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Intro to Thomas Kuhn: What Actually Is a Scientific Theory?
Probably the most standard answer these days is “A falsifiable one!”
That’s standard Karl Popper. Specifically, it’s Popper’s answer correcting for the bad philosophy of Logical Positivism.
And what’s wrong with Logical Positivism? I talk about that a lot in some videos on this playlist, but it’s not especially important for this post. Also, Logical Positivism did do one thing well: It actually had a pretty good theory on science.
Instead of answering that question with “A falsifiable one!,” the standard answer from Logical Positivism is “A verifiable one!”
Not bad. But not entirely right either. It’s missing something. Something like . . . like falsifiability, maybe. If you have to choose between just those two answers, I would recommend Popper.
Still, there’s something . . . something weird about Popper’s philosophy of science. He thinks we can’t solve something philosophers often call “the Problem of Induction.” For our present purposes, that only means this: Popper doesn’t think science can give us any knowledge that a theory is true. (If you want a more detailed intro to the Problem of Induction, try this YouTube intro from me, or this Ricochet post introducing it.)
So you see the problem with Popper, right?
It’s all very well and good to say that only a falsifiable theory can be a genuinely scientific theory. That may be the correct answer to the question of what science is. This is Popper’s most famous point, and I’m not disputing it. And it’s also all well and good to say that science can give us knowledge that a theory is false–it can. So far, so good for Karl Popper.
But if science can’t give us any knowledge that a theory is true, then science is just a very sophisticated exercise in human ignorance.
And that doesn’t seem quite right.
There’s another major philosophy of science out there that might help. And if it doesn’t help, at least it’s interesting! That would be the philosophy of this guy, Thomas Kuhn.
Since this post is already long enough and since the real reason to post this post was to advertise one of my new educational philosophy video series, let’s wrap it up with SIX POINTERS on Kuhn, and then that advertisement.
Ready? Here we go:
- First pointer: Kuhn, like the Logical Positivists and Popper, is trying to get a clearer picture of the general (and correct) idea we probably all have of science: a method of investigating the physical world that involves making hypotheses not fully consistent with just any set of data and then conducting experiments that are likely to give us the data we need to test those hypotheses.
- Second pointer: Kuhn does not say science is subjective, although people sometimes say that he says so. (But it’s been said that Paul Feyerabend takes that view, and I can’t tell you otherwise.) Kuhn just says science is not entirely objective.
- Third pointer: Kuhn thinks certain scientific views achieve the status of paradigms. Paradigms aren’t just big theories. They’re theories that play a role in determining how we perceive the world, how we interpret data, and even what data we think need most to be interpreted.
- Fourth pointer: Kuhn thinks science solves puzzles during times of what he calls “normal science.” This basically means working with an old paradigm and filling in the gaps in how much of the world it can explain–figuring out how the paradigm explains something or other that hasn’t yet been figured out.
- Fifth pointer: A paradigm tends eventually to run into a situation where there are puzzles it can’t solve. Later, a new paradigm takes over through a scientific revolution in which paradigm shift occurs–which basically just means enough scientists start looking at the world through the lens of the new paradigm.
- Sixth pointer: Kuhn’s theory actually includes his own account of the verification and falsification that the Logical Positivists and Karl Popper were talking about.
Well, not exactly the same things as verification and falsification, but fairly close.
I’ve recently recorded seventeen videos introducing Kuhn! Here’s where you can subscribe to me on Rumble, and here’s the Rumble channel for Kuhn where these videos have begun airing already. (The remaining ones should air on Thursdays, one each week.)
And then there are the same videos on YouTube, but airing a little later. Starting in September, I think; till then, the YouTube playlist just has me in the side yard at the old place in Pakistan talking about Jurassic Park.
That’s right: Jurassic Park–the book, not the movie–talks about scientific paradigms and includes a superb illustration of Kuhn. Not the most important reason to learn about the philosophy of science, but not the least!
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Nice!
That was the Futurama episode where they were eating the Omikronian young, right? That was a good one.
Crichton’s books are usually better than the movies.
