mish-mash of different formulas each for a different use case, etc.
@@only20frickinletters There is a straightforward information-theoretic notion of compression: how much information it takes to store the compressed form, over how much information it takes to store the uncompressed form. The different scenarios you're talking about are particular practical use-cases other than the use-case of just trying to say the most truth in the shortest way possible. In those cases, you're basically discarding a bunch of information as irrelevant to your purposes, and looking for the best way to compress that -- which is fine, and uses the same exact notion of compression as I'm talking about. But for the purpose of accounting for the truth in its entirety for the sake of doing so, you're not going to be throwing away any information, you're going to be collecting as much of it as possible, and trying to come up with the most efficient way of encoding *all* of that information, which is something that can be objectively measured.
Addendum about Kuhn Loss: if an older paradigm *could* in fact *accurately* predict some range of phenomena, rather than just making predictions that may or may not have actually been the case as in the wrong-floor example, then a new paradigm that can no longer make accurate predictions in that range can still retain the *old* paradigm as an ad-hoc patch for that newly-anomalous phenomenon, and so long as the new paradigm plus that ad-hoc patch for that anomaly is more parsimonious than the old paradigm plus the many ad-hoc patches for anomalies that motivated the paradigm shift, you have still made progress in a sense that is objectively, rationally preferable. Instead of one paradigm with many patches for many anomalies, you have another paradigm with fewer patches for fewer anomalies. The existence of anomalies still means that neither paradigm is completely correct, but the more parsimonious one is objectively better.
There is a post-modern reading you can do of science. It seems like you can read Kuhn's paradigm theory as being an explanation of how scientific progress occurs, and therefore interpret it as an explanation of a modernist metanarrative.
You could read it that way, but I'm not convinced that Kuhn's work implies science is actually making progress. You can also read it as a postmodernist challenge to the metanarrative that science makes progress at all given Kuhn loss and the claim that no theory can be tested in absence of a paradigm.
also, Kuhn was responding more to Popper Austin and Wittgenstein, who had already dealt fatal blows to logical positivism by the time Kuh n was working.
The paradigm shift from being able to only analyze blood type (type O or A or AB) to being able to determine potassium levels, iron levels, cholesterol or cocaine or heroin presence is a vast increase in knowledge (rather than a knowledge loss). The real methodology used in this instance of ground breaking chromatography chemistry was totally modernistic and raises serious doubts about Kuhn's work and the whole misguided (in my opinion) post-modern effort. You should also read Anthony Giddens critique of post-modern sociology in his book "The Consequences of Modernity".
Very interesting. When addressing those communities which deny science, such as climate change denialists, I'm not sure whether Kuhn has given them fuel or exposes their incompetence. It's one thing to claim a scientific consensus is wrong such as with climate change or the age of the Earth, but quite another to demonstrate where and how it is wrong that supports the alternative facts in the case.
Great video. What are your thoughts on Kuhn’s statement that “it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition to a science.” Do you think Kuhn was correct in his view on this? Are there examples from the history of science and the philosophy of science that can show whether this is true or not?
Fortunately Lakatos was able to incorporate Kuhn's observations back into the meta narrative of falsifiable scientific methodology. To say it in an overly brief statement: When we go through a paradigm shift, we put a finer point on our knowledge. For example, when Einstein made the theory of relativity, it did not destroy newtonian physics. It only showed that newtonian physics was a specific case of a larger picture.
As I note around 10:00, Kuhn did not agree with the convergent realist position that Newtonian physics are simply a specific version of Einstein's theories. Newton made claims about things like conservation of mass which Einstein denies. This is like saying that we never disproved the claim that "the earth is flat" we simply learned that it is only true in certain places, i.e. the earth is flat in my front yard. The point is that limiting the scope of the original claim actually and importantly changes the claim and the things that we can conclude from it. We do lose knowledge when paradigms shift.
