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Liked It “When the jacket said "one of the best books of the century" I was skeptical but after reading it, it truly is!” see full review » see other reviews » |
Didn’t Like It “A scholarly text on the way science develops over time. Not too complicated or boring for a history of science text, but still in now way thrilling. I read it for a library science class for some inexplicable reason.” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“When the jacket said "one of the best books of the century" I was skeptical but after reading it, it truly is!”
MAST Capt wrote this review Tuesday, September 29 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“A scholarly text on the way science develops over time. Not too complicated or boring for a history of science text, but still in now way thrilling. I read it for a library science class for some inexplicable reason.”
Christina F wrote this review Tuesday, September 8 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Simply the best book about the history of science and the philosophy implied by it. Absolutely awesome to read; beautiful prose, great arguments and a wonderful alternative to the Popperian whitewash handed to most scientists. Also therapeutic when dealing with scientists and their strange psychology. I have re-read this book many times, and sure will a few more.”
Joel Adamson wrote this review Thursday, July 16 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“This major work in the history of science (and in science studies) shows its age. While I'm sure it will challenge any new readers, if you dig deeper into science studies, you'll find not only more interesting and supportable arguments, but also a number of valid critiques of Kuhn. While 'Structure' is too synchronic (for lack of a better word) for my tastes, and pays far too little attention to the social and practical, every-day aspects of the sciences, it is nonetheless a good book to read.”
ikemook wrote this review Wednesday, March 18 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“A rebellion against science is running rampant in the West, causing such oddities as the cult of Global Warming. Here we can focus on one of the most important fomenters of this rebellion: Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), author of the enormously influential "Structure of Scientific Revolutions."
Gary Wolf wrote this review Monday, March 2 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Kuhn rejects the traditional view that science is a linear accretion of knowledge. In the traditional view, scientists build on the corpus that preceded them; through experiment and observation, they add a new fact here and a new discovery there, refining and adjusting the inherited learning. Slowly but surely, knowledge advances, and we modify the textbooks as we go.
Wrong, says Kuhn. Science in any given era is ruled by a paradigm, an over-arching theory that answers the big questions, and determines the bounds and the context within which everyday research takes place. Kuhn calls this everyday research "normal science," and its purpose is to flesh out and confirm the predictions of the paradigm.
At a certain point in the life of the paradigm, anomalies begin to appear. At first they are rationalized, as the paradigm is stretched and patched up to account for them. But eventually the anomalies become too glaring. Someone then comes along and proposes a bold new paradigm that completely replaces the old one. For example, Einstein's theory of relativity supplanting the former Newtonian system. Once the skeptics are defeated and the new paradigm is universally accepted, normal science resumes, but exclusively within the framework of the new paradigm.
In Kuhn's words:
"Sometimes a normal problem, one that ought to be solvable by known rules and procedures, resists the reiterated onslaught of the ablest members of the group within whose competence it falls. On other occasions a piece of equipment designed and constructed for the purpose of normal research fails to perform in the anticipated manner, revealing an anomaly that cannot, despite repeated effort, be aligned with professional expectation. In these and other ways besides, normal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does--when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice--then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions."
At this juncture, I find myself somewhat in sympathy with Kuhn. One can think of several cases that seem to correspond to this process, a prominent one being Darwin's theory of evolution. It was certainly revolutionary, and "normal science" has busied itself with filling out the theory and--more recently--with wildly bailing out the sinking ship. One can imagine a new scientific paradigm emerging, causing Darwin to be relegated entirely to the history books.
The problem begins when Kuhn goes beyond merely illuminating the great revolutions that have occurred in scientific thought. These revolutions, for him, completely supplant the previous view; in fact, they create a new truth. There is no such thing as an objective, empirically verifiable fact. The only thing that can be verified is a given phenomenon in relation to the ruling paradigm.
In the exposition of this argument, Kuhn reveals his relativistic hand by wading in the muddy waters of experimental psychology, which showed radical shifts in perception based on the beliefs and expectations of the test subject:
"An experimental subject who puts on goggles fitted with inverting lenses initially sees the entire world upside down. At the start his perceptual apparatus functions as it had been trained to function in the absence of the goggles, and the result is extreme disorientation, an acute personal crisis. But after the subject has begun to learn to deal with his new world, his entire visual field flips over, usually after an intervening period in which vision is simply confused. Thereafter, objects are again seen as they had been before the goggles were put on. The assimilation of a previously anomalous visual field has reacted upon and changed the field itself. Literally as well as metaphorically, the man accustomed to inverting lenses has undergone a revolutionary transformation of vision."
