Episode 86: Thomas Kuhn on Scientific Progress

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who thought about doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. For episode 86, the question is, what is scientific progress? And we read Thomas Kuhn's the Structure of scientific revolutions from 1962. You get a link to the text and lots of other information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer crossing the paradigms from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:41 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey fomenting revolution in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:46 Wes: What kind of revolution?

0:47 Dylan: Revolution of your mind, man.

0:50 Wes: Scientific in nature.

0:54 Seth: I love the word foment.

0:56 Dylan: It's a good word. It has just enough of like, foaming at the mouth.

1:00 Seth: It's one of those interesting words that people think you're saying or spelling wrong. Right. Because it sounds like it should have an R like forment or froment or something like that. But it's. There's. I'm sure there's a linguistic term for that.

1:13 Mark: I'm going to ferment some revolution, man.

1:16 Seth: There you go.

1:18 Mark: Awesome.

1:19 Dylan: That was the Whiskey Rebellion, right? The fermented revolution. That was terrible.

1:25 Wes: We are now fermenting at the mouth.

1:29 Mark: So this is the second in our Philosophy of Science series that began with our Karl Popper episode very recently. And Kuhn, in a way, was responding to Popper among many other people, but he was also more responding to the everyday pre philosophical view that one might have of science. Right. He's a history of science guy. He's not really a philosopher. He was studying to be a scientist, but really wasn't a scientist scientist. He got distracted to reading about history of science, and he thinks scientists neglect reading about the history of science. And so they see the growth of science as just an accumulation of discovery after discovery, that we may correct some things that are wrong, but we fundamentally are just building this great edifice.

2:13 Wes: We gradually get closer to the truth.

2:15 Dylan: It's fundamentally cumulative. And he attributes that to the positivists.

2:19 Mark: Right.

2:19 Dylan: And the Descartes.

2:20 Mark: I don't know if he thinks that's just the historical sort of baseline that we start with. He does mention both of those folks. Yes.

2:26 Dylan: He doesn't engage the question of where does the understanding of science as a cumulative activity of knowledge come from. He considers that to be the overarching paradigm of understanding of the way science works, as it being cumulative and maybe even loosely teleological, and that it aims towards the truth. And I think that he would attribute Some of that to. To certainly the modern history of philosophy, that science is the single best example of knowing the world and getting to know it better and better. And that scientific knowledge is an activity of progress where you specifically mean progress as being cumulatively and progressively getting closer to the truth about the world. And he doesn't think that's a good account of the way science works based upon the historical record. And he doesn't think that accounts for even science's power, actually.

3:21 Seth: Right.

3:21 Mark: Expanding our warehouse of facts. And then scientists look at those facts, they get enough facts and they make generalizations based on them, and they come up with scientific laws based on that, and then they find more facts that maybe contradict those scientific laws that they thought they had. So they refine the laws and it just gets better and better and better. And you already threw out the magic word, which was paradigm, which is Kuhn's, certainly not his invention. But the use of it in this context is as, I mean, what it really means. Right.

Is a case to model yourself after. And he does use it that way in terms of a particular area of science will look at a certain discovery. We'll look at some particular scientists, work like Newton's and say, man, that's awesome, and sort of base their inquiries after the questions that that major figure set up. But then not only does he mean by paradigm, those particular examples, but then he has just a broader meaning of it, of the whole style of doing science exemplified by the paradigm case.

4:16 Dylan: I think that he would make and does make in the Postscript. I think there's a useful distinction between a model as a kind of living, breathing instance of a paradigm, but it's not the same thing as the paradigm. And that there's in some ways more going on in his account of the way a paradigm influences scientific thinking and regulates normal science. And also more at stake at what it would mean to change a paradigm.

4:45 Mark: Yeah, just since you mentioned the postscript, we should say that we're all reading the second enlarged edition, which is the 1962 essay. But then he got a lot of feedback, a lot of press about it, and so he wrote this 30 page postscript in 1970 for the second edition, where he hedges a little. And one of the things, as you mentioned, that he changes is to try to reduce the ambiguity in what a paradigm refers to. That, yes, the word actually does refer to. And he uses it sometimes to talk about, you know, a prime example of something. But by this postscript, he says, okay, well, obviously I mean something bigger in general by Paradigm, something more encompassing.

We'll call these cases, these model experiments, we'll call them exemplars. He just decides to not use the word paradigm for that case anymore, just to be a little clearer. Yeah, and actually a lot of the philosophical juice is stuffed into that postscript as well, that he got so much. He was not a philosopher. He talks about Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations as one of the seemingly primary influences for his account of paradigms as being kind of like Wittgenstein's language games. And also uses the example from the investigation of the Duck rabbit, where there's a single drawing that if you look in a certain way, it looks like a duck, and if you look in another way, it looks like a rabbit.

The icon for the Philosophy Bites podcast, if you are not familiar with that, and uses that as a way to illustrate what it is like to jump from seeing the facts, seeing the world in terms of one paradigm, to another paradigm. It's a lot like, as he discusses in the postscript, almost like learning a different language of sorts, a different set of concepts. And I really. This rang true in terms of when we learn about weird areas of philosophy, you know, what is all this Heidegger shit? What? All these people influenced by Heidegger, but sort of after you do it enough, then you find yourself no longer translating everything from that weird dialect into everyday English, but actually sort of thinking in that dialect.

And that's one of the ways he characterizes a paradigm shift. But, yeah, so it's in the postscript where he, since so many people have drawn philosophical conclusions and accused him of being a relativist of various sorts, that he feels like he has to actually give a philosophical account of perception and the things that philosophers might be most interested in about this book, as opposed to the rest of it, which was really interesting to me, but because he's casting generalizations about the history of science, which I'm not all that familiar with, I had heard of most of the cases he's talking about, and he gives clear enough short explanations of the development of, you know, Maxwell's view of heat and Einstein over Newton and all these things like that, the development of oxygen as opposed to phlogiston, but I'm in no position not being so familiar with the primary material to second guess his generalizations, his theories about this.

Like, oh, no, that's not really the way science acts because I'm not a student of that history. So that's an interesting story. But it's hard for me as a philosopher to Latch on and have something immediately critical to say about that. It's only when you start talking about what does a paradigm actually mean for epistemology or something, then it gets into more familiar territory.

8:01 Seth: Mark, I don't think being a philosopher is a great disadvantage there because one of Kuhn's points is that the history of science isn't taught to anybody.

8:12 Mark: Right.

8:13 Seth: That in fact, the narrative of the history of science, it's written by the victors, so to speak, and it focuses on the. The exemplars. You might hear that somebody discovered something, but you don't hear about the competing theory so much at the time and how it emerged. So he would say that I don't know that other than historians of science, there's anybody out there who is in a position to judge about whether or not his characterization is correct or not.

8:42 Dylan: Well, one thing about his characterization that I think is correct is that there is a way in which science, and I can speak mainly to physics and some mathematics, but there's a pedagogical technique of telling a story that looks like history, which traces a genetic account of the way you view the world that goes back very far. Particle physics is particularly good at this. I don't know. I want to say the word good at it. So you'll read a book about particle physics, and it'll say, first there was Democritus who thought about the atom and goes on and on, and it draws a seemingly unbroken chain of thinking regarding elements and fundamental particles and fundamental constituents of the world.

And there is the explicit implication that everybody was thinking about the same sort of thing along the way, that what Democritus really was after, and he would completely recognize right now are quarks and electrons. And that would be just utterly clear to him what was going on with that. And Kuhn will say that, well, that's at best an ad hoc understanding of the way of looking backwards with the benefit of current accounts to see how you can explain the past, given the way you look at things now, but that it's not the case that the people in the past are looking at the same world.

In fact, he'll make that very strong claim in sort of the last couple chapters of the book that when a paradigm shift happens, the world actually changes, that people look at the world, the constituents of the world are actually different. And I think that's one of the things that got him into philosophical hot water was that claim that paradigm shifts lead to a changing view of the world. And that view of the world really is essential. The world is different in a deep sense. In scientific education, you often get a history that basically gives you an unbroken chain.

And it's not the same thing as saying, well, what were all the back alleys? What were the controversies? Sometimes there'll be a discussion of the difficulties that were used, but in Kuhn's language, and this also rang true to me, is that you focus on the way in which there was a persistent problem at a given time and you get told the story of how this new theory solved that problem. And that's different than a sort of full account which would include the things that you didn't solve, the anomalies that are still persistent and stuff like that.