@@CarneadesOfCyrene to continue putting an oversimplified analogy here, Lakatos described it like a "web" of beliefs. We can destroy part of the web without destroying the whole thing. I only briefly studied Lakatos in my history of science class. Where I am more interested is when he applies his ideas to mathematics in "Proofs and Refutations" The book is written as a play in a classroom where the teacher has the class do a mathematical proof. However, instead of doing the proof, one student comes up with a counter example. Thus the proof the other students did, although sound and valid, was noy true. The other students revise the proof to accommodate the counter example. But the one student keeps on coming up with counter examples and claims that the whole idea of mathematical proofs is silly. The other students get upset and call his counter examples "monsters." At the end of it, what was a simple, elegant proof has become complex, and convoluted, but it holds (at least for now). The teacher then points out how much they learned through the process. Highly recommend "Proofs and Refutations" by Lakatos
@@CarneadesOfCyrene I know you covered this in your video -- and I know Kuhn provides other examples -- but the physics example seems an especially inept one to me, as Einstein's equations literally reduce to Newton's equations in the inertial limit (i.e. with no gravity and no speed) and there's only a tiny difference between the two in other domains until you get to extreme speeds and gravities. In other words the correspondence in terms of the actual math is 1:1 in the simplest cases, and when you do experiments, there's no doubt about which one makes better predictions. I think your "flat earth" example is not very good for the same reason: the earth literally _is_ locally flat. We did never disprove that claim in the same way that we never did disprove Newton.
Can you link me to a brief summary of Lakatos' work in that area? I have my own argument that Kuhn's observations can be incorporated into a rational and progressive view, and I'm curious if I've just independently reinvented the same thing as Lakatos.
One of the most cited of all time depending on how you count (books vs articles, types of citations, disciplines, etc.). Here's the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy: "Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time." Here's an article in the journal Nature making a similar claim: www.nature.com/articles/484164a
How does the fact that predictions based on science are getting better and better, i.e. more accurate, square with Khun's idea that science does not make cumulative progress?
I never liked Kuhn, a relativistic rubber-necker circling outside the objectivist-realist camp. Michael Polanyi's strictures (ie, flat opposition from someone both a real scientist and a real philosopher), on the Kuhn position are found in this rare five minute audio interview: 'Polanyi's View of Thomas Kuhn', Tradition & Discover channel, th-cam.com/video/pL5g8Gobw0k/w-d-xo.html [ see also transcript provided in comment section ]
Frankly, I'm disappointed. If the point is simply that a scientific theory cannot prove anything without some underlying assumptions, which in turn are fundamentally assumed without complete evidence, than this is weak. The scientific process actively involves forming new theories with differing sets of assumptions and compare the accuracy of these using measurements. Yes, at any point in time a new theory can arise based on some completely different set of assumptions leading to the same or better results, but this is is the whole point of it all! Kuhn's proof that science cannot exist without paradigms is therefore comparable to the claim that a wheel cannot turn without an axis. It is true in an almost useless fashion.
Take this with a grain of salt. I left a related comment, and seriously have to question if he understands what the video is actually about. My guess is he sees this as an argument for rejecting the mentioned "power structure" within scientific communities and therefor validating whatever alternative facts that fit in his internal narrative. Regardless of the field, it has been my observation that people who deny science tend to place a great deal of their denial based on the perception of projecting power and control by the scientific experts in those fields.
Kuhn's ideas are deeply postmodern. The idea that something is only true relative to a particular paradigm is one of the central conceits of many varieties of postmodernism. Here's the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Postmodernism "...In Analytic philosophy [postmodernism] took the form of Dewey's early opposition to positivism, Kuhn's redescription of scientific practice, and Wittgensteins insistence on the language-game character of representation..." While not in conversation with the original tradition, Kuhn's highlights the same fundamental flaws with modernist conceptions. Additionally, why do you think that being postmodern inherently makes something bad? As we noted in the first video in this series, you do not need to be a postmodernist about everything. You might hate postmodern philosophy of language, but completely agree with postmodern philosophy of science or enjoy postmodern theater. They do not imply each other, rather they have similar characteristics despite being applied to various disciplines.
Kuhnian paradigm shifts can trivially be integrated into a rational and progressive view of science, turning paradigm shift into a normative rational principle rather than just an observation of irrational habit, by formulating it in terms of parsimony, or in terms of how complex a theory needs to be to account for the evidence at hand.
The entire point of coming up with theories, abstract models to believe, is to have an easier, simpler representation of reality to work with than just the whole body of raw observational evidence thus far accumulated. In essence, the point of a theory is to compress the data of the observational evidence into a more compact formula while retaining the same informational content, as in the field of algorithmic information theory; and a more parsimonious theory is precisely one that can better compress the same data with no greater loss of information.
On my normative account, the period of pre-science is one in which no single theory has yet been devised that can account for all of the evidence at hand, and so there is no better, easier, simpler, more parsimonious way of describing all the evidence than many different theories used in a patchwork to account for each of the disjointed areas of evidence. Once a theory is devised that can account for all of that evidence, that then becomes the better, easier, simpler, more parsimonious way of describing it all, and so the patchwork of other theories are rationally, pragmatically discarded in favor of it. There may still be other theories that also account for all of that evidence, and so are equally unfalsified, but unless they are in turn even more parsimonious, there is no reason to use them instead, and pragmatic reason not to.
