[QUOTE=The Cocky Watchman]
I’m no philosopher of science, but I think that your observation is commonly used as a good example of the weakness of Kuhn’s thesis - namely that paradigm shifts are by definition incommensurate. This is rarely the case in actuality, as can be appreciated in your example - Newton’s system of the world sits comfortably alongside Einstein’s, modern physics simply appreciates the limitations and applicability of each. One did not displace the other in a crisis of paradigm shifting.
Kuhn’s signature work *was *written fifty years ago - clearly a very influential text, but maybe one that has been superceded by more relevant commentary? The field of the philospohpy of science is surely no more immune to ‘normal, puzzle-solving philosophy’ than that of ‘normal science’ - I suspect that there may be a more revolutionary philosophy you can draw from, coberst.
Kuhn’s use of the word ‘puzzle’ speaks of a man embittered by failure to achieve tenure - those damn puzzle solvers!!
[/QUOTE]
Margaret Masterman has written the essay “The Nature of a Paradigm” for inclusion in the book “Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge”.
Her conclusions are: “as historians, however much we may cavil at Kuhn’s conclusions in detail, we are not going to be able to go back to where we were before Kuhn and his immediate predecessors began to get at us”.
The history of science, by its nature as part of the history of ideas, has got to be a discipline which helps actual scientists to get a deeper insight into the real nature of their science…So, if we retreat from all consideration of Kuhn’s ‘new image’ of science, we run the risk of totally disconnecting the new- style realistic history of science from its old-style philosophy: a disaster.”
Like many words ‘science’ has more than one meaning and this can be misleading. We commonly use the word to mean—systemized study of technology and its associated phenomena. The word has a more general meaning—systematized study of any domain of knowledge. I think that this distinction needs to be kept in mind.
The author notes that all “real science is normally a habit-governed, puzzle-solving activity” and not a philosophical activity. Paradigm and not hypothesis is the active meaning for the ‘new image of science’. Paradigm is neither a theory nor a metaphysical viewpoint.
Kuhn’s new image of science—the paradigm—is an artifact (a human achievement), a way of seeing, and is a set of scientific problem solving habits. Normal science means research based upon one or more past achievements ‘that some particular community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice…and these achievements are sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group pf adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity’ furthermore they are sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to solve’. Such achievements Kuhn defines as paradigm.
“A puzzle-solving paradigm, unlike a puzzle-solving hypothetico-deductive system, has also got to be a concrete ‘way of seeing’.”
Kuhn constantly refers to the ‘gestalt switch’ when discussing the switch in reference from one paradigm to another as ‘re-seeing’ action. Each paradigm has been constructed to be a ‘way-of-seeing’. Here Kuhn is speaking not about what the paradigm is but how the paradigm is used. He is defining a paradigm as a newly developed puzzle-solving artifact that is used analogically to understand another artifact; for example, using wire and beads strung together to facilitate understanding the protein molecule.
To understand Kuhn I must understand what is “an organized puzzle-solving gestalt, which is itself a ‘picture’ of something, A, if it is then to be applied, non-obviously, to provide a new way of seeing something else, B.”