I think we ought to go from the beginning because Kuhn's essay starts from an account of what normal science looks like. What does normal everyday science look like, how is it constituted? And then what. What does it mean to have scientific change or revolutions in science and trying to make sense of that. That's sort of what his essay is about. So we probably ought to talk a little bit about normal science too.

11:43 Mark: Yeah. One of the things he wants to retain here, especially in talking about normal science, but also across paradigms, one of his ways of responding to charges that he's a relativist is to say that he does believe in some kind of scientific progress. He doesn't believe that the way to characterize is that paradigms get closer and closer to the truth. But he does think that there is, well, between paradigms. The issue might be though, the superiority of a new paradigm over an old paradigm is not going to be so clear that it's going to convince everybody.

And they're incommensurable in certain ways that they don't even use the same terms. There's not a one to one translation between every single term between the old paradigm and the new paradigm. So that it becomes very awkward to even to hold them up next to each other and evaluate. So there's. He has a pretty complicated story of how the shift happens, but still you could look retrospectively and say you can see how these new paradigms explain so much more. They're simpler, they're clearer. He does think that you can draw a line. It's just not in as clear a way as before.

You read Kuhn's book, the most obvious notion of progress is just within a given paradigm, is that there really is a paradigm sets up tasks for itself. It is an idea. Right? It's based on some particular discoveries, like Newton's. But then leaves open certain questions that are not addressed. So the paradigm has to be elaborated further. So Newtonian physicists then would be embarking on this set of problems that basically Newton had set up by establishing the foundations that he had. And there's plenty of progress to be made. And it's very clear cut for members of that tribe, for, for other people who really understand Newton and are practicing physics in this way, it's going to be fairly clear what constitutes progress within that paradigm.

13:28 Dylan: Those rules and methods for constituting progress are part of what makes it a paradigm.

13:35 Mark: Yes. So he described normal science, I.e. operations within a paradigm, as solving puzzles. I guess the example, the most recent big historical example, was the Higgs boson. Dealy, the Death of Delie. Maybe you can give us the details here. You know that this was something that was according to predictions, was expected to be found, and it took a long time and ingenuity to actually get the evidence for it. But that this was not a discovery in the sense of something novel and unexpected, like the discovery of X rays, which he thinks were a paradigm changing event, but was the fulfillment of destiny according to the paradigm.

14:12 Dylan: Yeah. The Higgs boson is certainly within the scope of the paradigm of the standard model.

14:17 Seth: So normal science is just the activities that are indicated by the paradigm that's adopted. So, for example, if the paradigm comes in and says we can now understand heat in this way instead of the old way, then essentially normal science is then figuring out what are the specific equations, what are the relationships between particles, what sort of ratios hold, how do different types of substances react, and how does that impact. And it's about working out the details. That's one aspect of what normal science is about.

14:53 Dylan: And I would tack onto that. The framework of the account establishes parameters and entities that become important for the theory. So the very thing that you want to measure and the very thing that you call a thing in Kuhn's account ends up being delineated by the theory for you. The things that you consider important to measure, the fundamental constants of the theory, as well as the kinds of interactions, as Seth just mentioned, those are all prescribed by the theory and by working out the consequences of the theory so that the very things you're looking for, you end up looking for them because you're looking at the world through that paradigm and you see by means of that.

15:36 Seth: Mm, yeah.

15:37 Wes: They help you formulate questions and determine methods for getting at those questions and what's relevant.

15:43 Dylan: It's easy when you're reading Kuhn to read him as kind of saying, well, it's just this kind of paradigm that I'm doing and I'm just talking in this particular way and that's how the world is working.

15:55 Mark: If you read all of our bad business, speak back into Kuhn. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how lucid and non flaky.

16:01 Dylan: Oh yeah, yeah, I thought it was really great to read. He, I think, rightly points out that this activity of having a way to look at the world and then examining it through that structure is actually one of the central powers of scientific thinking. That you have a structure to look at the world so you actually have questions to answer. He quotes Bacon and he phrases it as being the power of error as opposed to confusion. So a paradigm in scientific thinking. And this is why I think he thinks it's the right account of the way science progresses, that in science you have questions that are framed within a paradigm that allow you to establish whether you were right or wrong.

And you're going to have to have a separate account for in that activity, which is the activity of normal science, that eventually things break down and, and you move into this sort of crisis mode where it's not clear what is right and wrong and where what's up and down and that has to get resolved. And that gets resolved by substituting in a new paradigm that allows you to once again engage in the activity of normal science in which you can make judgments about what is right and what is wrong as opposed to just being confused. And that is one of the central powers of, of the activity of science is being able to provide a structure for asking questions and therefore solving puzzles.

17:30 Wes: Right. So without that we get what he calls the pre paradigmatic stage of inquiry. Right. Well, I'm not sure if it's confusion, exactly.

17:38 Mark: Multiplicity, irreducible multivalent multiplicity.

17:43 Dylan: Yeah. Schools.

17:44 Wes: It definitely doesn't have that distinctive feel of scientific research where, yeah, you have a paradigm and then you have this set line of inquiry that you're put on that trail by the paradigm. It looks more like what philosophy looks like or certain other disciplines than he meant.

18:00 Dylan: You have Heideggerians and you have Kuhnians and you have Kantians and Aristotelians. Right?

18:05 Wes: Yeah.

18:06 Mark: Right. And I think one of the things Rickaly said about the mark of that when you're in that kind of stage is because whole groups will just completely deny the validity of what another group of their contemporaries is even trying to

18:18 Wes: do because they're arguing about something more fundamental. They're arguing about what's relevant in A way they're arguing competing paradigms as opposed to accepting one paradigm and then operating within it.

18:28 Mark: I think we should put in here his clarification from the beginning of the postscript about the scope of a paradigm, because we're not talking about, you know, all of science has one paradigm. He doesn't really say something like, there is an experimental method that's shared by all of science that constitutes a paradigm. I think one could make an argument that there are different levels in a way to expand it to that wide level. But he has in mind something. It's not even just all of physics as one paradigm. It's really quite a bit more narrow than that.

It could be just a handful of practitioners, 25 people who are working in some particular area of physics or something, and those are the only ones who, if there's an anomaly that puts them into crisis mode, they're always going to be anomalies, things that your paradigm can't explain, that you might just say, okay, well, that's something for future research. We'll figure it out. But when the anomalies get somehow too acute, when they stack up too high, when you're really having to do a lot of crazy stuff, ad hoc variations to your theory to try to make it take into account this new area, then you're in crisis mode.

But people outside of that little area might not even notice.

19:33 Dylan: It's also worth bringing in. In line with what Wes was talking about, the kind of disagreements that go on in philosophy and the way in which a paradigm gets accepted within a discipline, even or within science, is that he talks most about this in the postscript. He talks a little bit about it in the last couple chapters, that judgments between paradigms are not part of paradigms. They are things that are familiar, I think, to people when they think about doing science, things like simplicity or even aesthetic distinctions, various principles that guide the way you're thinking that are really not part of an individual paradigm or entity in the world.

I do think that you could make an account of saying that there are certain values in the activity of science that are relatively universal, that mark a person as engaging in scientific thinking, that are apart from the individual theories. And Kuhn, I think, is pointing to the distinguishing importance of those as regulating how paradigms get chosen and that it's not the progression towards the truth as much as it's in some ways a distinctive set of values.

20:44 Mark: Right. He talks about values in particular as one of the aspects of a paradigm that even if you say a desire to have simpler Theories, rather than more complicated ones, is sort of universal to science. There's still a lot of variations in how much emphasis you put on that, how much, how you weigh it versus other of those standard values, exactly how you interpret what constitutes simplicity. Those are all things that he thinks can vary by paradigm. They don't, of course, have to. And any given paradigm, the only way it would be recognizable, the only way people could make a transition from the one before it, is if it shares a lot in common with the previous one. But there could be incremental movements or even quite radical movements, I think, to some of those values.

21:23 Dylan: Yeah, he calls this in the Postscript on page 184. He's calling an individual paradigm. One way of talking about is a disciplinary matrix. And he says that there's another element of them that he calls describes his values. Usually they are more widely shared among different communities than either symbolic generalizations or models. And they do much to provide a sense of community to natural scientists as a whole. Though they function at all times, their particular importance emerges when the members of the particular community must identify crisis or later choose between incompatible ways of practicing their discipline.

Probably the most deeply held values concern predictions. They should be accurate. Quantitative predictions are preferable to qualitative ones. Whatever the margin of permissible error, it should be consistently satisfied in a given field, and so on. This really rang true for me in just my own experience of doing experimental physics. When a prediction is made, it should be accurate, and you should have quantitative ones as opposed to qualitative ones, and then the permissible error. So in particle physics, it's three sigma constitutes a claim of evidence, and five sigma is discovery.