But as new evidence accumulates that cannot be reconciled with the existing paradigmatic theory, the best way to describe all the evidence at hand begins to grow again into an unwieldy patchwork of the main paradigmatic theory and all of the exceptions and special cases needed to be made and used to handle the anomalous evidence, until at some point that patchwork becomes so complex that other competing theories, previously rejected as less parsimonious than the paradigmatic one, are now more parsimonious than the old paradigm plus all of its exceptions, and it becomes rational to adopt the best of them instead of trying to cling to the old paradigm and its mess of special exceptions.
Any "Kuhn Loss" experienced through the paradigm shift will necessarily be outweighed by the greater explanatory efficiency of the new paradigm, otherwise it would not be useful to shift paradigms and so there would be no motive to do so.
E.g. in the example case of "you come home to your apartment" that you give here, sure you have to admit that you don't actually know whether your door is locked or your husband is home alone etc, but in the face of mounting evidence, you've either got to concoct a contrived conjunction of many improbable events to explain the evidence at hand, or else change your background assumptions in a way that makes all of that evidence fall neatly into place, at the cost of admitting that you still don't know a few small things you thought you knew.
But if the background assumptions that you had to change to accommodate the mounting evidence had *much larger* consequences on the state of your knowledge, making you question everything you ever thought you knew, then that would be a large (rational, practical, normative) pressure *against* changing those background assumptions, despite the difficulty of fitting all the new evidence elegantly into that background worldview. If the options were (for some reason) either "two strangers broke into my house, killed my husband, disposed of the body and cleaned up, then had sex in our bed" or "I am nothing but a brain in a vat and the entire world I thought I knew is an illusion", it's more practical to assume the former than the latter. If the latter option is just "I'm on a different floor than I thought", though, then it's more practical to adopt the latter.
TL;DR: Parsimony gives a rational reason to prefer one paradigm over another.
The issue is that just because something is simpler and more practical doesn’t mean it’s more true. Also using normative claims doesn’t make something more or less rational. Rationality has very clear rules and by adding a normative claim you are no longer using strict rationality. All rationality does is say what arguments are valid it doesn’t say we ought to believe simpler theories. The presenter has done a video called “is science rational” which explores these ideas in more detail. If on the other hand you use science for its pragmatic value and suspend judgement on its truth value then you are an instrumentalist just like the presenter.
"A more parsimonious theory is precisely one that can better compress the same data with no greater loss of information."
How are you measuring better compression? To be consistent with your assertion that unless a new paradigm is better, "it would not be useful to shift paradigms and so there would be no motive to do so," your premise must be that it's the most useful compression, which is entirely subjective.
The best model of reality for me involves discrete objects colliding because my goal is not to bump into things and my observations are the photons hitting my retina. If my goals were different, the best model might be of atoms only bound to or repelling each other by EM, or of ripples in spacetime.
@@duder6387 Rationality and normativity are intrinsically linked: rationality is a kind of epistemic normativity, saying that certain kinds of inference are epistemically better or worse than others, as opposed to the postmodernist "eh there's not really such a thing as better or worse".
More generally, there are pragmatist accounts of truth, so your claim that "just because something is simpler and more practical doesn’t mean it’s more true" is controversial. On a pragmatist account of truth of descriptive propositions meaning usefulness for predicting empirical experiences, the primary qualification for truth is correspondence with all of the experiences thus far had. But a simple list of every observation thus far made is enormously impractical, so a theory that implies all those observations from a much smaller more easily understood formula is equally "true" in that sense and also much more useful in general towards the ends that define truth more generally. The parsimonious norm for paradigm shift I described before is just an extension of that: having a formula is more useful than having just a huge list of individual observations, and having *one* formula is more useful than having a big mish-mash of different formulas each for a different use case, etc.
@@only20frickinletters There is a straightforward information-theoretic notion of compression: how much information it takes to store the compressed form, over how much information it takes to store the uncompressed form.
The different scenarios you're talking about are particular practical use-cases other than the use-case of just trying to say the most truth in the shortest way possible. In those cases, you're basically discarding a bunch of information as irrelevant to your purposes, and looking for the best way to compress that -- which is fine, and uses the same exact notion of compression as I'm talking about.