That isn’t an answer at all because it doesn’t answer, “what is the purpose of seeking a scientific theory?”
Seeking a scientific theory is an example of what praxeology calls “action”: willful human attempts to direct the course of future events, to achieve a goal.
If you don’t specify the purpose of it you haven’t answered the question of what it is.
Peirce said it first. Then he used an economics of science to describe how the community of researchers grope toward truth. When the marginal benefits from a new discovery are greater than the marginal cost of the research, more time and effort go into those areas.
Looks like a heckuva reason to cut back on government funding of scientific research.
I’m no philosopher, and I haven’t studied Popper in detail, but my understanding that his emphasis on falsifiablity was as pushback against the sloppy post facto justifications for pet theories, particularly in social sciences.
This is actually my big problem with climate change theory: if warmer weather, cooler weather, more storms, fewer storms, more drought, and less drought all manage to “prove” climate change, how would one ever prove there isn’t climate change?
I don’t follow your claim that if all science can do is tell us what isn’t true, then it’s just “a very sophisticated exercise in human ignorance.” As Sherlock Holmes said, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Falsifiable science is all about chipping away more and more things that aren’t true to leave the truth exposed, the way Michaelangelo described carving a sculpture.
That being said, I certainly don’t disagree with Kuhn that scientists think in paradigms. I’d go so far as to say that paradigms often ossify into dogma that blinds scientists until enough of the old guards die off. See Einstein reworking his equations to support an eternal universe, or the flat rejection of continental drift and the asteroid theory of the K-T extinction for decades.
Praxeology (Mises and Hoppe, for example) say that Logical Positivism is a perfect example of violating the scientific method. Specifically, the rules that (a) a theory which contradicts what is known to be true cannot be true and (b) a theory of aggregates of things cannot contradict the theory of the things themselves.
I think the epistemology bits in “Human Action” and Hoppe’s interpretation of it would be interesting reading, if you had time.
I ain’t studied him in that kind of detail either, but I believe you are precisely, and importantly, correct.
Yes.
That’s probably what Popper should have done. But Popper thinks there is no solution to the Problem of Induction, which means we can never have any knowledge that a scientific theory is true. Every observed physical object is affected by gravity, and without induction this provides no support whatsoever for the view that all of them are.
I doubt Peirce saw it that way, being a long-time employee of the US Coast Survey (the forerunner of NOAA). But seriously, it probably is a good reason for governments to stick to basic research, (where the knowledge gained is a public good) if at all.
Science is the process of refining ignorance.
Someone (Watts Up With That, maybe?) put together a list of all the phenomena that have been cited as “evidence.” The number of contradictions (higher water levels in the Great Lakes, lower water levels in the Great Lakes, for instance) was downright funny.
This was the most impactful book I read as a part of my Law School curriculum.
A bit off-topic.
As a cub reporter I was one of the first people to actually visit Apple Computer and do a profile on the firm, which was still in one small building in Cupertino. One of my interviews was with an equally young Steve Jobs (a former neighbor and schoolmate). Steve, no doubt still dealing with his new celebrity, was in his “I’m smarter than you” phase.
In the middle of our conversation, he suddenly asked (with a superior smirk), “Have you heard of Thomas Kuhn?” I suppose he expected me to admit my ignorance. But, as it happened, I was at that time in grad school at Stanford majoring in the Philosophy of Science — i.e. Popper, Feyerabend, Kuhn, etc. So, I instead, I said, “Sure,” and pointed at the copy of Structures of ‘Scientific Revolutions on his shelf and proceeded to discuss Kuhn’s model.
Steve’s face fell. He quickly switched to a different topic. . .
I think you won that round.
Ricochet is the only forum in the world where you can find a weasel wrangler who has read Peirce.
It’s hard enough to find anyone who’s read Pierce.
Ricochet’s got two. (I keep very, very little Pierce in my head, and haven’t touched him in years. I don’t think I count.)
@mackthemike, are you there?
No one mentions Godel. Who demonstrated that unprovable theorems can be shown to be true. And that provable true theorems can be contradictory.