That's the convention, right? There's no physical law that you can say or point to, whatever, but that's the convention that if you have a five sigma deviation, you can say you discover something. That's what you shoot for. So when we were searching for the top quark in the mid-90s, we were looking for if we just got three sigma, that was enough to say there was evidence, but we needed five sigma to say we saw it.

22:53 Mark: And I understand you're talking about the deviation of whatever your result from the expected result. But what is the sigma? Sigma is standard deviation.

23:00 Dylan: Standard deviation, yeah. So is and typically sigma, you're referring to the width of a Gaussian curve. So we say a one sigma deviation for a probability distribution. That one sigma means that in that region around the average, around the mean, above it by one sigma and below it by one sigma, that constitutes 68.8% of all the possible cases. And so five sigma is 99 point something. I forget what it is, but it basically means that it's a very high probability. But that choice is a convention within the field.

23:37 Wes: Which point does it illustrate? Because I know chapter five on the priority of paradigms, where he's getting at the paradigm is more important than there's no distinct set of rules used by scientists.

23:47 Dylan: I was referring to in the postscript. We were talking about that one of the ways in which ultimately paradigms can't get judged based upon very specific rules, certainly not rules based. Based in the current paradigm. It's sort of extra paradigmatic. And he draws the direct comparison with a political revolution, that political revolutions are fundamentally illegal. Right. And they're outside of the regime. And that's the way he sees a shift from one paradigm to another. And then what I was referring to was on page 184, 185 in the postscript where he's talking about how among the ways in which paradigms get judged, one of them is this element of values.

And I was just referring to the most deeply held values concern predictions. They should be accurate, quantitative and within a permissible error. Resonating with me, that notion of a permissible error is what the range of that is part of the activity of doing science and the way in which you do that.

24:44 Unknown speaker: Right.

24:45 Mark: And at the end of our Popper discussion, remember Popper had this theory that if you've got a scientific theory, it implies a generalization. And then if you come up with some evidence that goes against that generalization, then that falsifies the theory and you need to revise it in some way. And we said, well, that doesn't always happen. Right. We've already said here, Kuhn thinks that

25:04 Wes: within a given paradigm almost never happens.

25:07 Unknown speaker: Right.

25:07 Mark: Well, even at the very start of a paradigm, it's not going to explain everything. There's going to be some counter evidence. And if you accept the paradigm, you just say, well, this is something we'll explain later, we'll figure it out.

25:18 Wes: Yeah. If you've seen anomaly in the orbit of, what was it? Neptune. Yeah, the example of Neptune and Uranus, where you don't say, yeah, Newton is wrong, you say, well, there must be some other planet out there. You actually use the theory to predict a fact that's consistent with the theory before you will use an anomaly to revise the theory itself. Right.

25:38 Mark: And you'd be more likely to do that if the alleged counterexample is challenging Something that's more fundamental. So, yeah, think of a paradigm not as a single theory, but as a network of theories. And there are some that are going to be more basic so that you're not going to probably say, oh, it must be esp. Like that would probably for most of your physical theories be way outside an acceptable shift. Something that's just on the surface. That's a detail. Yeah, okay, maybe the new evidence falsifies that, but you're not going to say Newton's three laws are all wrong because of what I discovered. If you're in the Newtonian paradigm.

26:08 Dylan: Yeah. Kuhn goes after Popper pretty hard in it's towards the end nature necessity of scientific revolutions. Is that what it is? Where he goes after the falsification issue and says, yes, falsification is part of normal science, but that's not why you change paradigms. And he in fact turns one of Popper's favorite examples against him, which is Einsteinian general relativity, as being victorious over Newtonian relativity, based upon the specific predictions that Einstein made regarding Mercury and the bending of light and so forth. And that he says, well, look, those were known anomalies, and just the fact that there was an anomaly was not enough.

If you believe the falsification hypothesis, you would say that no one should have ever believed in Newton because there were anomalies. That's the way Kuhn says. He says, look, my account is better than Popper's, a more fuller account, because I have a way of saying, well, look, you can have falsification, but the way in which you transfer from one account to another is not by falsification, but is by a different process substituting a paradigm.

27:14 Mark: Yeah, that's in chapter 12, like 146, 147.

27:19 Dylan: Yeah, that's it.

27:20 Mark: It sounds like the role attributed to falsification is much like the one this essay assigns to anomalous experiences, to experiences that, by evoking crisis, prepare the way for new theory. Nevertheless, anomalous experiences may not be identical with the falsifying ones. Indeed, I doubt that the latter exist. And then he echoes what you just said. If any and every failure to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times. On the other hand, if only severe failure to fit justifies theory rejection, this is a data theory fit, he's saying, then Popperians will require some criterion of improbability or of degree of falsification developing one that will almost certainly encounter the same network of difficulties that has haunted the advocates of the various probabilistic verification theories.

I don't know if that reference helps, since we didn't talk about that.

28:06 Dylan: Yeah. In the next paragraph he continues, popper's anomalous experience is important to science because it evokes competitors for an existing paradigm. But falsification, though it surely occurs, does not happen with or simply because of the emergence of an anomaly or falsifying instance. Instead, it is a subsequent and separate process that might equally well be called verification, since it consists in the triumph of a new paradigm over the old one.

28:30 Mark: Yeah, I did want to bring in this talk of probabilistic verification theories. It's in the same chapter a little bit, because it reminded me the idea is maybe verificationism doesn't work, that you don't need to write the whole logical positivist idea that the sentence isn't even meaningful unless it corresponds to some definite set of data. But you might still think that you could ballpark how probable it is that your theory fits the data and sort of do this outside of any particular context of scientific inquiry. And I want to connect this to our discussion of is it likely that God created the universe?

That's a prime example of something. Kuhn would say, you're not asking that question within any given agreed upon tradition of inquiry. Right. So there are no criteria you could use for probability that are outside of a given paradigm. So the theologian that says, oh, it's very likely, I mean, come on, look at bananas. Those are just natural. And the evolutionary biologists, they're not talking the same language really, according to Kuhn. So no, their take on probability is going to differ because probability is one of those things that's always defined within a paradigm.

29:36 Dylan: So another way of saying it, Mark, would be that in order for there to be an agreement to talk about a probability that makes sense between both of them, to have a translation, there would have to be an agreement on the denominator for that probability, a way of calculating that probability, which he would say involves a paradigm of some sort.

29:55 Mark: Right.

29:55 Dylan: Yeah.

29:55 Mark: There's some article a while ago that scientific theory shows that we aren't in the matrix.

30:00 Dylan: Yes.

30:01 Mark: You know, so somebody's done a calculations which inevitably involves a bunch of bullshit ad hoc assumptions that aren't going to be the kind of thing that Descartes, or anybody seriously proposing this, a real possibility, would have agreed to in the first place. So you might say, given our current paradigm, as if a paradigm was something global enough and not restricted to a given part of a discipline, as Kuhn thinks it is then we could agree on this. I think this is an important thing to take away from this, that in the vernacular, we use the term paradigm, even just to talk about the worldview, and that there's a modern worldview that's different than the ancient worldview, that this is all much too nebulous.

According to Kuhn, this doesn't really have a lot to do with what he's talking about at all. Which I guess brings me again to the question of, well, then how do we talk about these more general things like what is common to scientific method, perhaps across all things that aspire to be science, or just the fact that we as a modern society, the scientific paradigm is to reject supernaturalism. There's something substantial to that that we would like to be able to say something philosophically substantial about beyond just the way I just formulated it.

But it doesn't seem like Kuhn is sketching out his theory in a way that would let us use him as ammunition. At the end of the book, he says, yeah, a lot of people want to use my paradigm idea to talk about things other than sciences. And in a way that makes sense, because me talking about science in this way is actually just appropriating the way historians talk about art. Say the shift from one style of art being socially dominant to another style of art being socially dominant. And everybody that's cool will make the shift, and there might be some holdouts or maybe a whole generation will have to die off before the paradigm shift is complete.

What's novel about this is actually saying that science, which seems like something that is progressive, actually does have a lot in common with those things.

31:50 Seth: One of the criticisms that he responds to that's part of the he's a relativist criticism, is essentially that he undermined the common sense conception of science or science's view itself as solving problems. So if you identified with science or if you were trying to validate science as an endeavor over and above the arts, let's say, or social sciences or the humanities, you could say, well, look, science solves problems. Philosophy's been asking the same questions for 2,000 years. They haven't answered those questions. Whereas, look, we've answered the question of X, Y or z in science.

