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THE_PARADIGM_PARADIGM
October 6, 2018
When I first read Structure, I found the usage of the
word "paradigm" to be severely annoying, in a way that
a student today could probably not understand, because
while Kuhn did not invent the phrase, he put it over,
turned it into a very familiar intellectual phrase--
if not an intellectual cliche.
Back then, I thought I could see (mostly) what Kuhn was
getting at with the word "paradigm", but I didn't
understand why you would use a word that was so obscure
when you could just say something like "intellectual
framework".
The central idea seemed to be that the way you understood
things limited the ways you could understand things, and
you could fall into intellectual traps that were difficult
(though not impossible) to escape, because that required
aquiring a new point-of-view, learning a new intellectual
framework.
Going through Kuhn again, I can see the trouble with "paradigm"
more clearly: The original insight that Kuhn started from was
that to really understand a scientific theory it wasn't enough
to just read up on the theory, you had to work through various
example problems.
He brings up the, uh, example of "F=ma", which
is sometimes called one of "Newton's Laws",
but really it's not even all that clear what If you look at the
it *is* (you might think of it as more of a beginning of any
"definition" than a "law".) You don't really used copy of a
understand "F=ma" without working through physics 101 text
different standard example problems (including book, you will find
using analogous forms like "w=mg"). "F=ma" carefully
highlighted or
Kuhn then, in a vaugely empirical move, underlined --
takes these example problems as the heart a universal habit
of the subject-- these are what he called that does absolutely
paradigms. nothing to increase
understanding of the
Evidentally, when you're learning subject.
things like latin conjugation there are
standard examples you work with that
are called "paradigms". This is where
Kuhn picked up the phrase.
What we now might call something like
"paradigmatic examples" were Kuhn's
original "paradigms".
Following from his insight, Kuhn (perhaps unfortunately)
began to think of anything *associated* with this
process of learning example problems with the word
"paradigm". This is how it got turned into what I
thought of as an "intellectual framework".
Somewhat famously, Margaret Masterman carefully
counted the different usages of the term "paradigm" It's actually not that
thoughout Kuhn's text, and found over twenty of them. easy to find a copy of
her paper.
I gather that Kuhn later regretted starting a
"paradigm" craze, and all but gave up on the term. It's supposed to be
collected in an
anthology sitting in
There's another angle to Kuhn's work, he an architectural
made the point that after a change in library at
paradigm, the same words are often used in Berkeley... going
completely different ways creating a barrier over there to read it
to understanding that's diffcult to bridge. has been on my list
He would say the meanings of terminology are for some time.
"incommensurate" across paradigm shifts.
There's a simple understanding of the
process of advancement of science where we
tell a story like "once people believed
*this* but that made it hard to understand
observed phenomena such as *that*, but once
we started thinking like *so*, *that*
became easier to grasp: the new paradigm
is superior to the old because of it's
greater explanatory power".
Kuhn objected that even the meaning of
what you're trying to explain tends
to change across paradigm-shifts, and
that complicates this view of steady
progress. The problem that the
new paradigm explains might not even
have been perceived as a problem before
the new paradigm was acquired.
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