But for the purpose of accounting for the truth in its entirety for the sake of doing so, you're not going to be throwing away any information, you're going to be collecting as much of it as possible, and trying to come up with the most efficient way of encoding *all* of that information, which is something that can be objectively measured.
Addendum about Kuhn Loss: if an older paradigm *could* in fact *accurately* predict some range of phenomena, rather than just making predictions that may or may not have actually been the case as in the wrong-floor example, then a new paradigm that can no longer make accurate predictions in that range can still retain the *old* paradigm as an ad-hoc patch for that newly-anomalous phenomenon, and so long as the new paradigm plus that ad-hoc patch for that anomaly is more parsimonious than the old paradigm plus the many ad-hoc patches for anomalies that motivated the paradigm shift, you have still made progress in a sense that is objectively, rationally preferable. Instead of one paradigm with many patches for many anomalies, you have another paradigm with fewer patches for fewer anomalies. The existence of anomalies still means that neither paradigm is completely correct, but the more parsimonious one is objectively better.
There is a post-modern reading you can do of science. It seems like you can read Kuhn's paradigm theory as being an explanation of how scientific progress occurs, and therefore interpret it as an explanation of a modernist metanarrative.
You could read it that way, but I'm not convinced that Kuhn's work implies science is actually making progress. You can also read it as a postmodernist challenge to the metanarrative that science makes progress at all given Kuhn loss and the claim that no theory can be tested in absence of a paradigm.
also, Kuhn was responding more to Popper Austin and Wittgenstein, who had already dealt fatal blows to logical positivism by the time Kuh n was working.
The paradigm shift from being able to only analyze blood type (type O or A or AB) to being able to determine potassium levels, iron levels, cholesterol or cocaine or heroin presence is a vast increase in knowledge (rather than a knowledge loss). The real methodology used in this instance of ground breaking chromatography chemistry was totally modernistic and raises serious doubts about Kuhn's work and the whole misguided (in my opinion) post-modern effort. You should also read Anthony Giddens critique of post-modern sociology in his book "The Consequences of Modernity".
Very interesting. When addressing those communities which deny science, such as climate change denialists, I'm not sure whether Kuhn has given them fuel or exposes their incompetence. It's one thing to claim a scientific consensus is wrong such as with climate change or the age of the Earth, but quite another to demonstrate where and how it is wrong that supports the alternative facts in the case.
Hi, are you planning on making any videos on Foundationalism, Coherentism and 'The Myth of the Given'?
One needs to be so misguided to think that science makes no progress or we can't know that we're making progress ...
@dark_matters yeah. From stone age until space exploration age there was probably no progress .. I mean heeeeeeeeeey who knows.
Will you be also doing a series on Philosophy of Science..?
Wonderful 👍
Thanks!
Great video. What are your thoughts on Kuhn’s statement that “it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition to a science.” Do you think Kuhn was correct in his view on this? Are there examples from the history of science and the philosophy of science that can show whether this is true or not?
Fortunately Lakatos was able to incorporate Kuhn's observations back into the meta narrative of falsifiable scientific methodology. To say it in an overly brief statement: When we go through a paradigm shift, we put a finer point on our knowledge. For example, when Einstein made the theory of relativity, it did not destroy newtonian physics. It only showed that newtonian physics was a specific case of a larger picture.
As I note around 10:00, Kuhn did not agree with the convergent realist position that Newtonian physics are simply a specific version of Einstein's theories. Newton made claims about things like conservation of mass which Einstein denies. This is like saying that we never disproved the claim that "the earth is flat" we simply learned that it is only true in certain places, i.e. the earth is flat in my front yard. The point is that limiting the scope of the original claim actually and importantly changes the claim and the things that we can conclude from it. We do lose knowledge when paradigms shift.
@@CarneadesOfCyrene to continue putting an oversimplified analogy here, Lakatos described it like a "web" of beliefs. We can destroy part of the web without destroying the whole thing.
I only briefly studied Lakatos in my history of science class. Where I am more interested is when he applies his ideas to mathematics in "Proofs and Refutations"
The book is written as a play in a classroom where the teacher has the class do a mathematical proof. However, instead of doing the proof, one student comes up with a counter example. Thus the proof the other students did, although sound and valid, was noy true. The other students revise the proof to accommodate the counter example. But the one student keeps on coming up with counter examples and claims that the whole idea of mathematical proofs is silly. The other students get upset and call his counter examples "monsters." At the end of it, what was a simple, elegant proof has become complex, and convoluted, but it holds (at least for now). The teacher then points out how much they learned through the process.