We now understand the table of the elements. We've answered that question, and there's no going back. There will never be a debate about whether, you know, strontium is this versus, you know, argon or whatever you want to call it. And, well, I think when Kuhn said that the idea that Science moves linearly through this series of questions, and as it shuts them down, we just add to the store of knowledge and we move on to the next question. He says, well, it doesn't quite work that way. People thought that means that this edifice that we thought was foundational and rock solid and granite like isn't.

And he's saying everything we've learned is subject to doubt. And I think at one point in the book he says, look, this is not a exercise in Cartesian doubt. It's just simply his description of the process by which science moves, and I won't even say moves forward, and that it isn't exactly linear. That doesn't mean that it's circular and it doesn't mean that it's aimless or turns around. It just means that there's a kind of herky jerky motion to the way that science builds its knowledge store. And there are aspects of what we consider to be scientific knowledge that could potentially be called into question at some point in the future.

So first of all, I didn't read him as taking a strong relativist stance against scientific knowledge. And I guess I understand how people would be a little freaked out about this. But it still strikes me that there are some significant. Just the notion of the paradigm and working within the paradigm is significant enough to articulate a distinction between science and certain other disciplines. You know, he himself mentions that the closest analog is in history, where because historians are required or the goal of historical activity is to create a narrative, much in the same way that science through textbooks or pedagogy of science through textbooks creates a narrative for science.

They had that in common. And that you might say, well, English lit doesn't work within a paradigm. Or insofar as other academic endeavors adopt paradigms and work within paradigms, they act similar to science, but they don't have the same kinds of rules and methodologies. And all the things that Dylan mentioned

34:51 Dylan: earlier, he several times talks about the genetic aspect of his account. And I think that why somebody would have a problem with his account of science is similar to the reason why people have a problem with an evolutionary account of human beings, in that it seems to diminish the notion of the human being as being the end result of nature itself. So that if you don't buy Darwin, you might say, well, human beings are a culmination of evolution and that all of nature and all of the development in biology is towards a ultimate end of the human being.

So you sort of half buy Darwin, I guess, if you Buy evolution. But if you don't take it teleologically that way, then you have a kind of progress. You have species adapting to their environment. They change. They have a kind of motion within themselves that allow them to change. And you can speak of a kind of relation between earlier old generations and draw a kind of line through them, like on a tree. So the way in which we would talk about primates are the ancestors of human beings, and before primates there were other kinds of mammals and so forth.

36:07 Mark: And you can even talk about progress in terms of the specific adaptation.

36:11 Dylan: Exactly. But there is something fundamentally wrong about saying that we're related to primates. There is that kind of ancestral relation. But it's not as if the landscape for a Primate, you know, 3 million years ago was the same as the landscape for a human being now, that the world for them was the same as the world is for us now. I think that's part of his point that you may be able to draw a kind of genetic line, but it's not as if those primates in a simple way held the genesis of modern human beings in them. That it would require that whole process of evolution to end up where we are now. It's not as if where we are now as modern human beings are the completely necessary end of that evolution. It's not teleological in that way. It is an end. And you can look backwards and you can talk about that process, but it was contingent upon the way in which it evolved along the way.

37:14 Mark: Yeah, I liked when he brought that in explicitly as a metaphor, the Darwinist interpretation that Darwinist natural selection is to old style teleological evolution as Kuhn's theory is to the traditional theory of how science progresses.

37:28 Dylan: Yeah, exactly.

37:30 Mark: And I like the fact that he pointed out a few vivid cases of what looks like in apparent scientific progress, certain retrogression. One of the reasons that Aristotelianism was abandoned to some degree by the later scholastics was because of these occult properties. Right. Earth wants to go down, fire wants to go up. And there were just these things that are sort of basic properties of teleologically wanting to do something. But of course, you're talking about a rock. So it doesn't want anything, but it has a innate unexplained tendency. And so that's something that we make fun of in philosophy today, that there's an example in a play by Moliere that, you know what explains why the sleeping potion work?

Well, it has the power of dormancy or something. Just giving it Another word that. That's not an explanation at all. So these were thought of as occult properties. And so by the Enlightenment, we'd gotten rid of those and it had been replaced by a corpuscular paradigm that you had to explain why something moved entirely by the fact that it was shaped in a certain way and interacting with other things that were shaped in certain ways, not by occult properties. But then when Newton comes along, his account of gravity is again, an occult property.

Things just go down. And maybe we can say something about

38:48 Dylan: things are attracted to go down. Things are attracted to each other. Yeah.

38:52 Mark: And we can say, well, things go down.

38:56 Wes: That's another retrogression.

38:58 Mark: The biggest thing being the Earth. So other things being attracted go down to it.

39:09 Wes: Is that in the universe or the solar system, the biggest thing, everything in

39:14 Dylan: the universe goes down on the Earth, right?

39:18 Mark: Oh, yeah,

39:21 Unknown speaker: yeah.

39:22 Wes: I like that theory.

39:24 Mark: I think I probably made the point

39:26 Wes: we get the occult properties back with Newt.

39:28 Mark: Yep. And then, of course, as you get to Einstein, then now those are no longer occult, that some kind of explanation is given for gravity. And so that was just seen as well, not an anomaly, but just something that is not explained by the Newtonian paradigm. And that's okay because other things were explained with a much greater predictive power. And so people jumped on board with that.

39:48 Dylan: Well, this is an interesting case of these scientific values and simplicity, because I think you would look at science and some kind of prejudice saying, well, we don't have any occult properties. As Mark just pointed out that with Newton's account of gravity, you end up having what seems like just an occult property, that all mass attracts all other masses, and that's just what they do. And the fact is that that's a claim of the kinds of entities that are in the world and what those entities do and what their basic characteristics are. And that's true in physics and biology and all kinds of science, that you have fundamental entities that have certain characteristics and they just do what they do,

40:34 Wes: and that can't be explained by any further breaking down or any mechanism beyond that.

40:38 Dylan: Yes. And in fact, what you'll do is you'll create a mathematical model that characterizes those fundamental qualities. So the force between two charged particles is governed by Coulomb's law, because charged particles are such that charge comes in a certain quantity. And like charges repel and opposite charges attract. That's just what they do. And you might come up with later on another account, like the field account, in which you then if you're going to do a field account you need to try to say, well, if I have a field, why the heck do like things repel and opposite things attract? But in any of these cases, those fundamental qualities define the entities that are part of your world. And those are the entities by which you measure, by which you look out at the world by which you decide what's bigger and smaller. And the means by which you say, there's this thing and that thing.

41:35 Wes: So at bottom, it's all occult properties.

41:39 Dylan: Well, where I was going with that, is that Moliere's criticism? Well, you know, the reason for that sleeping powder working is its power of dormancy is that you have a proliferation of occult properties. So there would be this tendency of just having. Everything has its own occult property. And plywood is plywood because it has plywoodness in it and stuff like that. And you get in this conversation in philosophy classes when you have your freshman philosophy class and you talk about chairness and tree ness and stuff like that. And so there is a simplifying account that you get where you minimize the number of occult properties.

So that would be something like a value that I would ascribe to the way in which science would work is it wants to have a minimum number. And what that minimum number isn't exactly. It's not a fixed number. But having fewer occult properties is better than having more, right?

42:32 Mark: Well, I have one, but it's just a really awesome one. It's the force. That's all there is.

42:37 Seth: Well,

42:40 Dylan: Feynman was a famous theoretical physicist. He said that I can write down the equation for the universe. U equals 1, right? But all the juice is in you. Right? That's a form of occult properties. You've said something, but without really explaining anything, just like Mark said, you said, well, the reason why that the sleeping pill makes you sleepy is because it has the power to make you sleepy. The reason why u equals 1 is because all the universe is in you. It's not an explanation. It's not clear to me that those values of simplicity, they're certainly not just scientific. That's part of what the activity is going into to try to articulate things that make predictions that go outside of the original claim.

43:23 Mark: Another interesting point to make about the paradigms is how he says, when you adopt a new paradigm, it actually changes the data. First of all, no scientist ever collects random data. And then something is supposed to come out of that. No, you're always looking for some stuff in particular. And this is something that was in Popper 2 very clearly that you have a problem before you. It's not a passive experience being a scientist.

43:46 Wes: Not just that you have an expected result, right? You have a hypothesis, you expect a given thing to happen and then you guess that.

