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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 used
"definition" than a "law".)  You don't really        copy of a physics 101
understand "F=ma" without working through            text book, you will find
different standard example problems (including       "F=ma" carefully
using analogous forms like "w=mg").                  highlighted or underlined--
                                                     a universal habit that
Kuhn then, in a vaugely empirical move,              would seem to do little
takes these example problems as the heart            to increase understanding
of the subject-- these are what he called            of the subject.
paradigms.                                           
                                                         POWER_OF_SCRIBBLING
  Evidentally, when you're learning                                             
  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      
  "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 with            
the word "paradigm".  This is how it got turned     
into meaning 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 aa book 
                                                        sitting in an           
There's another angle to Kuhn's work, he                architectural library
made the point that after a change in                   at Berkeley... going 
paradigm, the same words are often used in              over there to read it
completely different ways creating a barrier            has been on my list      
to understanding that's diffcult to bridge.             for some time.         
He would say the meanings of terminology are            
"incommensurate" across paradigm shifts.                [NEXT - INSENSIBLE_TWIST]