Normal Science is Lamp-Post Science
There is a popular joke that goes something like this: A drunken man is crawling around on his hands and knees under a lamp-post. His friend asks him “what are you doing crawling around under that lamp-post? The drunk responds that he has lost his keys and is looking for them. His friend responds “your car is over here, you have not been near that lamp-post”. The drunk responds “it is very dark and this is the only place where there is some light”.
Normal science is a puzzle-solving enterprise. Normal science is a slow accumulation of knowledge by a methodical step-by-step process undertaken by a group of scientists.
‘Paradigm’ is a word that was given great meaning and clarity by Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.
The author notes that all “real science is normally a habit-governed, puzzle-solving activity” and not a philosophical activity. Paradigm and not hypothesis is the active meaning for the ‘new image of science’. Paradigm is neither a theory nor a metaphysical viewpoint.
The paradigm is analogous to the lamp-post in the joke. The paradigm provides the illumination that allows the scientist to look for the “laws of nature” that drive our high tech culture.
I recently had occasion to hang out in the waiting area of St Joseph Hospital in Asheville for a few hours. I was free to walk many of the corridors and rest in many of the waiting areas along with everyone else. It was early morning but it was obvious that the hospital functioned fully 24/7.
A person can walk the corridors of any big city hospital and observe the effectiveness of human rationality in action. One can also visit the UN building in NYC or read the morning papers and observe just how ineffective, frustrating and disappointing human rationality can be. Why does human reason perform so well in some matters and so poorly in others?
We live in two very different worlds; a world of technical and technological order and clarity, and a world of personal and social disorder and confusion. We are increasingly able to solve problems in one domain and increasingly endangered by our inability to solve problems in the other.
Normal science is successful primarily because it is a domain of knowledge controlled by paradigms. Science uses instrumental rationality to solve puzzles. Instrumental rationality is a systematic process for reflecting upon the best action to take to reach an established end. The obvious question becomes ‘what mode of rationality is available for determining ends?’ Instrumental rationality appears to be of little use in determining such matters as “good” and “right”, i.e. social morality.
There is a striking difference between the logic of technical problems and that of dialectical problems. The principles, methods and standards for dealing with technical problems and problems of “real life” are as different as night and day. Real life problems cannot be solved only using deductive and inductive reasoning.
Dialectical reasoning methods require the ability to slip quickly between contradictory lines of reasoning. One needs skill to develop a synthesis of one point of view with another. Where technical matters are generally confined to only one well understood frame of reference real life problems become multi-dimensional totalities.
When we think dialectically we are guided by principles not by procedures. Real life problems span multiple categories and academic disciplines. We need point-counter-point argumentation; we need emancipatory reasoning to resolve dialectical problems. We need critical thinking skills and attitudes to resolve real life problems.
Normal science is a science normally driven at high speed by our culture because it is a dramatic performance enhancing drug for our culture that places the maximizing of production and consumption as humanities’ sui generis (uncaused cause) value.
I claim that our human sciences that can help us to create a social morality that is required to save the species and perhaps the planet must receive a much higher priority. We can no longer afford the luxury of looking only under the lamp-post for our lost keys.
Normal Science is Lamp-Post Science
Rortabend wrote:There is a famous essay by Margaret Masterman where she convincingly argues that there at least twenty different ways in which Kuhn uses the word paradigm!‘Paradigm’ is a word that was given great meaning and clarity by Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.
Margaret Masterman has written the essay “The Nature of a Paradigm” for inclusion in the book “Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge”.
Her conclusions are: “as historians, however much we may cavil at Kuhn’s conclusions in detail, we are not going to be able to go back to where we were before Kuhn and his immediate predecessors began to get at us”.
The history of science, by its nature as part of the history of ideas, has got to be a discipline which helps actual scientists to get a deeper insight into the real nature of their science…So, if we retreat from all consideration of Kuhn’s ‘new image’ of science, we run the risk of totally disconnecting the new- style realistic history of science from its old-style philosophy: a disaster.”
Like many words ‘science’ has more than one meaning and this can be misleading. We commonly use the word to mean—systemized study of technology and its associated phenomena. The word has a more general meaning—systematized study of any domain of knowledge. I think that this distinction needs to be kept in mind.
Kuhn constantly refers to the ‘gestalt switch’ when discussing the switch in reference from one paradigm to another as ‘re-seeing’ action. Each paradigm has been constructed to be a ‘way-of-seeing’. Here Kuhn is speaking not about what the paradigm is but how the paradigm is used. He is defining a paradigm as a newly developed puzzle-solving artifact that is used analogically to understand another artifact; for example, using wire and beads strung together to facilitate understanding the protein molecule.
To understand Kuhn I must understand what is “an organized puzzle-solving gestalt, which is itself a ‘picture’ of something, A, if it is then to be applied, non-obviously, to provide a new way of seeing something else, B.”
I am interested in cognitive science, which is presently in a stage of seeking a unifying paradigm. To my knowledge cognitive science has two ‘pre-paradigms’: the disembodied ‘symbol manipulation’ of Artificial Intelligence and the embodied ‘conceptual metaphor’ as depicted in “Philosophy in the Flesh”.
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mark black
- Posts: 167
- Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2008 1:28 am
coberst,
I enjoyed your post and agree in many ways, however...
I view science as an inter-generational enterprise, employing human reason to understanding of something real - which would seem to stand at odds with Kuhn's concept of incommensurability.
Even if, to cite Khun's example, Newton's and Einstien's concepts of mass are different, I'd say that there are continuities in reality and reason that transcend incomensurability.
Any thoughts?
regards,
mark.
I enjoyed your post and agree in many ways, however...
I view science as an inter-generational enterprise, employing human reason to understanding of something real - which would seem to stand at odds with Kuhn's concept of incommensurability.
Even if, to cite Khun's example, Newton's and Einstien's concepts of mass are different, I'd say that there are continuities in reality and reason that transcend incomensurability.
Any thoughts?
regards,
mark.
Depends how you understand Kuhn's use of incommensurability and also whether or not you take him to be a relativist about truth. He's very wishy-washy about the relativism issue at the end of the book so, depending or your agenda, Kuhn can be made to look like a realist or a relativist.I view science as an inter-generational enterprise, employing human reason to understanding of something real - which would seem to stand at odds with Kuhn's concept of incommensurability.
It is ironic that Kuhn came to despise the relativism of the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge given that his book is cited by its leaders as a major influence on their work.
Top fact about Kuhn - did you know that he drove a Ferrari (badly) around the Harvard campus? The number plate was 'Paradigm 1'. Who said philosophers weren't rock n'roll?
What does "science as inter-generational enterprise mean"?mark black wrote:coberst,
I enjoyed your post and agree in many ways, however...
I view science as an inter-generational enterprise, employing human reason to understanding of something real - which would seem to stand at odds with Kuhn's concept of incommensurability.
Even if, to cite Khun's example, Newton's and Einstien's concepts of mass are different, I'd say that there are continuities in reality and reason that transcend incomensurability.
Any thoughts?
regards,
mark.