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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
I think he was being playful.
Point taken.
I know that, and I apologize for breaking it. I shall try to do better.
In reading your past comments, I am somewhat mystified where I got the idea that you were a positivist. It must have been the one comment you made criticizing a position which I inferred that you ascribed to me (when you didn’t). I think jumping to that conclusion may have been down to bourbon, which I occasionally have a wee dram of while posting at night. I’ve repeatedly discovered that ethanol clouds my judgement too much to post, but I’ve also repeatedly discovered, after two drinks, that I was wrong: that bourbon has suddenly made me profound and witty. I’ve not been able to settle on one theory or the other. I just go back and forth on it.
Regarding my failure to answer a number of your questions: I rely heavily on the software tool to keep track of its open items for me, like Comments that need to be read and answered. (My secretary went on vacation in 1985, and she’s not returned.)
Ricochet unfortunately has the unique inability to do that simple function. (With Discus discussions, I can use email notification. With email discussions, I can use email functions.)
For example, the moment I follow a notification to read an Article or Comment, Ricochet deletes it without allowing me to decide. (For a while I was hopeful that it would be easy for someone to program around these missing functions, but that didn’t pan out.)
Until someone is able to fix these problems or Valerie comes back, I have given up on any hope of being able to show correspondents the courtesy of replying to their questions unless I happen to be able to do it at the moment they are asked. Sorry about that.
I both understood and appreciated that comment of yours. Notice that I commented on how we might have gotten to that clarity much sooner. (BTW, regarding “beauty in the mathematics…”, mathematics was one of my majors. Math has beauty. Most of my career has been in scientific research.)
Instead of applying to the quote preceding it, my statement…
…was a preface to the statements that followed, which needed saying. Since tone is difficult to convey in text, I wanted to carefully avoid the impression that the assessment that followed was in any way coming out of being “against you”.
Actually I believe cause and effect went in the other direction. Because you were already resolutely convinced I must be a positivist, I suspect that greased the skids to rush twice (see here and here) to mistaken interpretations. I think it is clear that you had already assumed I was a positivist even before your first post stating “My opinion is different. …”
I’m not mystified why. While I agree about the value of seeking beauty as a guiding expectation for a satisfying scientific theory, I haven’t included anything like “beauty” as part of the definition demarcating “science” from “not science”. (I treat those as separate questions. Some genuine “science” is ugly, at least for now, even though it is still “science”.)
The emphasis in my definition for “science” on testing ideas (without mentioning beauty) undoubtedly triggered your “positivist” early warning signals.