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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
That does happen to me a lot. Happy to hear more about personality type theories as an explanation.
Conveniently, we’re in a thread that started off with Kuhn! My best idea is that it’s largely a case of paradigm-based thinking. A particular theory filters one’s perceptions to the extent that the mind cannot even understand a sentence challenging the theory.
True. Tautologically, if you think Newton was a scientist, then what he did when he was doing science was science.
If you think that Newton was not a scientist, then whatever he did was not science.
This doesn’t answer the pseudo-question, “what is science”?*
But it does serve to divide us into two clearly opposed camps.
The vast majority believe that Newton wasn’t a scientist. (They don’t know they think that. What Newton spent his life doing, they are absolutely convinced, beyond the possibility of persuasion, that he never did do. What the are convinced, beyond the possibility of persuasion, that he did, he did not do.).
The rest of us find it convenient to call Newton the very model of a “scientist”, a word they find extremely useful).
*”What is x?” is always a meaningless question, the result of fallacious thinking: the concretization of words.
LOL. It never occurred to me that you might be passive-aggressive.
Yes, for sure. But somebody mentioning something as a reason not to respond, but then refusing to say what that thing is, well, if you didn’t know me, you might think it was passive-aggressive.
Oh, no. It’s just the way you think. It’s refreshing. I appreciate all your comments, even the ones in which you withhold comment. :)
philosophy with flare!
Newton demonstrated a stunning mastery of experimental investigation in his Optics. He demonstrated clearly that light is a wave. Yet, out of stubbornness or some other insight he never fully rejected the idea of light as a particle. IN the 19th Century, with Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism, light was accepted universally as a wave, and the ether, the medium of its propagation the “most certain thing in the Universe.” But Maxwell’s equations did not fit observation, as they predicted a huge rise in energy as frequency uncreased into the ultraviolet range of the spectrum (later called the “Ultraviolet catastrophe.” And the ether couldn’t be demonstrated, in the Michaelson-Morley experiment, yet that experiment gave rise to the use of Lorentz contractions to explain the negative result while not discarding the concept of the Ether–and the Lorentz contractions were subsequently used by Einstein in the formulation of Special Relativity–circuitous path to stunning developments). Max Planck tried to study this problem, and found that by dividing wave lengths into extremely small increments, he could fit the curve of what actually was observe. He gave us Planck’s constant.Then Einstein explained the photoelectric effect, and the Quantum age was born. Light was recognized as a wave AND a particle. Something that boggled the mind. And that those who developed the theory abhorred. And those who practice physics still despise. And don’t understand. And can’t explain.
Does that make Newton a scientist? Or some sort of savant? Or something else? The title of a recent book on Newton’s intense religious pre-occupations and his alchemy, was entitled: Priest of Nature.
Science is as science does.
And speaking of Logical Positivism,
Newton did what has been called “natural philosophy”, “pure science”, and “theoretical science”. Including the critical thinking requirement you mention above, that a theory that doesn’t conform to all current experimental results must be rejected.
He employed what the natural philosophers call “the scientific method”. It is a method that is categorically rejected by the positivists.
Using that method and its restrictions on what qualifies as a candidate theory, he constructed a scientific conceptual model of the physical world that accounted for recurrent patterns in the sequences of events, one that was superior to anything that came before according to the rules of scientific method. . I listed some of these features above.
Natural philosophers sometimes call those qualifications that are in addition to the requirement that a theory not be falsified by experimental knowledge (a requirement that they share with the positivists) the need for “beauty”. Why do natural philosophers, like Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Lorentz, Heisenberg, and many thousands of others, reject so many theories that, like the Bohr theory of the hydrogen atom, agree perfectly with all known experimental data? A property of the theory that by itself is sufficient to accept it?
To put it succinctly, the Bohr theory lacked “beauty”.
A positivist rejects all of these other restrictions out of hand, based on received dogma, and will not consider any facts to the contrary. He has mystical knowledge of an alternate scientific method. It is irrational, and it is known for a fact that all of the great pure physicists rejected it and still reject it. But positivism is a dogma that its proponents defend only by repeating their declaration that it is true, over and over.
If you still think so after this, I’d like to hear you elaborate more on that. I believe that people can seek to understand each other better, provided they operate in good faith without making straw man caricatures or insisting on false accusations.
It seems that there has been some conflating of what defines science and what is a good scientific theory or model. Are these the same? Of course not.
If someone defines a sport, say golf, this does not define what a golfer’s score will be. It does not define what makes a superior golfer.