43:53 Mark: Right? And that in turn indicates what methods you're looking for, what you count as an observation. There's always going to be noise in your measurements. What noise do you care about? As Dylan gave the example of how far off the standard deviation before you call something a discovery.

44:11 Dylan: It's more than noise though, right? I took your first part, Mark, to be pointing out that he says that the data itself actually changes, which is

44:19 Wes: another observations or theory laden kind of thing, right?

44:23 Mark: So there's going to be a certain amount of information that you ignore when you're looking in a certain way. But then when you get a new paradigm and you're looking a different way, then you pay attention to the data. That was maybe just noise before.

44:33 Wes: It's not just what you pay attention to because to make an observation you have to operate within the prevailing paradigm. You're making statements about things which assume a theory. There's no such thing as just a brute observation. And that's why ultimately he's going to say observations are not going to be something that you can use to decide between paradigms.

44:53 Dylan: There's no such thing as a simple given, he says on page 126. The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not the given of experience, but rather they're collected with difficulty. The entities and quantities that one measures are not given, absent, as Wes reminded us, without a theory that accounts for the choice of them as the given things he goes on to discuss. This is in the context of talking about how we learn to see things in the world at all and the distinction between something like signals, retinal pulses, and when we actually perceive something and then have knowledge of it. And that would be a familiar discussion for people reading philosophy.

45:36 Mark: Yeah, I think we need to maybe read some quotes in here. It's in the postscript. It's back to this point that you raised much earlier, Dylan, about in what sense do people with different paradigms live in different worlds? On 193 we posit the existence of stimuli to explain our perceptions of the world and we posit their immutability to avoid both individual and social solipsism. About neither posit have I the slightest reservation. But our world is populated in the first instance not by stimuli, but by the objects of our sensations. And these need not be the same individual to individual or group.

To group. So in other words, he's saying, yes, there are stimuli. And this, I think is really, if you want to put it in Kantian terms, is the thing in itself. There is something that physiologically is outside of us, that is tickling us and that's going to be the same. So if I stand in one place and you stand in the same place, we're getting the same stimuli, but what actually we perceive, and maybe you want to call it being in the world or something, perceiving what the world is, is not just getting at the stimuli, it's actually what it is we perceive.

And there's just no guarantee that there's going to be a one to one correspondence between the stimuli, that everybody's getting the same stimuli because you're just standing in the same place. You have the same basic sense organs and what we call the furniture of the world through our theories, through our judgments. Because that is the end process of a whole long physiological chain which involves a lot of internalized ways of categorizing things, what to pay attention to, what not to pay attention to. Again, just what we were saying, that the data itself is altered.

47:14 Wes: As you said, Mark, this makes him sound very Kantian. Right? And he also sounds like a pragmatist, because I think pragmatism is a kind of variation on Kantianism. But one way to think of it is as an evolutionary Kantian, where we don't have access to things in themselves. And these objects, these, or as Kant would call them, appearances, he also calls them objects in Kant. They're stable. There's one paradigm, and that's not going to change. It sounds here as if our categories can change, our world can change because our paradigms can change. And so the very objects themselves will be different.

47:48 Mark: In that sense, he wants to distinguish sharply between an interpretive process where we perceive a lot of things and then we reflectively make judgments about them and come up with generalizations and come up with scientific laws in that way. And what goes on immediately, that there's no sense, even though, yes, we have a lot of scholastic exercises, we do very deliberately take a bunch of experiences and analyze across them to come up with a judgment. That's not what is happening in immediate perception. There's no perceptual given that, then we in some unconscious sense reflect on and make a judgment about that.

The difference between them of those two things, the way he lays it out is that in the sense that we're deliberately, consciously interpreting something, we, we might be able to identify what Rules we're using. And these are going to be rules from a paradigm, of course, what do we consider? So if we're trying to come up with a high level scientific generalization across all this data, then we'll use, well, how have other people, scientists that I respect, do this kind of generalization? And I will try to do something like the same thing. So you could actually pick out maybe explicit rules in that case.

But he doesn't think that if it's just a matter of something physiologically occurring that you can then necessarily carve out any particular rules for, you know, define that, make explicit what's going on implicitly. I mean, what did you think of that? To me, the more I talk about that, the more I don't know that I buy the distinction that he's making that I think it's equally problematic to spell out what the rules are. And of course, he says this elsewise when talking about paradigms. This is why he compares them to the later Wittgenstein, to the language games that just like for Wittgenstein, you can't necessarily put into a rule what constitutes a concept like, and that will capture all the games and only the games.

And so in the same way, what constitutes doing science in a certain way, if you try to say, let me, within this particular science, let me spell out exactly what sort of all the inference rules and the observations rules are, you're going to be making something up. Any formulation you come up with is not going to actually completely capture the practice so that there's a lot of implicit knowledge, tradition that's going on in any given paradigm. So in that sense, I kind of like the take that he has through the rest of the book, as opposed to the postscript, where he doesn't seem to be making this sharp distinction between immediate perception that you can't capture what's going on, the judgments with rules and considered perception, where he's making that distinction, as opposed to the rest of the essay, where he's not, where he seems more consistently Wittgensteinian.

50:21 Dylan: I didn't see it as being that strong. I saw it as being more clarifying of a relatively consistent position. You know, in the middle of the book in Revolutions is changes in worldview 126, 127, 128. This is another section where he's talking about how we learn to see things. He's got a couple examples of perception. One is the very famous goggles experiment.

50:44 Seth: I'm glad you mentioned that.

50:45 Dylan: Okay, so he has Two particular psychological sociological experiments that he refers to regarding perception. And one is this experiment where people were fitted with goggles that inverted the world. And there was a process of a time where things were just very confused. They couldn't get around very well, but then they acclimated. In fact, they then saw the world flipped around back like they normally did before, where up was up and down was down. And then, in fact, when they removed the goggles, then the world flipped back around for them. They had to readjust.

And that, for him, serves as a twofold example. One is, it's a kind of analogy for the process of paradigm shifting. That when you are switching from one paradigm to another, you have this kind of state of confusion or crisis where it's hard to tell what's what, but that eventually you shift in and you now know what's up and what's down. The other is the importance of the context of our perceptions for just viewing the world. Another experiment is done, is regarding anomalies in which a deck of cards is set up. And people are shown the cards one at a time.

And they're supposed to flag you when they notice something that doesn't look. And what's been done is they have put in cards that would be a black four of hearts or a red six of clubs, and those don't exist. There's no such thing as a red club or a black heart in a standard deck. And most people, when they're going through that, they don't even notice. So that anomaly doesn't even register. And then they'll be looking at it. And then once they notice, once there's an indication, what happens is they have to be shown the cards relatively slowly.

So that depending on how fast the cards are and how long they have to look at them, then they begin to start noticing whether or not there's this anomaly. And then once they begin to see the anomaly, it just locks in. They just see it all the time. And so it's again another example that he points to. To the way in which you have a shift in your perception of the world. So you have to learn to see.

52:50 Seth: And there's lots of studies, right, that show that we see what we're looking for and that we completely miss things that don't fit. I remember there's a video that floated around the net years ago where they tell you to watch and count the number of bicycles or something that cross through the frame. And in the middle of it, like a guy in an orangutan suit runs across the screen and you don't even notice it until they tell you afterwards. Do you guys remember that?

53:15 Wes: No, but I can imagine it.

53:16 Seth: Yeah. And it's true that when you're looking for something specifically you completely miss. And this is something we've talked about many, many times about the way we construct categories to interpret the world. I think what Kuhn is trying to get at is that there's almost a little bit too much weight put on this. That the idea that I think he's just basically saying science is a human endeavor. And insofar as it's an endeavor that's practiced by humans as an enterprise, it's going to be subject to the kinds of constraints that humans have. And I think that's probably the thing that pissed people off the most and got the most violent reaction is that there was this fetishization of science as some sort of objective, dispassionate, totally rational and mind and individual independent pursuit of capital T truth.

And in reality, any given scientific paradigm, any given scientific field of study is really just a bunch of activity by a bunch of people. And to that extent it's going to be subject in some way, shape or form to all the sorts of prejudices and challenges and limitations that human beings have. And you can interpret it that way and you can then get hostile and say, oh no, you know, science is dispassionate, it's not subject to the whims of individuals. But when I look around and I look at what kinds of things researchers and purported scientists and all that spend their time and energy on, it's not capital T truth.

We have to make decisions even within small disciplines about what it is that we're going to spend our time and energy trying to to do. And those decisions themselves determine to some extent what we are going to uncover research wise and what possible outcomes there are to the time and energy and money that's spent looking into them. And I don't think it's crazy for him to have identified this and called it out. And I also don't think it's surprising that people reacted so negatively.