Highly recommend "Proofs and Refutations" by Lakatos
@@CarneadesOfCyrene I know you covered this in your video -- and I know Kuhn provides other examples -- but the physics example seems an especially inept one to me, as Einstein's equations literally reduce to Newton's equations in the inertial limit (i.e. with no gravity and no speed) and there's only a tiny difference between the two in other domains until you get to extreme speeds and gravities. In other words the correspondence in terms of the actual math is 1:1 in the simplest cases, and when you do experiments, there's no doubt about which one makes better predictions.
I think your "flat earth" example is not very good for the same reason: the earth literally _is_ locally flat. We did never disprove that claim in the same way that we never did disprove Newton.
Can you link me to a brief summary of Lakatos' work in that area? I have my own argument that Kuhn's observations can be incorporated into a rational and progressive view, and I'm curious if I've just independently reinvented the same thing as Lakatos.
@@Pfhorrest th-cam.com/video/VExVaR8S_wQ/w-d-xo.html
Carneades, you and Kane are two of the bravest men on TH-cam for your videos on science.
What indeed 😎
Did he have the most cited academic publication of all time? I did some googling but couldn't find that
One of the most cited of all time depending on how you count (books vs articles, types of citations, disciplines, etc.). Here's the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy: "Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time." Here's an article in the journal Nature making a similar claim: www.nature.com/articles/484164a
How does the fact that predictions based on science are getting better and better, i.e. more accurate, square with Khun's idea that science does not make cumulative progress?
It doesn't. That's why Khun's so wrong.
I never liked Kuhn, a relativistic rubber-necker circling outside the objectivist-realist camp. Michael Polanyi's strictures (ie, flat opposition from someone both a real scientist and a real philosopher), on the Kuhn position are found in this rare five minute audio interview: 'Polanyi's View of Thomas Kuhn', Tradition & Discover channel, th-cam.com/video/pL5g8Gobw0k/w-d-xo.html [ see also transcript provided in comment section ]
postmodernism/post truth/etc. not a thing people are just stupid and prefer delusion over suffering and others dont want to accept it
you know Magritte was a modernist, not a postmodernist, right?
Frankly, I'm disappointed.
If the point is simply that a scientific theory cannot prove anything without some underlying assumptions, which in turn are fundamentally assumed without complete evidence, than this is weak.
The scientific process actively involves forming new theories with differing sets of assumptions and compare the accuracy of these using measurements.
Yes, at any point in time a new theory can arise based on some completely different set of assumptions leading to the same or better results, but this is is the whole point of it all!
Kuhn's proof that science cannot exist without paradigms is therefore comparable to the claim that a wheel cannot turn without an axis. It is true in an almost useless fashion.
My dad sent me this when I asked him to get vaccinated. Can someone explain what’s the hell he means???
Take this with a grain of salt. I left a related comment, and seriously have to question if he understands what the video is actually about. My guess is he sees this as an argument for rejecting the mentioned "power structure" within scientific communities and therefor validating whatever alternative facts that fit in his internal narrative. Regardless of the field, it has been my observation that people who deny science tend to place a great deal of their denial based on the perception of projecting power and control by the scientific experts in those fields.
@@deepashtray5605 or he could just be skeptical
This is not a comment and you are not reading this
Ce n'est pas une réponse, et ce n'est pas en francais. :)
💗🌈💗🌈💗🌈💗
Para > túl digma > határ. Border shifting.
🥱
Please don't ruin good philosophy by labelling it postmodern
Kuhn's ideas are deeply postmodern. The idea that something is only true relative to a particular paradigm is one of the central conceits of many varieties of postmodernism. Here's the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Postmodernism "...In Analytic philosophy [postmodernism] took the form of Dewey's early opposition to positivism, Kuhn's redescription of scientific practice, and Wittgensteins insistence on the language-game character of representation..." While not in conversation with the original tradition, Kuhn's highlights the same fundamental flaws with modernist conceptions.
Additionally, why do you think that being postmodern inherently makes something bad? As we noted in the first video in this series, you do not need to be a postmodernist about everything. You might hate postmodern philosophy of language, but completely agree with postmodern philosophy of science or enjoy postmodern theater. They do not imply each other, rather they have similar characteristics despite being applied to various disciplines.
It's postmodern. Structure is interesting in how it describes the cycle of science, but it's neither accurate nor "good".