Claim: Within science, some theories are wrong and some models are bad models. Defining science never implies all theories are correct.
The necessary distinguishing quality of practicing science is that everyone’s claims must be tested against observable reality. This testing against reality is something like someone keeping score. But does that “deify” the reality check?
No smart competitor will become preoccupied with just the scoreboard. Anyone who thinks about it will realize that one needs to discern what is required to do well.
If anyone is serious about actually modeling reality well, the implication is that they must correctly discern the true nature of nature and express that. Those that get this wrong will not do well in the reality check.
For instance, suppose someone finds certain ideas appealing and others offensive (e.g. “How could nature be like that?”). But if the reality check disagrees with precious presuppositions, then too bad for those presuppositions about the nature of nature.
For example, for almost a decade Kepler tried hard to make certain preferred ideas about planetary orbits work (e.g. polygons, nested Platonic solids, egg shaped). Kudos to Kepler that he eventually gave up on those preferred ideas. Why? Because the reality check convinced him that wasn’t how nature was designed.
Naive statistical curve fitting doesn’t work.
Doing well depends upon discerning the nature of nature.
I certainly agree with this. I was just pointing out that by emphasizing the empirical results you can miss the point.
What I was generally saying is countered by this statement of yours. Ideally. This conversation seems to revolve around a philosophical idealization of “science” and there’s good in that. I like your golfing analogy, There are many reasons to enjoy golf. For some it is the low score. For some it it approaching the perfect shot or perfect swing. For some it is being out in the fresh air. For some it is the camaraderie. And for some it is the financial payoff. There is I suppose one and only one definition for golfing, but everyone can have a different definition that is in a way more real than just the course, the tools, the physical activity (the swing and the loft), and the score.
Secondly, people for some reason cheat at the score. For these the score is all that counts, whether it reflects reality or not. And others don’t care that the next person or the following foursome cheats. And others, spectators, only care about the score.
In an ideal world everything would be done purely, and rules would be followed and scores would be scrupulous, and losers would congratulate winners on an excellent game.
So, this brings me to my questions, Is all true science constituted of only good science? Is poor science science nonetheless? Is climate science such as it is popularly presented science? In quantitative experiments, is science done with an erratic scale or sensor science? If later one could correct for the scale’s errors would that now make bad science good science?
Does a scientific theory that can never be proven or disproven count as science?
And of course, reality is not science. Science is a human activity, and humans are flawed. And therefore science is flawed and sometimes we don’t even know where the flaws are. Science is human thinking and action. Without the empiricism or the “scientific method” pure reason is pure conjecture.
Slightly off-topic I have a favorite “science” story. The bell curve is pretty exact, but it is not pretty. I remember an incident in at a science center in which the techies built a display in which ping-pong balls would would randomly fall into a curve that matched a painted line of the bell curve. It was double-sided Lucite with interior pegs as baffles and was 6 feet across and 4 feet high, and was installed over the wide glass-walled entrance. It was beautiful. This process would repeat over and over. On it’s inauguration day, the balls did not fall into the proper curve. It turns out that the graphics department had thought that curve was not visually appealing and changed it to fit their aesthetic sense. The techies were less than gruntled.
I find that reassuring. (Not to suggest I have any great understanding of philosophy, but with you teaching me here at ricochet about these matters, I am learning a great deal.)
I don’t know of anyone who thinks that. Obviously, doing science means following the scientific method. For positivist science, the positivist method, and for traditional science, the traditional scientific method. What is a good theory (model) according to each of these two mutually exclusive philosophical systems is determined by application of the respective rules.
Already addressed above.
The two methods determine whether a model is good or bad.
According to positivist scientific method that is true. According to the Newtonian philosophical tradition it is not. This rule is common to both philosophies so it doesn’t distinguish them.
To a positivist, the statement is universally true by declaration. He denies the existence of natural philosophy (by re-creating the great natural philosophers in his positivist image), or he simply mocks natural philosophy, or both. That other scientists know what he does not is not a permissible idea.
That is correct, under both philosophies.
Positivists will ALWAYS temporarily do well in the reality check, because their method of discernment is defective. It rejects some invalid theories, but allows others to remain in a state of “waiting to be confirmed or falsified by data”, even though they are based on no understanding whatsoever.
