The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Very famous book, and worthy of its reputation by the looks of things. About halfway through at the moment. Something I did not know before reading the preface was that Kuhn was a grad student in theoretical physics.
Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery by Holland et al. This is a collaborative interdisciplinary work that straddles computer science, psychology and philosophy of science. It’s almost 30 years old now, but I still found that I gained some perspective by reading it. One of its most important arguments is that induction should be viewed as a pragmatic rather than syntactic process, i.e. you won’t get a working theory of induction without putting a spotlight on agents’ goals and how they influence the hypothesis space and categorisations of the agent.
Kuhn certainly knew physics better than he knew philosophy. The frequently mentioned “positivist” in his narrative is entirely made of straw. He discusses a lot of interesting ideas, and he wrote better than many people who had discussed similar ideas previously, but most of the ideas had been discussed previously, sometimes extensively; he was apparently simply not very aware of the previous literature in the philosophy of science.
Wasn’t his book extremely influential within philosophy? Whether or not he was aware of previous literature, his own contribution seems to have been vast.
I think you’re exaggerating. The amount of references he makes to publications in philosophy, social science, science and history suggests he was aware of a big chunk of the literature relevant to his interests.
Still, I’m interested in hearing some criticisms in more detail. Where specifically does he rely on straw man arguments?
I don’t have time to re-read the whole book to come up with examples, and there is unhelpfully no index in my copy, but checking through the footnotes quickly, I found exactly two references to actual positivists (or close enough); a quick dismissive paragraph on Ernest Nagel’s use of probability theory, and a passing reference to Philipp Frank’s biography of Einstein. No references to Reichenbach or Hempel or Carnap. The closest he comes is perhaps the (one) reference to Goodman, who was heavily influenced by Carnap, but Kuhn cites Goodman favorably, while apparently being unaware of how positivist-influenced the ideas he was agreeing with were. There’s also a citation of Wittgenstein, which seems vaguely favorable but complains about Wittgenstein’s lack of development of an idea, which is surely fair enough; I won’t mark anyone down for complaining about that problem in Wittgenstein. But I do have to give low marks for talking so much about “the positivist” while citing only one major positivist philosopher of science (Ernest Nagel) and attributing many views to “the positivist” which are far more simplistic than that positivist would ever have endorsed. Also no references to Duhem. Quine doesn’t get mentioned until the postscript, although it’s quite plausible that the enthusiasm for Kuhn at the time was part of the same broader phenomenon that turned Quine and Putnam and Goodman into huge stars in philosophy around the same time (all three of those were also to varying degrees prone to denial about the extent of their influence from positivism, but at least they were generally better about citing actual positivists when criticizing them).
Maybe he’s referring to Comte or Mach? But I saw no references to them at all, and criticizing 19th century figures in 1962 doesn’t sound very revolutionary. The most charitable I can be is that there may have been some confused historians of science employing some positivist ideas without understanding them (I don’t know much about history of science in Kuhn’s time), and Kuhn’s “positivist” may be an assembly of such characters. But that’s just speculation. It still seems to me that Kuhn is part of the depressing philosophical tradition of ignoring and misrepresenting previous philosophers in order to appear more original and insightful.
Which is not to say that the book is worthless. I do find the idea of a paradigm very fruitful, and it seems a lot of scientific progress involves the discovery of new ways of making observations, and these are issues that perhaps hadn’t gotten sufficient emphasis prior to Kuhn. But a lot of the radical claims that he is most famous for are either not as radical or original as he claimed, or not as well supported by his examples as his very slick writing might lead one to believe, or both.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Very famous book, and worthy of its reputation by the looks of things. About halfway through at the moment. Something I did not know before reading the preface was that Kuhn was a grad student in theoretical physics.
Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery by Holland et al. This is a collaborative interdisciplinary work that straddles computer science, psychology and philosophy of science. It’s almost 30 years old now, but I still found that I gained some perspective by reading it. One of its most important arguments is that induction should be viewed as a pragmatic rather than syntactic process, i.e. you won’t get a working theory of induction without putting a spotlight on agents’ goals and how they influence the hypothesis space and categorisations of the agent.
Kuhn certainly knew physics better than he knew philosophy. The frequently mentioned “positivist” in his narrative is entirely made of straw. He discusses a lot of interesting ideas, and he wrote better than many people who had discussed similar ideas previously, but most of the ideas had been discussed previously, sometimes extensively; he was apparently simply not very aware of the previous literature in the philosophy of science.
Ah. Well.
Wasn’t his book extremely influential within philosophy? Whether or not he was aware of previous literature, his own contribution seems to have been vast.
I think you’re exaggerating. The amount of references he makes to publications in philosophy, social science, science and history suggests he was aware of a big chunk of the literature relevant to his interests.
Still, I’m interested in hearing some criticisms in more detail. Where specifically does he rely on straw man arguments?
I don’t have time to re-read the whole book to come up with examples, and there is unhelpfully no index in my copy, but checking through the footnotes quickly, I found exactly two references to actual positivists (or close enough); a quick dismissive paragraph on Ernest Nagel’s use of probability theory, and a passing reference to Philipp Frank’s biography of Einstein. No references to Reichenbach or Hempel or Carnap. The closest he comes is perhaps the (one) reference to Goodman, who was heavily influenced by Carnap, but Kuhn cites Goodman favorably, while apparently being unaware of how positivist-influenced the ideas he was agreeing with were. There’s also a citation of Wittgenstein, which seems vaguely favorable but complains about Wittgenstein’s lack of development of an idea, which is surely fair enough; I won’t mark anyone down for complaining about that problem in Wittgenstein. But I do have to give low marks for talking so much about “the positivist” while citing only one major positivist philosopher of science (Ernest Nagel) and attributing many views to “the positivist” which are far more simplistic than that positivist would ever have endorsed. Also no references to Duhem. Quine doesn’t get mentioned until the postscript, although it’s quite plausible that the enthusiasm for Kuhn at the time was part of the same broader phenomenon that turned Quine and Putnam and Goodman into huge stars in philosophy around the same time (all three of those were also to varying degrees prone to denial about the extent of their influence from positivism, but at least they were generally better about citing actual positivists when criticizing them).
Maybe he’s referring to Comte or Mach? But I saw no references to them at all, and criticizing 19th century figures in 1962 doesn’t sound very revolutionary. The most charitable I can be is that there may have been some confused historians of science employing some positivist ideas without understanding them (I don’t know much about history of science in Kuhn’s time), and Kuhn’s “positivist” may be an assembly of such characters. But that’s just speculation. It still seems to me that Kuhn is part of the depressing philosophical tradition of ignoring and misrepresenting previous philosophers in order to appear more original and insightful.
Which is not to say that the book is worthless. I do find the idea of a paradigm very fruitful, and it seems a lot of scientific progress involves the discovery of new ways of making observations, and these are issues that perhaps hadn’t gotten sufficient emphasis prior to Kuhn. But a lot of the radical claims that he is most famous for are either not as radical or original as he claimed, or not as well supported by his examples as his very slick writing might lead one to believe, or both.