These "revolutionary transformations of vision," says Kuhn, are equally applicable to the world of science:
"After a revolution, scientists are responding to a different world. It is as elementary prototypes for these transformations of the scientist's world that the familiar demonstrations of a switch in visual gestalt prove so suggestive. What were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards...Transformations like these, though usually more gradual and almost always irreversible, are common concomitants of scientific training. Looking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, the cartographer a picture of a terrain. Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events."
As an exercise, let us apply Kuhn's method to Kuhn himself. We begin the exercise by saying that for thousands of years, at least since Aristotle, the reigning epistemological paradigm was that science is based on objective, verifiable facts. But more and more anomalies were found; modern thinkers noticed that the ideas of different individuals, groups, and nations are dependent upon a set of received values and beliefs. Thus who is to say which of the systems represents the truth? Along comes Kuhn and applies this modern relativistic approach to the last great bastion of objective truth: science itself.
Now, continuing our Kuhnian analysis of Kuhn: This paradigm, in its numerous permutations, has been in vogue for quite some time, going back at least to Hegel. Even looking at Kuhn alone, it is now nearly half a century since the publication of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Anomalies are accumulating, and we begin to realize that relativism is...well...relative. Kuhn's theory is merely one more paradigm that inevitably will be replaced. Are not relativism and its derivatives (such as deconstructionism and multiculturalism) dependent upon a received set of values and beliefs, just like any other theory?
Thus the paradox of relativism: If everything is relative, and there are no real "truths," then we have no reason to accept relativism itself as more valid and "true" than anything else. It can be deconstructed and thrown out like any other notion.
Like its ideological cousin, Marxism, Kuhnian relativism refuses to admit the existence of a world, with its laws, its nature, and its continuity. It refuses to admit that we and Aristotle are looking at the same rock. Certainly, our interpretations differ, but the rock remains the same, notwithstanding some gestalt hocus-pocus that tricks us into seeing the rock upside-down.
Kuhn's remark that ducks become rabbits as a result of a scientific revolution brings to mind the following statement by Aristotle (in "The Metaphysics") on the intellectual short-circuit that occurs in philosophical relativism:
"If all contradictions are true at the same time of the same thing, palpably all things will then be one. For if it is possible either to affirm or to deny anything of everything, the same thing will be a ship and a wall and a man, as it must be for those who repeat the theory of [the relativist:] Protagoras. Then if anyone thinks that a man is not a ship, undoubtedly he is not a ship. But, in the same way, he is a ship, if the contrary is true....I mean that if it is true to say that a man is not a man, then clearly it is also true that he is a ship and not a ship....Then all things will be one, as we said before, and the same thing will be man and God and ship and their opposites. For if we can make all these assertions of everything, there will be no difference between any one thing and any other...
"And if all men are equally wrong and right, a person like that can neither speak nor tell us anything, for he is saying at the same time both "yes" and "no." And if he has no opinion but both thinks and does not think together, how is he different than a vegetable? So it is very evident that no one, neither those who profess this theory nor any others, really abide by it....When he wants and looks for a drink of water or a man to see, he does not go looking for everything and taking them all to be the same; and yet he should, if the same thing were equally a man and not a man." ”
“There's a lot about this book I didn't understand (I'm not a scientist by any sense of the imagination), but what Thomas Kuhn shares about how paradigms come about (over and against the natural science of ongoing work within a theory or paradigm) and the kind of people involved in introducing them was fascinating stuff.
geoffreybaines wrote this review Monday, November 17 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Read this if you are struggling with the changes outside the organism or organisation you are a part of, but are not seeing the changes needed within.”
“The general argument is familiar: "Practices don't change until the beliefs of the practitioners change."
Gary A wrote this review Wednesday, September 24 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
This has been a basic idea in my thinking (first as a scientist then as an "educationist") for 20+ years.
The postscript includes the 4 components of the disciplinary martix that has been helpful in my thinking about structuring a theory of hwo IT will affect schools:
1) Symbolic generalizations (kuhn_1) or what the technology will allow us to do...
2) metaphysical paradigms (kuhn_2) or what society expects us to do...
3) values (kuhn_3) or how we create tech rich schooling
4) exemplary practices (kuhn_4) or how we do our work”
“It's dry but a very fascinating read. Must be into history of science, epistomology, and general science.”
Chris G wrote this review Thursday, March 6 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