55:15 Mark: Well, and he doesn't even spend much time on the social sciences, which are. There's certainly a lot more to say in that respect. He mentions at one point, you know, you don't get a lot of economists arguing about sort of whether what they do is a science or not, because maybe they just have some clearer paradigms. What they're in agreement about is about economics. It's not about what science is. It's Just that at least they have among the social sciences are much less insecure because they're more unified in some way, which I would interpret as more idiosyncratic than outside of. Well, that's for a different episode, a critique of economics as a science to

55:52 Dylan: look forward to that discussion. Some of those critiques have come within economics, but they end up having to be formulated as anomalies that can be understood. So one of the classic examples is just the assumption of individual rational choice in economics. That will assume that every individual makes rational choices based upon their own economic good, and we'll see how that spins out for an economy. Well, that seems like a crazy assumption. People are constantly making decisions that don't seem to be in their best interest. The question is, how do you formulate that into a question that can be addressed economically?

And people have done that, and it allows you to then make an evaluation of which account of economic activity seems to be more powerful? Just the criticism of it isn't enough. You have to be able to have a consequence of it. You have to have an account, a theory that can bounce against the other theory that may be representative of the paradigm. And that's where, when that rubbing of those theories becomes acute enough, then science or your intellectual endeavor will get into a crisis mode, according to Kuhn's account. And you'll have to choose.

I have a question for you guys, because first of all, I get the feeling that I was way more excited and interested in this than you guys were.

57:10 Mark: I could just picture you romping through this. The number of times you brought up, like, the theory of heat in discussions that really didn't have a lot to do with that. Listening to you on those episodes, well, prepared me for this book. So many of those examples were more fresh for me then, thanks to you.

57:26 Dylan: So I can tell it's not just because you guys are tired, but I could feel like, okay, so here's a book that the other three guys read and they like, okay, well, that's. That was fine.

57:37 Mark: I generally enjoyed it. I found it breezy.

57:39 Unknown speaker: I.

57:40 Mark: When I started it right after doing Rawls, I was still in the mode of, oh, God, I'm gonna fall asleep after just reading the page. But then I just took a week off and read other stuff. And then I went back to it, and it just was able to pretty much just cruise through it until the last little bit was a little more laborious. And I've found it very refreshing, not weighed down, that, you know, even though he's. Well, he's An American. So he's roughly within this tradition of analytic philosophy. He was talking to Quine and other folks like that and talking about Wittgenstein, but he was clearly not. Granted, this is a little bit earlier, this is 10 years earlier, but he was not, like Rawls, sort of weighed down by the stylistic paradigm.

58:20 Dylan: There's a little bit of sort of, well, duh. Didn't you guys already think that was true, you scientists, that the way you were thinking about the world had some kind of contingency to it? And as Seth pointed out, he was understanding that why people might get upset about it. What I find very interesting about it and exciting is not so much that there's this issue of sort of taking science down a peg or it's not all about truth or whatever, because that seems to me to be an argument that's been going on in philosophy for a long time. And the terms of that and the argument going on doesn't seem to me to be all that different than the ones that Kant and Hume and Quine and Wittgenstein and Carnap and all those guys are engaging in the same kind of discussion about what our perceptions mean and what their relationship are to the world and how we get to know the world and that sort of thing.

59:19 Mark: The myth of the given.

59:20 Dylan: Exactly.

59:21 Mark: That's hardly original to this book.

59:23 Dylan: Exactly. So in that way, it doesn't seem all that controversial. What might be is that he's taking on this sort of conventional notion of the progress of science. You know, I liked his political analogy because it also takes on implicitly the notion of the progress of political institutions and so forth. What I also found powerful about it is the way in which it begins to account for or helps you think about why is it that scientific activity can be powerful in the way it is powerful, while maybe qualifying some of it and trying to understand that its power doesn't come from being directed at truth with a capital T, but that you're still left with trying to think about, well, what makes it persuasive when it's persuasive when what makes it so clearly progressive, even in the constrained way in which it's progressive. And I think that he helps you really think about that in a clearer way.

1:00:20 Wes: I did Kuhn in graduate school, and I was a lot more excited back then. And now it seems like his conclusions are too strong. Normal science being governed by these incommensurable paradigms and these very quantum shifts between paradigms. At a gut level, that seems to be an overstatement it's as if he's someone who had this idea and now he's really going hard at it. Our degree at St. John's is sort of one of the majors is basically history of science. So I've had some exposure to that history in reading the original papers.

1:00:50 Mark: You read a book on phlogiston.

1:00:53 Wes: We do read about phlogiston. Phlogiston, I think Phlogiston, yeah.

1:00:57 Dylan: You certainly read Lavoisier.

1:00:58 Wes: Yeah, The Elements of Chemistry. Right. That's the Lavoisier. It doesn't ring true for me, but I don't really have a good way to offer up my critique, although I know that that critique has been offered up in philosophy of science, literature that came after him. He was widely criticized and today there's not that much going on with him, although there may be a resurgence or maybe the concept of paradigm may get a resurgence now. Where he really caught on was in the social sciences and the humanities. People love this idea of the paradigm shift and they over interpreted it to their own political ends. Right. To their own sort of relativistic.

1:01:33 Mark: Well, and it provides a nice catchphrase to talk about the fact that you don't understand my point because you're not talking with the same concepts that this came up in the talking about new work, that it just. It's not on our plate of alternatives, the things that would be required to bring about new work. We think everything is either just the Republican solutions or the Democrat solutions. And so we just deny that any problems exist, even that don't seem to be solvable. Using those things and talking about that in terms of a political paradigm. Sure. I don't know if that word adds much, if anything, but it's a nice way of capturing that.

1:02:11 Wes: Yeah. Well, as one of you said, I think most people use it as synonymous with worldview, which there's an argument for that, but really it's more like exemplar. It's an example.

1:02:21 Mark: I would just like some more systematic language, some philosophy, to tell me how to talk more intelligently about worldviews in this nebulous way that we actually want to talk about it. I saw a perhaps modern far evolution of this idea in the Deleuze book that we read. When he's talking about planes of immanence, there's a certain commonality. Granted, he's talking about planes of immanence are what define a philosophy. And the philosophy is defined by the concepts. And then once you have concepts established, then maybe you could see that as providing a paradigm for science, which, remember, he.

He thinks of as they're just providing functions. It's just mapping one value onto another, as if you've got sort of the mapping rule already stored in your paradigm there in your plane of immanence. And so science on that model is just. It sounds like what Kuhn is describing normal science as is just sort of filling in the details, finding out what values each question maps to in your setup. But that the plane of immanence that we had so much trouble with. Now, maybe it's just my desire to make some sense out of the Deleuze retrospectively, but maybe paradigm is a good start for that.

1:03:31 Wes: It sounds more like a conceptual scheme, which I think is different than a paradigm. A conceptual scheme includes a set of concepts for talking about the world and certain assumptions. But a paradigm, I think, because it's an example, it gets more at some of the less conceptual stuff, some of the tacit knowledge, some of the just ways of. Maybe it's more like, what's Wittgenstein's phrase, Mode of life. Yeah. And part of it's about what's relevant to people. So it's not just about what concepts they're deploying, but it's about what's actually interesting and relevant.

1:04:05 Mark: Yeah. I enjoyed the story as he was telling it, and like I said in the beginning, I don't have the history of science background, so I was, okay, it sounds reasonable the way you've sketched out these revolutions, but based on the way I've dealt with this in the past as an alleged form of relativism, it just seems that, yes, I understand that you, before the scientific discovery and after it, are using the word element differently, but we can achieve, in a way that seems easier than he describes, some common understanding that the scientists from the two different fields or two different stages of development can, without a whole lot of trouble, if they're careful, talk to each other.

1:04:43 Dylan: It's not that they couldn't talk to each other. It's that there's going to have to be a translation made that is going to involve them having to grant different things.

1:04:53 Wes: I thought there couldn't be a translation, really.

1:04:55 Dylan: You could have a retrospective translation. He has this discussion of the conceit that, well, Newtonian gravity is derivable from Einsteinian gravity. And he says, well, look, that's just not true. You can't even formulate Einsteinian gravity in terms that are consonant with Newtonian gravity as Newton developed it, that you have to actually change the terms that you're Formulating that theory on, does it really

1:05:20 Wes: seem as radical to you, though, as he's making it up?

