The passage you quote is probably in the postscript to the 2nd edition, which, as I said in the post, denies the original content of the 1962 edition. Make outrageous statement, get media attention, get famous, then retain your new position by denying you ever meant the outrageous thing that you said in the first place. If he’d been that careful and subtle in the first edition, he might never have become famous.
Bad phrasing on my part: I didn’t remember the exact wording but very close to it (I remembered the end and beginning precisely and Google confirmed). I would have simply looked in my copy but unfortunately it is on my Kindle which decided to break (again). (Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish setting trains you pretty well to remember passages almost word for word if you find them interesting enough. Unfortunately, passages of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality seem to be an increasingly common category and I know those aren’t that useful. There’s probably an eventual limit).
Edit: Thinking about this more you may have a point about making outrageous statements. But it seems to me that a lot of what he said did get woefully misinterpreted or ignored outright by a lot of the po-mo people who followed up on Kuhn. For example, he makes the point that science is unique in having accepted paradigms and that this doesn’t happen generally in non-science fields. Yet, a lot of his language was then used by others to talk about paradigms and paradigm-shifts and the like in non-science fields. I’m inclined to think that some not-so-bright or ideologically inclined people just misunderstood what he had to say. (I’m under the impression although don’t have a citation that Lakatos didn’t think that Kuhn was arguing against scientific progress. And I’m pretty sure Lakatos read drafts of the book. IRCC he’s acknowledged as helping out in the preface or forward).
One consequence of the position just outlined has particularly bothered a number of my critics. They find my viewpoint relativistic, particularly as it is developed in the last section of this book. My remarks about translation highlight the reasons for the charge. The proponents of different theories are like the members of different language-culture communities. Recognising the parallelism suggests that in some sense both groups may be right. Applied to culture and its development that position is relativistic.
The passage you quote is probably in the postscript to the 2nd edition, which, as I said in the post, denies the original content of the 1962 edition. Make outrageous statement, get media attention, get famous, then retain your new position by denying you ever meant the outrageous thing that you said in the first place. If he’d been that careful and subtle in the first edition, he might never have become famous.
Your memory for passages is remarkable.
Bad phrasing on my part: I didn’t remember the exact wording but very close to it (I remembered the end and beginning precisely and Google confirmed). I would have simply looked in my copy but unfortunately it is on my Kindle which decided to break (again). (Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish setting trains you pretty well to remember passages almost word for word if you find them interesting enough. Unfortunately, passages of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality seem to be an increasingly common category and I know those aren’t that useful. There’s probably an eventual limit).
Edit: Thinking about this more you may have a point about making outrageous statements. But it seems to me that a lot of what he said did get woefully misinterpreted or ignored outright by a lot of the po-mo people who followed up on Kuhn. For example, he makes the point that science is unique in having accepted paradigms and that this doesn’t happen generally in non-science fields. Yet, a lot of his language was then used by others to talk about paradigms and paradigm-shifts and the like in non-science fields. I’m inclined to think that some not-so-bright or ideologically inclined people just misunderstood what he had to say. (I’m under the impression although don’t have a citation that Lakatos didn’t think that Kuhn was arguing against scientific progress. And I’m pretty sure Lakatos read drafts of the book. IRCC he’s acknowledged as helping out in the preface or forward).
It is from the Postscript. That starts with: