The “What paradigm is each of these working from?” section seems like an interesting meta example of the thing Kuhn described, where you keep adding epicycles to Kuhn’s “paradigm” paradigm.
This makes for an interesting companion read. I’m inclined to see the problem Kuhn identified as “functional fixedness, but for theories”. Maybe because humans are cognitive misers, we prefer to re-use our existing mental representations, or make incremental improvements to them, rather than rework things from scratch. Rather than “there is no objective reality”, I’d rather say “there is no lossless compression of reality (at least not one that’s gonna fit in your brain)”. Rather than “there is no truth”, I’d rather say “our lossy mental representations sometimes generate wrong questions”.
The “What paradigm is each of these working from?” section seems like an interesting meta example of the thing Kuhn described, where you keep adding epicycles to Kuhn’s “paradigm” paradigm.
This makes for an interesting companion read. I’m inclined to see the problem Kuhn identified as “functional fixedness, but for theories”. Maybe because humans are cognitive misers, we prefer to re-use our existing mental representations, or make incremental improvements to them, rather than rework things from scratch. Rather than “there is no objective reality”, I’d rather say “there is no lossless compression of reality (at least not one that’s gonna fit in your brain)”. Rather than “there is no truth”, I’d rather say “our lossy mental representations sometimes generate wrong questions”.