A positivist never asks “How could nature be like that?” He is incapable of conceiving of it. This question is generated by instinctive knowledge about nature that a true scientific thinker possesses that a positivist does not, by the very nature of his personality. A natural philosopher has, by his personality, what seems to me to be an innate ability to
I’ll never tire of reminding my positivist friends that we agree with this, just as they’ll never tire of ignoring it, and assigning a ridiculous position to us.
Thanks!
Another analogy might be the running high jump. The defining rules of the high jump set certain boundaries on what is a legal jump, but different people have different ideas about how to make the jump. Then along comes Dick Fosbury who introduces the Fosbury Flop that revolutionizes the sport.
And then along comes a Kepler or an Einstein that revolutionizes some aspect of our understanding of nature in ways that come closer to reality.
I don’t see a coherent way to avoid the fact that even when scientists are seeking a beautiful model of nature, nevertheless some of those attempts are simply wrong and must be discarded. I’ve given the example of Kepler. If we say that none of those attempts that are later discarded are within the practice of “science”, then the consequence is that we cannot know if anything is truly within “science” since
When we practice science, even present agreement with the finite observations so far is never sufficient to guarantee that any particular proposal is correct, even the beautiful ones. There can be surprises later. Newton’s laws of motion give answers indistinguishable from Einstein’s — for speeds far from the speed of light. It is only when we test where they make different predictions that we establish that Newton’s laws gave a simplified description of reality.
Since there can be surprises later, science isn’t like mathematical proofs. But if an idea cannot even be tested against reality, then many would agree that isn’t “science”. It may be an imaginative idea or mathematical system, but it’s not science.
Thank you! Another proof that I am not a positivist! To continue that accusation would require contradicting your own position.
By “your criteria” it seems you refer to my defining science as requiring testing ideas against reality. Yet you’ve said multiple times that this is a shared requirement and that everyone you commend operates under this constraint as well — and it does not stop them from practicing science as you describe. Good!
Ergo, this proves by your own words that this shared requirement cannot possibly exclude practicing science in exactly the way you describe. On the contrary, your understanding of science requires it.
PS You also accused me of saying something “untrue” about Kepler. What exactly did I say that was “untrue”?
Yes, I agree with everything you say. :)
Well I lost track of the philosophy discussion a couple pages back, but this is just wrong.
The Bohr model of the atom works perfectly well as long as you’ve only got one electron. Hydrogen obviously, but also ionized helium, doubly ionized lithium, and so on up the chain. Once you add a second electron it’s no longer possible to use Bohr’s model to predict spectral lines for the simple reason that the electrons affect each other’s position.
The Schroedinger model of the atom allows you to make those predictions, but it does so via a technique known as perturbation theory. Which is ugly.
Consider a specific scientific theory: Einstein’s Special Relativity. As an alternative approach to analysis of the reasons why the Michaelson-Morley experiment failed, Einstein postulated that time and distance change with velocity, e.g, that time passes more slowly and distance contracts as one gets closer to the speed of light. Out of his calculation fell the famous equation: E=mc(squared)–the equivalence of mass and energy. The theory was validated with the demonstration of atomic bomb detonation, which converted a small amount of mass into a massive amount of energy.
Paul Dirac tried to calculate the relativistic behavior of the electron using Special Relativity. At the end of his calculations he wound up with the positive and negative square roots of an imaginary number. He interpreted the positive square root as representing the electron, but didn’t know what the negative square root represented. He postulated it represented the electron traveling backward in time, or a kind of “hole” in space that was the opposite of the electron. He was close. At about that same time, cloud chamber experiments at Cal Tech were showing the track of a particle that was of the same mass as the electron but with the exact opposite charge, as it spun with the same pattern as an electron but in the opposite direction. Those particles, when they collided with an electron would cause mutual annihilate of each other. The mysterious particles were quickly recognized as, and called positrons–antimatter. Dirac, without knowing exactly what he had done, had calculated the existence of anti-matter. Something that no one imagined to exist prior to Dirac’s efforts. Then theory and experiment coincided in a remarkable way.
And the negative square root represented election fraud?
If you are ascribing such a patently ridiculous view to those like me who hold to the traditional view of pure science, it is a straw man argument.
Were you to read my arguments for meaning, you would find that I have never suggested such silliness.
If you were to read that post for meaning, you would find that I didn’t ascribe any ridiculous view to you. It wasn’t describing you. It wasn’t even claiming that anyone who holds the view you hold takes a silly view of denying what I said. There was no straw man attack. For example, I didn’t insist on accusing you of holding a position you disagree with.
In another post I wrote
So I’ve not ascribed the ridiculous position you were concerned about to you or those who share your thinking. I made that explicitly clear.