1:05:23 Dylan: I don't think it's necessarily radical, but I do think he's right to point out that the strong case of simply deriving Newtonian gravity from Einsteinian gravity is not quite right. It's that you can, with an Einsteinian account, make simplifying assumptions and show that Newtonian gravity is a consequence. So you can show why you might have ever even thought that Newtonian gravity would work and come up with an account for why that's true. And that, in fact, lends credence to your account with Einstein, is that you have a way of understanding how it was that you missed it.

But it's not the same thing as deriving it. It's a little bit like saying with counting numbers in geometry and stuff, you say, well, I don't have to worry about incommensurable numbers because I can just say, well, the diagonal of a unit square is the square root of two. And you can go through, in that sor of account of the story of numbers, say, well, we used to think that there were just counting numbers, and then you could have fractions that were made of ratios of counting numbers. And then we had to develop these things called irrational numbers.

And you end up glossing over the way in which you actually had to think of a number as being a different thing than it was before that when you call square root of two a number, what you mean by a number is no longer the same thing that you meant before. In fact, you don't even mean the same thing by one that you meant before. If you start calling the square root of two a number, it's not the same thing as it was before you did that. It's not that I don't have an account of what 1 and 2 and 3 and 0 are. When I have developed and understand the square root of two as being a number, it's that I mean something different by them than I did before.

And so if you, for instance, go back and you try to understand Euclidean geometry, and this is the kind of reading of history that Kuhn would talk about, is if you read that and you understand it all those relations as implicit algebraic relations, you can translate them into that. When you can make an account based upon the fact that I know about algebraic geometry now and say, well, this relation in Euclid for this proposition really is A squared plus B squared equals C squared, and this relationship is A plus B times A plus C. And Stuff like that.

And you can come up with many of the propositions as embodying algebraic identities and you could see a continuity of thinking there. But I would agree with anybody that said that if you say that you are attributing to that original thinking a different meaning to what magnitudes were that that way of thinking about it was not the case. And so if you really want to understand what the difference is, you have to go back to that original book in that conte to understand what those entities were, to understand how it was different. Looking backwards is an explanation, but it is not right to say that they were simply just proto thinking what you were thinking.

1:08:25 Unknown speaker: Yes.

1:08:25 Mark: Yeah, we had a similar discussion in terms of specifically the Newton to Einstein example on our objectivist epistemology episode, that if you want to maintain that, well, Newton was just right and is really just compatible with Einstein, that's exactly what you're saying, then you have to say, well, what Newton believed did not have the global specificity that he actually sketched out. That really his theory only encompassed the actual examples that he had looked at, which were with objects not moving anywhere close to the speed of light. No, that's not the way he formulated it.

And that's sort of a post hoc rationalization. And if you take that too far, then it turns out that science never makes any claims beyond the specific cases that have been seen and measured, which is just not true. That's just not the way scientific generalization works. That the whole point of the generalization of the induction is to go beyond the perceived.

1:09:20 Dylan: This is one of the parts that I found resonated with me in thinking about how scientific progress happens, in thinking about these crises that happen in a paradigm where you have an anomaly or you begin to actually pay more attention to an anomaly in a way that you never did before, that it gives you purchase on a current problem that you're solving. And if I had a misgiving about it, it would be that I think he leaves the door open to a conversation about whether or not that progress that happens even within normal science ends up getting to a, for lack of a better term, a more truthful account of the world or not. My impression with not having read any more Kuhn is that he's essentially anti realist, is that he just doesn't think that the entities that you formulate in your scientific account really have reality to them, or there are even closer to,

1:10:19 Mark: or that ontology is defined in a theory and that there's no way to really talk about ontology again. It just all sounds very, as west characterized it as an evolutionary version of Kantianism that you can talk about the world as experienced, but instead of the experience being conditioned by consistent categories that are going to just be constant for all human beings, they are conditioned by the paradigm, by particular customs and particular subcultures and this implicit knowledge. And it's just the way it is.

1:10:50 Dylan: I understand that, but I think one of the open questions thinking about Wes's unclarified sense that he's overstating the case would be whether or not they're within the scientific structure that he's talking about, even within this process of scientific evolution, that it isn't making more significant progress towards something like a truthful account of the world than he is allowing for.

1:11:15 Mark: Right. It's like that version of Kantianism where the thing in itself is always going to be unknown. And it doesn't even really make sense to talk about the thing itself as ontology. It's just, it's by its epistemic position going to be something that is not the natural limit for progress in knowledge or something like that. It's just a separate thing. It's the unfiltered that we will not have access to.

1:11:37 Dylan: Yeah. Another way I would think about it is following his analogy with political entities and political revolution and stuff is, you know, even though we would grant that, you know, yeah, there's lots of different forms of government. There's monarchy, there's tyranny, there's full on democracy, yada yada yada, some of them are better than others and there is something like a progression that happens and that something like representative democracy is a better form of government than other forms of government. That's a little bit along the lines of the kinds of claims that someone might make about science that its progress is towards something that is more truthful, that it's not just the will of the stronger.

1:12:18 Mark: That's exactly what he was arguing. Actually he had a footnote in there that was saying how the acceptance of paradigms is sometimes even just a matter of the name of the person involved. Like some dude submitted a paradigm changing article to a publication a few hundred years ago and somehow his name was not on it and it was rejected, like, ah, this guy is an inveterate doubter or something. And then when it became clear that it was like this duke or earl or something, it was published with great apologies and performed its revolutionary effects.

That it comes down to if the jump between paradigms is not going to be primarily or solely based on, oh, the new one is just obviously better at explanation. I mean, that's part of it. But given that the standards for what counts as explanation and all these other types of values can change in it as well, and what you're trying to explain, which details you're paying attention to, given all those different variables, then there's a lot of just sociological contingency in what catches on next. And I also like the parts of the story where some of these advances were because somebody from a different field came in and brought the tools from their own field and started to apply to this new thing.

You know, this guy never considered himself a chemist. He was a, you know, a physicist. But then that's just the way things turned out, and he ended up having such a great effect. So that was all pretty cool. I just. It was like the Popper, and this is, for me, a signal that I don't really understand what's going on. That the Popper, like, he told some pretty neat historical stories, and I came away like, yeah, that makes sense. But now I read the Kuhn Lake. Oh, I guess that makes. Yeah, I guess he's got a leg up over Popper here now. But I don't feel like I'm really in a critical position to say anything more definite than we've already said here in terms of the superiority of one over the other.

So we'll just have to do a third episode and a fourth episode in philosophy of science.

1:14:07 Dylan: Well, this is where I say that you have to have the experience of doing science in some ways to appreciate how it works. I guess you can read about it,

1:14:16 Wes: but hey, man, we've all done it in high school.

1:14:18 Dylan: Yep.

1:14:19 Wes: And whatever it was we did at St. John's I did that.

1:14:23 Dylan: The Newton bending light experiment.

1:14:25 Wes: Oh, yeah. I measured the mass of a. Of an electron.

1:14:29 Mark: Yeah. I put the Prell on one half of my lathered head and the leading brand on the other half. I've done science.

1:14:37 Wes: And then when I interned at the Naval Research Laboratory in physics, that's the only time I wasn't doing that. I was doing computer programming, essentially killing data points. Killing bad data points that didn't fit in with the curve. Yeah.

1:14:52 Mark: Every so often, evidence of ESP would come in and I would have to dispel it from the system.

1:14:57 Wes: Yeah, you do. You treat anomalies as if they were errors because you didn't want to screw up your.

1:15:01 Dylan: Well. Yeah. So you start with that. I had this experience when I was a grad student. I was measuring a distribution and this was when we were hot on trying to look for the top quark. And there's this question of, well, how do you look for new things? Kuhn brings this up. That one way in which you discover new things is you just have new instruments, you gain new powers to look at the world, and some of them end up being things you hadn't seen before. So that kind of thing happened in particle physics, World War II, and afterwards with the development of accelerators, and they just became like particle factories.

And you just like, sort of, you build one, you make it bigger, and you turn it on and you see new shit that you never saw before. And I mean, it's like a microscope, right? You build a microscope and wow, look at the little wiggly things in the water. And then you make one that's bigger, and you learn some of the optics to make the lenses smoother. And then you can see smaller, wiggly things in the water. You make new discoveries just because you open up the world through new instrumentation and technologies, then you discover.

1:16:08 Mark: God.

1:16:09 Wes: I was going to say the soul. I'm not going to be satisfied. Oh, there's the soul.

1:16:15 Mark: That's just an anomaly. Just erase that. Erase that from the data.

