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MASTER_PARADIGM_OUTLINE

                                             March 15, 2024


Starting over again, reading through Margaret Masterman.

                                                            MASTER_PARADIGM
     Margaret Masterman, "The Nature of a Paradigm",
     _Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge_ (1970)


An attempt at outlining her discussion:

(1) People have been saying dumb things about Kuhn,
    and the philosophy of science in general.

    "Normal science" is real, you idjits.

(2) Kuhn can confuse, more poetic than precise.

    Look at the various ways he talks about paradigms.

           Masterman takes an observational, empiric view
           of the meaning of Kuhn's text, much as Kuhn
           examines the behavior of people doing science--
           going from history/sociology to philosophy.

    The various uses of the word paradigm can be categorized:

        metaphysical
        sociological
        concrete artifiacts/tools

Masterman makes the point-- a key point?--
that paradigms are not theories (or we wouldn't          p.85-p89,
need another word): paradigms precede theories.          the last 4 pages
                                                         out of 40.
Paradigms then, are something fuzzier, an intuition
about the world, some sort of rough analogy?

Masterman runs with that notion of a
paradigm being like analogies, and she
talks a bit about how analogies work.

She refers a few times to the well known problem of
analogies breaking down when extended too far-- and
contrasts that with the extensibility of mathematic
reasoning.

She goes off into what looks like a long discursion
about programmatic techniques for identifying
similarities-- suggesting that there might be a way
paradigm generation could be automated?


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