In that same post I just quoted from, I did ask you some questions. I hope you will read that post for meaning and give serious consideration to the questions I have actually addressed to you. Thanks.
Thanks and sorry for my mistakes. As my complete and despairing frustration with this seemingly (to me) one-way conversation draws me closer to unfollowing it, I am spending less and less attention to what is said. I think my time’s up :-)
I have departed our chat with the forgiveness of a Saint.
Thanks for contributing your clarifications.
I would have preferred that the overall conversation had gotten more into substance. Perhaps you have thoughts on the following.
There are legitimate and defensible reasons why one might prefer to pursue theories that humans find “beautiful”, and not only because that has often proved pragmatically successful. I believe there are reasons why humans are both able to understand the mathematics of the universe and why we often find the discovered answers beautiful.
Nevertheless, you mentioned “The Schroedinger model” has aspects that are “ugly”. Beyond that example, even Einstein (who laid a foundation for quantum theory in 1905) famously found certain aspects of quantum theory not beautiful.
Even
Instead of a helpful guiding preference, suppose a sense of beauty were made part of the “criteria necessary for a satisfactory conceptual model” such that scientists had an “instinctive rejection of arbitrary assumptions (like the law that energy levels must change in jumps)”.
Would that standard imply that Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics fails that proposed criterion for a satisfactory conceptual model (at least until it was confirmed)?
I thought there was just one of us but I see there are two.
You don’t need to suppose it. A sense of beauty has ALWAYS been such an inviolable criterion for pure scientists.
We are for now dissatisfied. We are stuck in our past assumptions and don’t know where to go because we are too unwilling to think critically and rationally (as Newton and Einstein did). But much less so with quantum field theory than when Uncertainty first appeared. We see that the problem of “what can be known” cannot be ignored anymore. We are for now papering over the problem with what I think will be found to be nonsense about Schrodinger’s cat, an idea that allows us to maintain our old un-criticized assumptions.
Some day, if science progresses (if positivism fails to exterminate it) we will discover a satisfactory theory. Really, Heisenberg seems maybe to have brought us closer to that truth. We always ignored the epistemological simplification of science, and substituted metaphysics.
I’d like to see you prove it!
Really though I think Mark Camp has the right idea here:
Do you think I can’t?
And now, do you think I haven’t?
;-)
I hold nothing against you. For the sake of future conversations, something needs saying.
How much more quickly might you have come to a better understanding of my position if you had led with asking questions instead of assuming and repeatedly insisting I held a position (positivism) that I repeatedly explained I do not hold? When you reflect on “years of failed attempts at Ricochet conversations” that you attributed to personality types, is it possible that there might be a better and more effective way to approach those conversations?
You know the standard you apply to others when you imagine that someone might be “assigning a ridiculous position to” you or imagine might be “ascribing such a patently ridiculous view to” you as “a straw man argument.” And yet, when actual positivists (who believe only math+empirical verification gives true knowledge) see their position caricatured as naive statistical curve fitting, is it only a “personality type” that would cause them to likewise object to a straw man attack just as you would have?
If you have a strong position that you have confidence in, you can afford to practice the Golden Rule. That is the right thing to do, and it will make a difference. Count on it.
Yes, I agree that an ugly theory is not fully satisfying, and I would gladly welcome that a better understanding that is not so ugly may yet be possible.
But saying that a theory is not fully satisfying is not at all the same as saying it is not science.
If Heisenberg has brought us closer to the truth, can we agree that Heisenberg’s theory is part of “science”? Or does the sense that it is not sufficiently beautiful mean that his very accurate and repeatedly confirmed description of reality is “not science”?
This is why it cannot work to make something like a requirement of “beauty” to be a necessary part of the definition of “science” itself. Even though it is part of what we would require of a scientific theory to regard it as satisfying, that is quite different from saying a theory is “not science”.
“Inviolable criterion”?
If truly “inviolable”, that seems to imply that a “pure scientist” could not have done what Heisenberg did.
Everyone agrees a beautiful theory might yet be false. Could a seemingly ugly theory be true? It is worth considering that our helpful sense of beauty may not be an infallible guide.
Einstein disliked quantum mechanics, but his intuitive prediction against spooky action at a distance has been shown to be wrong.
I think you misread my comment. I meant that I was glad to see that someone agreed with me about beauty in the mathematics of the universe. I wasn’t attacking your position on beauty, but happily agreeing with it.