Franklin, J. (2000) 'Thomas
Kuhn's irrationalism', in The New
Criterion, Vol 18, No 10 [online] http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/18/jun00/kuhn.htm
[This is a witty and ironic piece criticising Kuhn's central arguments
and the popular caricatures of them, and trying to explain why they are
so
popular among people who don't understand science. I'm going to reduce
the wit
and irony to a few basic points as usual. It is also worth noting that
a mirror image of this critique could be levelled at Franklin himself
-- Kuhn ignores realist arguments, Franklin ignores contructivist ones;
Kuhnians ignore actual science, Franklin ignores actual sociology and
history -- and so on]
Kuhn's
work turns out to be the most frequently cited book in the US
Arts and Humanities Citation Index. It is popular with politicians from
Bush to
Gore. This can be understood simply by asking 'What
would the humanities crowd want
said about science?' (no page references on this downloaded copy). They
would
want science to be no different from humanities, certainly no better or
more
rigorously grounded: 'Kuhn declared
logic outmoded and replaced it with history'.
He
actually did this as a teaching device initially, having been given
the task of teaching non-scientists (policy
makers in particular) about science at Harvard.
His sponsor, the
President of Harvard at the time, realise that tasters of natural
science were
not effective. Discussing earlier episodes of scientific development
would
prove more exciting and illustrate the processes of discovery. Kuhn's
teaching
did not prove very successful, and he lost tenure -- the famous book
can be
seen as a kind of revenge.
The
caricatured version says that an established paradigm leads to
normal science until anomalies accrue which 'eventually
make the paradigm unsustainable'. A
revolutionary phase
ensues, but the new paradigm does not prevail really until the old
adherence to
die out. Advocates of the caricature, who include Fukuyama, believe
that this
means there can simply be no scientific knowledge of nature at all.
Kuhn
himself denies that he said any such thing, but this leaves only two
further
inconsistencies and means that 'the
caricatured has a historical career considerably more vigorous than the
original, whose qualifications would have lessened its appeal'. The
caricature
renders the history of science as a simple literary plot,
'the story of the Morte d'Arthur, of the
peace and order and its ageing King, the
virtue undermined by internal corruption, falling to the challenge of
the
vigorous and bloodthirsty young challenger'. It also reveals a
structure known
as 'theomachy... [where]... what was
previously thought to be a continuous and an interesting succession of
random
events is discovered to be a conflict of a finite number of hidden
gods... who
manipulate the flux of appearances to their own advantage, but whose
imaginations may be uncovered by the elect to whom the key has been
revealed'
[Freud and Marx are cited here -- it could be a perfect description of
British
Cultural Studies as well].
Kuhn's
work used selective examples, ignoring sciences where there was
a progressive accumulation of established results, such as
'ophthalmology, oceanography, operations
research, and ornithology, to keep to just one letter of the alphabet'.
It
appealed to social scientists in particular who had been embarrassed
earlier by
the theoretical fights in the subject, but now thought these lay at the
very
heart of science. Even natural scientists could see themselves as
potential
revolutionary heroes. The thesis appealed perfectly to the spirit of
the
Sixties.
There
are ambiguities, of course. Unsustainability may be a matter of
logic or psychology. The first option delivers us back to conventional
views of
science: the second option fails to explain why psychological
rejections
actually changed scientific theories. There are left-wing criticisms,
such as
those offered by Fuller -- these point out that Kuhn failed to connect
the
progress of science with the military-industrial complex and other
social
processes. Kuhn's work offered a harmless diversion, according to
Fuller. This
points to one theme in Kuhn at least -- 'its
talk of "revolution" is
very
harmless; the revolution is in the past, against the previous paradigm,
and no
present entities have anything to fear from it. Like the violence and
horror
film, it's all virtual and it's over when you come out into the light'.
However, Franklin admits that dominant paradigms do attract better
funding and
resources.
Fuller
also connects the notion of paradigm to a lot of earlier
cultural work, including that of Piaget, but he still does not refer to
the actual
practice of science. As a result, he fails to realise how logical
actual
science is. This is also ignored by much of science studies, where
Kuhn's work
prevails. There has been a backlash on the constructivism and
relativism of the
approach, but the core argument remains -- 'that
usually different scientists will come to agree on
what they say
about reality, but that the reason for this is not in reality but in
the
scientists, in particular in their social relations'. Franklin points
out that
this simply ignores the observable effects of scientific arguments [I am not sure it does]. Fuller argues that
knowledge must be embodied in linguistic and social practices, and that
it is
this that reliably transmits knowledge at the least.
Franklin
says this is a bad argument because it simply rules out the
possibility that we can know things as they are in themselves [this is the crux of the debate of course --
Franklin is wrong to assert that Kuhnian positions are only a product
of the Sixties or whatever. Constructivism does have a philosophical
argument too.]
Franklin illustrates his point by quoting a caricature: "we have our
eyes,
therefore we cannot see". There is a further analogy
[shouldn't we be suspicious of caricatures
and analogies being used at this point?] -- a calculator successfully
performs
arithmetic because its circuitry is assembled to deliver the right
result, but
successful performance also depends on more abstract arithmetical facts
such as
that numbers do indeed add together [this
seems dubious grounds to me, assuming that
arithmetic simply
mirrors some real-world equivalents]. Franklin admits that
'there needs to be some philosophical story
about why causes cooperate with reasons' as in this case, but says that
Kuhn
simply denies that this requirement is necessary. As a result, 'the worst effect of Kuhn... has been the
frivolous discarding of the way things are as a constraint on theory
about the
way things are'.
What
is needed is a proper account of science, showing how evidence is
related to conclusion, how measurement works and so on.
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