Yeah, it happens from time to time. Sometimes these mistakes cause errors in basic things to be taught. I think schools especially are quite slow on the uptake of new ideas—they have syllabuses and courses and textbooks, and it’s quite a lot of trouble to change them, so they usually only get updated every couple years at best.
For example, schools often teach that light is both a particle and a wave, or that it’s sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave, or that it has ‘particle-wave duality’. They do this because in order to explain that light is just a particle and not a wave at all, one has to take the multiple universe theory of physics seriously.
In philosophy, an example of an important discovery not penetrating the field would be Karl Popper’s epistemology. In that case, it’s probably because, although it’s fairly straightforward, what Popper actually says is very counter-intuitive. Most people don’t understand what he means when he talks about us not actually needing any justification for our theories, because it’s built into our culture and our language that we need to justify our theories in order to believe them.
No doubt in any field, you will find people ahead of the pack whose ideas haven’t been adopted yet. Often they will be good ideas, but not presented well enough to make people understand, remember or pass on the ideas (especially if they’re new and counter-intuitive). So, it can take time for them to get off the ground.
Yeah, it happens from time to time. Sometimes these mistakes cause errors in basic things to be taught. I think schools especially are quite slow on the uptake of new ideas—they have syllabuses and courses and textbooks, and it’s quite a lot of trouble to change them, so they usually only get updated every couple years at best.
For example, schools often teach that light is both a particle and a wave, or that it’s sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave, or that it has ‘particle-wave duality’. They do this because in order to explain that light is just a particle and not a wave at all, one has to take the multiple universe theory of physics seriously.
In philosophy, an example of an important discovery not penetrating the field would be Karl Popper’s epistemology. In that case, it’s probably because, although it’s fairly straightforward, what Popper actually says is very counter-intuitive. Most people don’t understand what he means when he talks about us not actually needing any justification for our theories, because it’s built into our culture and our language that we need to justify our theories in order to believe them.
No doubt in any field, you will find people ahead of the pack whose ideas haven’t been adopted yet. Often they will be good ideas, but not presented well enough to make people understand, remember or pass on the ideas (especially if they’re new and counter-intuitive). So, it can take time for them to get off the ground.