Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Pleased to see someone here who is familiar with the innovator of the “washing hands prevents disease” genius. Semmelweis based his conclusions on his huge success rate in eliminating uterine infections & death among women who were delivering babies in the hospital wards of the 1800’s. These hospitals had in their employ doctors who held contests in the hospital cafeterias and nearby taverns in which the winner was the doctor whose surgery jacket was so encrusted with pus that it could stand up on its own!
It was not only that doctors did not want to wash their hands like common staff, but that the doctors remembered how the Bible was explicit in detailing that all daughters of Eve must labor in pain and blood and sweat.
Semmelweis ended up in a lunatic asylum, where it is said, some members of a London medical org snuck in and beat him to death.
Kuhn talks like that too.
Yep.
Sounds like what we do when we talk about the “Problem of Induction.” If I have to choose I’d take the Reid-Plantinga line, but Kant and William James are good too.
Should I give some links?
I have to thank you for your mention of watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO7BfIJZyIM
Some of the information you are providing clarifies thinking I have played around with but have never been able to put into clear and logical statements. (Part of the problem is I sometimes dismiss conclusions I am approaching by deciding a real philosopher would not entertain those thoughts. But apparently some of the time, a real philosopher would – except they have a broader framework to use as being supportive of those thoughts.)
And you have made this fun!
You are too kind. Thank you.
Yes please. Sausage links preferred, but if they are philosophical links that will better shape up my mind, that would be fine too!
It looks like you already found a solid YouTube link for Kant, Reid-Plantinga, and Hume.
This Ricochet post introduces much of the same stuff in text.
I guess that just leaves James.
Well, it’s somewhere in this Rumble playlist. It’s probably in “In Defense of Belief in Free Will.” Maybe it’s also in the ones on “The Sentiment of Rationality.”
The -nesses can go to n-ness, but Pierce argued that thirds and below are irreducible. My old philosophy prof came up with a logical proof for the irreducibility of thirds. It was based on topology, I didn’t follow it.
Whoaa, there, fella!
It’s too late for me to get interested in metaphysics again. You are making it sound too tempting.
I am very much a Kuhnian – the idea that we are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on giant-killers. That knowledge does not accrete inevitably. And that language (paradigms) are incredibly important and usually invisible to the practitioner. (It is one reason why my work in Torah tickles me so: going back to the text itself is really its own paradigm.)
Though I disagree with the original post that science has anything to do with truth, except inasmuch as “truth” might be a target described as a conclusion that cannot be altered. Given that in human history our conclusions are always subject to alteration, I think the idea that science is about truth is really pie-in-the-sky.
Instead, I would say that what we really care about is whether something is useful. When a theory is not useful – when the results contradict the thesis – it is falsified. I think Popper would agree.
For me, it is more than good enough to suggest, as I think Kuhn sort-of does, that science is about finding explanations that are both aesthetically pleasing, and usefully applied as we work in realms we do not understand very well. Science is what happens out on the edges of human knowledge. What is inside those frontiers is already well established and useful, even if not “true”.
Wait, what? Are you talking about the moment when Ender killed the giant in Ender’s Game?
A great Kuhnian moment in sci-fi.
As usual, your writing is unclear and I do not know what you mean.
“Our conclusions are always subject to alteration” provides no logical support whatsoever for the conclusion that we can never know the truth, although it provides plenty of support for the conclusion that we can never know for certain.
All humans care about useful knowledge, just as you do. Some also seek true knowledge for its own sake, which it happens that you don’t.
They care about philosophy, the search for truth for its own sake, including science, which is nothing more or less than a branch of philosophy.
You are making a mistake by assuming that the fact that you don’t value a thing implies that others do not.
I don’t think he’s assuming that. Doesn’t seem like him to assume that.
I’m glad you said that so I don’t have to. To be more correct, things that we can know only by observation we can never know for certain, only know better and better with more and more observation. By induction.
The only synthetic truths we can know for certain are a priori synthetic truths, like the fact that humans act. The latter truth can’t be proved by logic alone (i.e., it is synthetic), but doesn’t depend on observation (i.e., it is true a priori)
B
Yes, I was very surprised too. I assume he wrote it without thinking enough about it. I do that a lot.
But he did write it: “Instead, I would say that what we really care about is whether something is useful.”
Obviously, some people care about philosophy not “instead” of caring about what is useful, but in addition to it.
Guilty as charged. I meant my remarks to apply to knowledge of the physical world. Which I generally, despite having well over 100 patents to my name, consider much less interesting than the world that cannot be measured or valued using physical tools.
Love, freedom, art, loyalty…
I do seek true knowledge. Just not about the physical stuff. I am interested in the soul, and growth and love and all that we can learn of G-d.
I loved this comment, especially because all the hard core physicists I know would reject it with every fiber of their being.
I’ll take that.
Likewise. Very, very little is entirely certain.
Kuhn was a pretty standard text in the first year political science graduate program curriculum back in the early 1990s.
Oh. iWe? Hi. I didn’t know you was listening. I was just explaining to St. A. here what you was thinking.
That you know no hard core physicists who seek the truth about the physical world doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
William James: ” I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must claim. some characteristic realm of fact as its very own What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. But the over-belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in….I can. of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist’s attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor or which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word “bosh!” Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow “scientific” bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament, –more intricately built than physical science allows.
From “The Varieties of Religious Experience”
If you haven’t encountered God at the bottom of your glass, you don’t know enough yet to know that you don’t know enough yet.
— Percival
Sure. Except that is not what I actually said. But you already knew that.