1:16:20 Dylan: I built a very, very sensitive scale, and I killed a guy. In fact, I killed 20 guys to

1:16:28 Mark: see if they got lighter.

1:16:29 Dylan: They set them on the scale alive, and I slit their throats. And very carefully weighed the blood, and they weighed less afterwards, statistically less.

1:16:38 Wes: This is where you can hit your serial killing hobby and your scientific hobby at the same time. Yes.

1:16:43 Dylan: Dexter discovers the soul.

1:16:44 Mark: See, that's the thing. Because serial killing is such an isolated activity, it's outside of a paradigm. You don't have your social group. Maybe with the Internet, that's changing.

1:16:54 Dylan: I think you're making a false assumption there. There are all kinds of serial killer conventions, all right?

1:17:00 Mark: Yes. There's one in Sandman.

1:17:02 Dylan: There is one.

1:17:03 Mark: That one. That was before the Internet.

1:17:07 Dylan: Yes.

1:17:07 Wes: Well, that's off the. That's off the topic.

1:17:09 Mark: So we're done with the topic. It's fine.

1:17:12 Wes: No, I was going to say, what serial killers. And Joyce Carol Oates actually wrote a great article about serial killer. Okay. She's just can't stop writing. So she writes about everything, you know, And I actually took some classes on this and read a lot about the psychology of serial killers. But, you know, in her articles about the aesthetic component of it, because the way they stage their crime scenes is often they're trying to be artistic in some weird way. So not Science. It's kind of art gone wrong.

1:17:43 Dylan: Sure.

1:17:44 Mark: That's a great transition to Next Time's topic, which is existentialism, specifically Sartre's existentialism. We're going to finally return to him and read about the thing that he's most famous for. And we're going to do that through reading the essay Existentialism is a Humanism, which is quite easy to read. It's actually a speech. But then we're going to pepper it with a little essay called Bad Faith, which is actually a chapter toward the beginning of his monumental work, Being and Nothingness. But we're going to just pretend that it's an article by itself, because that's the way it appears in my Existentialism compilation. And then while we're at it, we'll look at his play no Exit. Just to be puzzled by that. I didn't mean to cut other people off if they had closings. Did anybody else have anything to say about serial killing?

1:18:34 Wes: Not about.

1:18:36 Mark: Everybody has a closing about serial killing.

1:18:40 Seth: No, I believe that it's bad.

1:18:43 Wes: Well, you've never even tried it.

1:18:45 Mark: If you just do it once in the heat of passion, we can't judge you on that.

1:18:48 Wes: Can you do serial killing once, Mark, Come on. And it's not a serial.

1:18:54 Mark: Well, if you're planning to start a serial, if you write a number one on your victim.

1:18:59 Wes: Oh, now we're okay. Now we're talking about potentialities, dispositions. Seth.

1:19:06 Seth: Oh, God.

1:19:09 Unknown speaker: It's all right.

1:19:09 Mark: We're all tired, man.

1:19:11 Seth: It's the funniest thing. I remember reading this book, like 20 years ago, and I remember enjoying it and understanding it and all that. And I came back to it and reading it again. You know, as much time as we spent on the last episode complaining about Rawls's writing style, this is eminently readable. And I guess I'm guilty of what Kuhn was complaining about, namely that I kept thinking about the ideas he was presenting, not in terms of science, but in terms of my own experience in the business world or technology or even in philosophy. You know, the idea that in the 20th century, in large part because of logical positivism, analytic philosophy tried to become scientific.

And there was a paradigm to some extent, and they tried to define the field of questions that they were going to explore and somehow answer. And to that extent, a lot of the things that he has to say, you could recognize as behaviors in other populations that maybe weren't scientist or scientific. And coincidentally, I just watched that Steve Jobs biopic, The Ashton Kutcher 1. The Ashton Kutcher one. Yeah. And there's a sense in which you could somewhat generously apply the concept of paradigmatic thinking. Not so much in terms of discovery or laying out the roots of what problems are going to be solved, but the type of paradigmatic thinking that creates the sort of group think to which we're all susceptible.

And he sort of breaks that. And I of course, immediately put two and two together and was like, oh, well, he was an anomaly. That caused a paradigm shift. It used to be that when Dell was at its ascendancy, the issue was around supply chain and cost and price and quality. And now everybody talks about innovation, right? That innovation in the technology world is what's needed. And that doesn't just happen. That happens because there's been a paradigm shift. And you see that there's still a generation of business people who maybe need to die off before that gets fully accepted across the industry.

But it's thought provoking. I mean, these are the kinds of books that I enjoy reading. Even if, as Mark says, I can't judge the validity of some of the analysis and I don't understand some of the backdrop, it provides you with thought tools that are fun and interesting, and I'm totally guilty of applying them outside of the realm that he felt comfortable saying they were valid. And I'm perfectly okay with that because I don't care about authorial intent.

1:21:48 Mark: My experience with this is just that if anybody in the business world uses the word paradigm, then I want to smack them. That's pretty much. Can you just think outside the box, man?

1:21:58 Wes: Yes. It's not a paradigm, it's a box.

1:22:00 Seth: No, I use words all the time that people I'm sure, want to smack me for, but that's the way I express my rebellious streak. Mark, I'm not as overtly anti establishment as you.

1:22:11 Mark: I think to be up to date, you can't. I mean, paradigm, that's old hat. That's 1960s. You gotta delve into Deleuze and talk about the plane of immanence of the product.

1:22:21 Seth: Why I just whip out autochthony every now and again. Oh, yeah, my favorite word.

1:22:31 Mark: Actually, my favorite phrase coming out of this book was that paradigm that was right before Newton. Mechanico. Corpuscular. I think that should be my. The name of my next album. Mechanical, corpuscular or a whole new genre of music.

1:22:45 Wes: Yes.

1:22:46 Mark: Awesome.

1:22:48 Dylan: Okay.

1:22:49 Mark: All right, thanks, guys. Everybody make sure to go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to watch for blog posts following up on this episode that everybody is going to write. And we've got a Facebook page you should look at and there's some other stuff. And then we had a lot of great people donate to us or perhaps join our citizen site, which is $5 a month or $50 a year, where you get lots of extra goodies. Some of the high dollar contributors included Steve Snyder, Jessica Thanos, Zoe Finkelstein, Michael de Camp, Jacob Lundgaard, Hari Sikara, Andre Conrad, Laura Lochner, Joseph Wheeler, Richard Ostrom iii, Jacopo Lenzi, Ernie Prabhakar, Stephen Meyer, Gregory Miller, Michael Stroud, Jesse Holding, Warwick Hook, Frank Haugseth, Robert Rogers, Paul Donahue, Rogers David, Jeff Edwards, Nicholas Komanos, Daniel Steffen, Justin Westover, Rhett Trussler, Kyle Thompson, Miles Ramer, Stanley Green, Jason Ko, Brent Gresham, Daniel Lago, and Abram Lyons.

So I'm not sure when this is gonna come out. Let's just say Merry Christmas and Happy Kwanzaa. Hanukkah, other stuff.

1:24:02 Seth: Oh, Hanukkah's almost even over now.

1:24:04 Dylan: Well, no.

1:24:06 Mark: Merry Hanukkah to you.

1:24:08 Dylan: Screw you,

1:24:12 Wes: Santa. Santa's a racist.

1:24:14 Seth: I was just gonna say, like what?

1:24:19 Wes: No Christmas for you Jews.

1:24:23 Mark: He always does that. I hate that. All right, have guys.

1:24:28 Wes: Good night.

1:24:38 Mark: Now.

1:24:38 Unknown speaker: Cut out that crap. Don't listen to that. Don't put on that album. Don't put on that. You got a little life now you know where you're at you should be obsessive but not over that. And I know it's tempting to retrogress when things get slow Just give it a week and a half or so don't do anything rash yet.

1:25:12 Wes: Alone

1:25:16 Unknown speaker: you mo your emotions you pick what you feed you fight with your conscience or just do the deed you hit and you squander fall up like a fan. Keep acting your age but don't act like a man. And I know it's tempting to retrogress when things get slow Just give it a month and a half or so don't do anything rash yet. And I know which tends into retrogress when you feel low but don't be pathetic oh, oh. So take care of your illness way after the fact. Get that out of your mouth now and don't put it back you don't need to judge that up to screw up your day you're perfectly miserable in your own way And I know it's time to. It's tempting to retrogress when things get slow Just give it a year and a half or so don't do anything right yet it's tempting to retrogress when you feel low just giving hundred years or so. Don't do anything at all yet all of a oh.