anon_sysa said in #5514 20h ago:
After watching The Students episode with Jonathan Wallis about academic apathy I feel compelled to post about Thomas Kuhn’s work as it is very relevant to this conversation. Kuhn is known for popularizing the term “Paradigm Shift”. Many people are familiar with and use this term but have not read his work. I will lay out the basics of his paradigm model of scientific progress.
Science begins in the pre-paradigm phase where there is no shared framework for analyzing things. From roughly 1700 to 1750 Franklin, Hauksbee, Gray, Desaguliers, Du Fay, Nollett, Watson and others were working on understanding electricity but their work hardly resembled the others work despite them reading each others work. There was a not a common framework shared among researchers and each was doing their own thing. Franklin was able to solve an important problem that drew others into his perspective and caused the field to mature. This is the progression from the pre-paradigm phase to the paradigm phase via a grand achievement. Kuhn uses “paradigm” in different ways and is not super rigorous but we can begin with his first definition - a scientific achievement that 1. Brings in a lot of adherents from alternative perspectives and 2. Has many open problems to solve. I believe this definition should be the starting point for understanding his work and is extremely relevant to the episode. Further examples of paradigms are Aristotle’s Physics, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Newton’s Principia and Opticks, Franklin’s Electricity, Lavoisier’s Chemistry and Lyell’s Geology.
Once the paradigm forms we can now do what Kuhn called “Normal Science”, which is science within a paradigm with clear rules and perspectives to fall back on. Kuhn referred to normal science as “puzzle solving” being that nothing revolutionary could come of it and it would result in incremental progress. The key characteristic of normal science is that it does not involve challenging assumptions of the paradigm it is done within. The stability afforded by the paradigm allows for rapid progress via normal science. The paradigm phase is dependent upon the grand achievement previously mentioned but it is also largely a phenomenon of psychology; a shared psychology of practitioners. The more rigorous the discipline the easier this is to achieve. The paradigm phase in math began prior to that of physics and physics prior to chemistry and so on.
Kuhn believed no paradigm could truly capture and understand the world in its totality and so every paradigm was destined to fail. This failure happens in a very predicable way in which an accumulation of anomalies happens, which cause more and more doubt in the foundations of the field. This, however is not enough for a paradigm shift or scientific revolution to happen. There always must be a new ship to jump to for the shift to occur. The canonical example of a paradigm shift is Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. While the two paradigms may have mathematical similarities in many cases what makes it a true paradigm shift is a radical change in how we see the world. In this sense a paradigm is a psychological phenomenon. Space-time as a concept was entirely novel and revolutionary, it qualifies as a paradigm shift because of the psychological shift it induced in its adherents. They see the world differently after understanding space-time.
To recap Kuhns model of science begins without any paradigm, a paradigm emerges through a grand achievement, rapid progress can be made through normal science, a period of crisis emerges as anomalies accumulate, an alternative paradigm becomes better able to explain those anomalies and a paradigm shift occurs and we are back to doing normal science. It feels as though we are now in a period of crisis of academia in general rather than a specific field. There is a societal frustration and doubt of academia not just among the masses, but even amongst the highly educated.
Science begins in the pre-paradigm phase where there is no shared framework for analyzing things. From roughly 1700 to 1750 Franklin, Hauksbee, Gray, Desaguliers, Du Fay, Nollett, Watson and others were working on understanding electricity but their work hardly resembled the others work despite them reading each others work. There was a not a common framework shared among researchers and each was doing their own thing. Franklin was able to solve an important problem that drew others into his perspective and caused the field to mature. This is the progression from the pre-paradigm phase to the paradigm phase via a grand achievement. Kuhn uses “paradigm” in different ways and is not super rigorous but we can begin with his first definition - a scientific achievement that 1. Brings in a lot of adherents from alternative perspectives and 2. Has many open problems to solve. I believe this definition should be the starting point for understanding his work and is extremely relevant to the episode. Further examples of paradigms are Aristotle’s Physics, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Newton’s Principia and Opticks, Franklin’s Electricity, Lavoisier’s Chemistry and Lyell’s Geology.
Once the paradigm forms we can now do what Kuhn called “Normal Science”, which is science within a paradigm with clear rules and perspectives to fall back on. Kuhn referred to normal science as “puzzle solving” being that nothing revolutionary could come of it and it would result in incremental progress. The key characteristic of normal science is that it does not involve challenging assumptions of the paradigm it is done within. The stability afforded by the paradigm allows for rapid progress via normal science. The paradigm phase is dependent upon the grand achievement previously mentioned but it is also largely a phenomenon of psychology; a shared psychology of practitioners. The more rigorous the discipline the easier this is to achieve. The paradigm phase in math began prior to that of physics and physics prior to chemistry and so on.
Kuhn believed no paradigm could truly capture and understand the world in its totality and so every paradigm was destined to fail. This failure happens in a very predicable way in which an accumulation of anomalies happens, which cause more and more doubt in the foundations of the field. This, however is not enough for a paradigm shift or scientific revolution to happen. There always must be a new ship to jump to for the shift to occur. The canonical example of a paradigm shift is Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. While the two paradigms may have mathematical similarities in many cases what makes it a true paradigm shift is a radical change in how we see the world. In this sense a paradigm is a psychological phenomenon. Space-time as a concept was entirely novel and revolutionary, it qualifies as a paradigm shift because of the psychological shift it induced in its adherents. They see the world differently after understanding space-time.
To recap Kuhns model of science begins without any paradigm, a paradigm emerges through a grand achievement, rapid progress can be made through normal science, a period of crisis emerges as anomalies accumulate, an alternative paradigm becomes better able to explain those anomalies and a paradigm shift occurs and we are back to doing normal science. It feels as though we are now in a period of crisis of academia in general rather than a specific field. There is a societal frustration and doubt of academia not just among the masses, but even amongst the highly educated.
After watching The S