Kuhn, Heidegger, and the Structure of

Scientific Revolutions

D. GruberSTS 214

Opening Question:

• So what is the structure of scientific revolutions?

The StructureA) Develop: forge a “scientific community” with set of beliefs (a paradigm).

- Teach them through “rigorous and rigid” preparations such that students experience a right of passage and the beliefs take a “deep hold” on student’s minds.

B) Concretize: an authorized community leads to a “’Normal Science’ predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like" (5) -Scientists take great pains to defend that assumption.

C) Suppress: “Normal science suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments" (5).

- Research, thus, becomes "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education" (5).

D) Shift: a shift in professional commitments to shared assumptions takes place when an anomaly successfully "subverts the existing tradition of scientific practice" (6). These shifts are what Kuhn describes as scientific revolutions—"the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science" (6).

Source of outline [adapted]: http://des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html

On Paradigms

• Paradigms help scientific communities to bound their discipline in that:– they help the scientist to create avenues of inquiry,– formulate questions,– select methods with which to examine questions, and– define areas of relevance.

“A shared commitment to a paradigm ensures that its practitioners engage in the paradigmatic observations that its own paradigm can do most to explain [Kuhn, p. 13], i.e., investigate the kinds of research questions to which their own theories can most easily provide answers” (Pajaras, p. 1).

The Process of Normal Science

• Determination of significant fact from paradigm– A paradigm guides and informs the fact-gathering.– Expand the paradigm through the scope of facts

• Matching of facts with the forming of a theory– Researchers focus on facts that can be compared directly with

predictions from some paradigmatic theory– Great effort and ingenuity are required to bring theory and nature

into closer and closer agreement.• Articulation of theory

– resolve residual ambiguities, refine the theory, permit the solution of problems within the overall paradigm.

(pgs 26-28, Kuhn / also see: http://des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html)

The Process of Revolutionary Shift

• Discovery—novelty of fact– the awareness of anomaly.– nature has violated the paradigm-induced expectations.

• The area of the anomaly is then explored– anomalies will be ignored, denied, and fought.

• The paradigm change is complete when the paradigm/theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous become the expected

(pgs 50-53, Kuhn / also see: http://des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html)

What of this is “Heideggerian”• In the Age of the World Picture, Heidegger says something very similar: With scientific research “something is stipulated in advance as what is

already known…only within the perspective of this ground plan does something in nature become visible as such an event. This projected plan of nature finds it guarantee in the fact that physical research, in every one of its questioning steps, is bound in advance to adhere to it…

Methodology, through which a sphere of objects come into representation, has the character of clarifying on the basis of what is clear—[i.e. has the character of explanation from what one already accepts as explained and able to explain the unexplained.]

Explanation is always twofold—it accounts for an unknown by means of a known, and at the same time it verifies that known by means of the unknown” (p. 119-121, Age of the World Picture).

What of all this is “Modern”

• This modern reasoning is what Heidegger calls our “world picture.” Indeed, “the essence of science” is this modern world picture. It’s a perspective where we are calculating nature through our calculators such that “nature and history become the objects of a representation that explains” (p. 127). It makes the world a grid, racked [Enframed]; the “picture” we get is a representation of the world such that the world “only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man…The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter” (p. 130).

• The world becomes an object. Something to be calculated and able to be used (up).

• For H, this is frightful. The calculating procession of humankind leads to “progress” that is actually narrow and erodes humanity at its core and/or ultimately destroys an artful existence and leads to a new destiny of in/non-humanity.

What of all this is “Modern”

Fritz Kahn

Becoming Objects - Available for Use - And to be Used (up)

Becoming Objects - Available for Use - And to be Used (up) (?)

The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter” (p. 130).

Kuhn’s Concern

• Kuhn is more concerned with solving problems, with correcting stuck and wrong scientific practice. His book is largely observational, and it seems set out as a pragmatic project. It is not done in an effort to steer us away from scientific practice or to suggest scientific thinking leads to the extermination of Being. It is not Heideggerian; it is, itself, “scientific.”

So how does Kuhn and Heidegger relate to STS?

What’s the Post-Modern stance?

• The world is representational—references upon references. There’s no way for us not to have a “picture,” but we can understand it as constructed from our situatedness (time and culture and material) and find agency/power in reconstructing it and in knowing the “picture” is always “open.”

Structuring & Restructuring

• There is something of a “postmodern” sensibility in STS insofar as it takes a view of the world wherein structures are always assembled and reassembled and dependent upon their set-up. STS, as a structured discipline, tries to follow Heidegger’s advice in terms of being reflective: “Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called into question” (p. 116, Age of the World Picture). But it does so by taking what is good of Heidegger and good of playfulness.