One problem with our current science, is that it blinkers itself, intentionally. If refuses to acknowledge the nose on its own face.
Of what is the cosmos mostly composed? Science doesn’t know. Dark Matter and Dark Energy, they tell us- some 95% of the stuff of which the cosmos is composed, but they don’t know what it is. They don’t even know how to figure out what it is.
The great Scientific Theories, or “Paradigms” mutually contradict each other. Quantum theory and General Relativity are mutually incompatible. So where does our “Science” take us? Our technical capacity and precision are belied by our profound ignorance.
The neo-Darwinian consensus on evolution and genetics is falling apart, clearly untenable in explaining the living world around us. Where do we go from here?
Science as it is practiced cannot get us anywhere from where we are. The methods limit what science can find out. The definitions and agreed-upon approach don’t advance our knowledge of the cosmos or the world.
What “science” is doing now is keeping us ignorant. And misleading us. Science has stopped being science and has become authoritarianism.
Science denies human transcendence. It is no longer even human.
Three. My class on American Pragmatism started with a Peirce book.
Customer Review:
I give it a Threeness* of stars. I would recommend it to a friend.
I think it had a light blue cover with the name of the book on it. The latter I don’t recall but no probs. No one else will ever read it.
*Answers: 1. Yes, it is one of those. 2. Yes, you would have to. 3. No, it would not be worth it; it wasn’t that funny.
It’s equally hard to find a weasel wrangler who has any hands on experience instead of just the book knowledge.
And yet everyone believes every theoretical physicist and his brother that comes along.
Values in a Universe of Chance, perhaps?
Threeness of stars is perfect.
They all get 5 “Fauci’s” in my book.
Especially since the bio-tech firms we try to recruit have little interest in R&D programs that promote collaboration with Universities. They say that very little of any published research can be reproduced.
@greatghostofgodel, are you there?
Title doesn’t ring a bell. But my class book said the same thing as “Values”, apparently: threeness is as high as nesses go.
I have always felt that he might be on to something with Oneness, Twoness, and Threeness, even though it does sound a little like typical 19th-century metaphysical/mystical intellectualism. A bit forced, in need of some Wittgensteinian skepticism
My philosophy of science prof defined science this way: Science is what scientists do when they are doing science. And yes, he was often deliberately annoying but always fun. He made it hard not to wonder what else a scientist did not consider when you are reading a scientific paper. What paradigms, what cultural investments are in play to filter this?
We are appalled at the politicization of science taking place on campus but in truth, it was never the case that science was immune to the larger cultural and political influences. It is just that those influences were vastly more benign in recent past decades.
In the middle of the 20th century, I don’t think people thought about science having its own culture. Science was just facts and test tubes and stuff that made sparks. But methodology develops habits of thought. I think of Ignaz Semmelweis who intuited a germ theory of disease twenty years before Pasteur and the biggest obstacle to its acceptance was not insufficient data but that if it were true then doctors needed to wash their hands like the common staff.
The switch in the legal standard from Frye (is there a consensus among the credentialed) to Daubert (allowing for a more detailed review of the substantive basis for the method or theory) governing the admissibility of scientific opinion evidence reflected an understanding that there can be valid scientific findings not yet part of an established canon, that science is a process and not an officially approved fixed body of facts.
Now lefty legal morons are attacking the idea that science is sui generis and distinct and recognizable. They would argue that if a jury wants to believe that one can of Dr. Pepper or Mountain Dew can cause cancer then why should some “science” notion from a bunch of guys in white coats be privileged over that? Science is what the community says it is. Just like law, race or sex. The socially constructed view of science may be coming to a courtroom near you if enough bad judges get appointed.
@saintaugustine
On a Ray Moody youtube video, the well known author of books on “The Near Death Experience” recounted his adventures with students who had been asking him “How can we definitively prove the reality of something?”
Moody turned the question back on them.
They came up with the notion that the definitive proof involved a scientific exploration to determine the existence of the questioned reality.
He then asked them how the notion of science was arrived at, as that notion had to exist before science came into being, so what then?
No one had the answer. (Perhaps to this day. Although I wonder if SaintAugustine might!)