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MASTER_DEEP_AND_CRUDE
March 15, 2024
MASTER_PARADIGM
Margaret Masterman, "The Nature of a Paradigm",
_Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge_ (1970)
It's a good point that a large part of Kuhn's
approach involves observing what's actually been
done in the sciences and thinking about the way It often doesn't seem clear
things work. He's trying to form a new concept whether the adherents of
(or concepts) that describe actual practice. Popper's "falsification"
are talking about the way
"Kuhn himself has no doubt, moreover, scientists actually do work
that his paradigms, thus sociologically or perhaps making an
defined, are prior to theory. (This is argument about the way they
part of the reason why he wants a new *should* work.
word, other than 'theory' to describe
them.) For 'why', he asks himself
(p.11) is the paradigm, or scientific
achievement, 'as a locus of professional
commitment, prior to the various
concepts, laws, theories and points of
view that may be abstracted from it?'"
"... for Kuhn, something sociologically
describable, and above all concrete,
already exists in actual science, at the
early stages, when the theory is not
there."
"... the paradigm's basic property,
which I shall call concreteness or Talk about awkward
'crudeness'." terminology. Crude
as the opposite of
Abstract?
"... [Kuhn] fails to distinguish from one another
three relevant states of affairs, which I will
call respectively
*non-paradigm* science,
*multiple-paradigm* science, and
*dual-paradigm* science."
"This pre-scientific and philosophic state of affairs
sharply contrasts, however, with *multi-paradigm science*,
with that state of affairs in which, far from there being
no paradigm, there are on the contrary too many. (This is
the present overall situation in the psychological, social
and information sciences.) ... each sub-field as defined
by its technique is so obviously more trivial and narrow
than the field as defined by intuition, and also the
various operational definitions given by the techniques
are so grossly discordant with one another, that
discussion on fundamentals remains, and long-run progress
(as opposed to local progress) fails to occur. This state
of affairs is brought to an end when someone invents a
deeper, though cruder paradigm ..."
"The property of crudeness allows a comparable
simplification to be made of Kuhn's statements to the
effect that a paradigm must be finite in extensibility.
For in so far as the crude analogy drawn by a paradigm So now here,
is not merely *like* that drawn by a speaker in natural "crude" means
language but *is* one, then it is notorious that it rough (a "crude
cannot be developed too far (all poets know this); analogy"),
whereas, by contrast, mathematical extensibility is which also
always imagined as being capable of going on by means of
accretion, indefinitely." "limited
extent"--
meaning of
limited
application,
limited to
a particular
domain.
"... it is not only the case that a fully
extended paradigm, or theory, reaches a point
where further extensions of it produce
diminishing returns. The situation is worse.
The paradigm itself goes bad on you, if it is
stretched too far, producing conceptual
inconsistency, absurdity, misexpectation,
disorder, complexity and confusion, in exactly
the same way as a crude analogy does, if pressed
too far, say, in a poem, but quite unlike the
way in which a system of pure mathematics does,
when it yields undecidable formulae or
sontradictions, or fails to yield proofs;
i.e. when an exact statement of what has gone
wrong can still be made."
"No philosopher of science before Kuhn had described
this deterioration. All had blamed the gradual
collapse of various scientific theories on the fact
that they were eventually falsified in experience by,
say, the emergence of new facts; i.e. on the
non-cooperation, as it were, of nature."
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