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.
Greatly enjoyed Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics. Covers his positions on various political issues, including a non-crazy discussion of race and intelligence, and the ethical implications thereof. I think Singer has been recommended here before, but to reiterate: he’s a preference utilitarian consequentialist philosopher whose style and clarity of analysis is very Less-Wrong-esque, but he engages directly with the philosophical tradition. Both the meta- and object-level analysis are well worth reading.
Edit: In particular, if you’re interested in how philosophers think and talk about the orthogonality thesis and some related practical matters, his final chapter is an exceptionally lucid starting point. Singer also gets bonus coolness points there for discussion of the actual (disclaimer: 1978) research on psychopathy, and its relation to the concept of normativity.
Reza Aslan’s Zealot. It’s a life and times of Jesus. I am not qualified to judge the story he tells; I would be interested to see comments from anyone who is. The story is of a messianic zealot, of a sort that were common in those days, from the poor and obscure village of Nazareth, who wandered around preaching a message of deliverance for the Jewish people to happen in this world, not the next. He eventually came up against the Roman powers in Jerusalem, who immediately executed him for sedition, as they did all of his sort. The label “King of the Jews” on the cross was not a recognition of his divine status, but the charge against him. The only thing that distinguishes him from other failed messiahs (of whom Aslan mentions a good many) was that his movement survived his death and grew.
Aslan passes on the question of whether the resurrection actually happened, but identifies it as the key idea that transformed the movement into one that would spread across the world. Without the resurrection, Jesus is just another false messiah, the crucifixion being the proof of his falsity. Aslan declares the resurrection to be “not a historical event” and to lie “outside the scope of history”, which seems like fudging. The paucity of sources may make it inaccessible to historical inquiry, but in fact, either something of the sort happened or it did not. Other messiahs were executed and that was the end of them. Somehow, in Jesus’ case, the idea of the resurrection took hold and gave his followers hope for the future of what he had started.
Those followers continued to meet, led by James, Peter, and John. First among these was James, brother of Jesus. But then Paul had some sort of conversion experience, joined the movement, and then fought bitterly with its leaders to take it over and take it in a new direction, one more palatable to the Roman authority. The very idea of Jewish deliverance from oppression was eliminated, the kingdom was declared to be not of this world, Jesus’ death was firmly placed on the heads of the Jews, Pilate was whitewashed (the whole trial account in the Gospels, Reza says, is clearly fiction), James in Jerusalem was marginalised in favour of Peter in Rome, the original emphasis on justice for the poor and upholding of the Jewish law faded away, and modern Christianity began to be created.
In a radio interview (and less emphatically in the book), Aslan says there’s no evidence of the Roman government permitting a crucified corpse to be buried. Part of the point of crucifixion was to desecrate the corpse.
If you liked Zealot, his prior book No God But God is also good. It does a similar treatment of the history of Islam and an analysis of the ongoing reformation within the religion that is currently driving world politics.
The Age of Spiritual Machines—Ray Kurzweil, outdated but thought provoking.
My Stroke of Insight—Jill B Taylor, a TED talk-ish book on neuroscience for the masses.
I am a Strange Loop—Douglas Hofstadter, GEB without the dialogues and focused on consciousness.
The Signal and the Noise—Nate Silver, makes a good case for Bayes’ theorem without showing the theorem.
Social Engineering: the Art of Human Hacking—Chris Hadnagy, rehashes Cialdini’s Influence, describes some neat techniques, and includes some pseudoscience. Still nice intro to social engineering despite the author being a pentester, not a writer.
Nonfiction Books Thread
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.
2014 COPSS anthology, Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science (review)
Pioneers of Soviet Computing, Malinovsky 2010 (review)
How to Read a Book was not particularly useful to me, except for the suggested reading list at the end.
Clear and Simple as the Truth was interesting.
The Ode Less Travelled was good.
How to read a book? Just follow the formula.
Greatly enjoyed Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics. Covers his positions on various political issues, including a non-crazy discussion of race and intelligence, and the ethical implications thereof. I think Singer has been recommended here before, but to reiterate: he’s a preference utilitarian consequentialist philosopher whose style and clarity of analysis is very Less-Wrong-esque, but he engages directly with the philosophical tradition. Both the meta- and object-level analysis are well worth reading.
Edit: In particular, if you’re interested in how philosophers think and talk about the orthogonality thesis and some related practical matters, his final chapter is an exceptionally lucid starting point. Singer also gets bonus coolness points there for discussion of the actual (disclaimer: 1978) research on psychopathy, and its relation to the concept of normativity.
Reza Aslan’s Zealot. It’s a life and times of Jesus. I am not qualified to judge the story he tells; I would be interested to see comments from anyone who is. The story is of a messianic zealot, of a sort that were common in those days, from the poor and obscure village of Nazareth, who wandered around preaching a message of deliverance for the Jewish people to happen in this world, not the next. He eventually came up against the Roman powers in Jerusalem, who immediately executed him for sedition, as they did all of his sort. The label “King of the Jews” on the cross was not a recognition of his divine status, but the charge against him. The only thing that distinguishes him from other failed messiahs (of whom Aslan mentions a good many) was that his movement survived his death and grew.
Aslan passes on the question of whether the resurrection actually happened, but identifies it as the key idea that transformed the movement into one that would spread across the world. Without the resurrection, Jesus is just another false messiah, the crucifixion being the proof of his falsity. Aslan declares the resurrection to be “not a historical event” and to lie “outside the scope of history”, which seems like fudging. The paucity of sources may make it inaccessible to historical inquiry, but in fact, either something of the sort happened or it did not. Other messiahs were executed and that was the end of them. Somehow, in Jesus’ case, the idea of the resurrection took hold and gave his followers hope for the future of what he had started.
Those followers continued to meet, led by James, Peter, and John. First among these was James, brother of Jesus. But then Paul had some sort of conversion experience, joined the movement, and then fought bitterly with its leaders to take it over and take it in a new direction, one more palatable to the Roman authority. The very idea of Jewish deliverance from oppression was eliminated, the kingdom was declared to be not of this world, Jesus’ death was firmly placed on the heads of the Jews, Pilate was whitewashed (the whole trial account in the Gospels, Reza says, is clearly fiction), James in Jerusalem was marginalised in favour of Peter in Rome, the original emphasis on justice for the poor and upholding of the Jewish law faded away, and modern Christianity began to be created.
In a radio interview (and less emphatically in the book), Aslan says there’s no evidence of the Roman government permitting a crucified corpse to be buried. Part of the point of crucifixion was to desecrate the corpse.
If you liked Zealot, his prior book No God But God is also good. It does a similar treatment of the history of Islam and an analysis of the ongoing reformation within the religion that is currently driving world politics.
The Age of Spiritual Machines—Ray Kurzweil, outdated but thought provoking.
My Stroke of Insight—Jill B Taylor, a TED talk-ish book on neuroscience for the masses.
I am a Strange Loop—Douglas Hofstadter, GEB without the dialogues and focused on consciousness.
The Signal and the Noise—Nate Silver, makes a good case for Bayes’ theorem without showing the theorem.
Social Engineering: the Art of Human Hacking—Chris Hadnagy, rehashes Cialdini’s Influence, describes some neat techniques, and includes some pseudoscience. Still nice intro to social engineering despite the author being a pentester, not a writer.