Kuhn: An Apologist's Escape Hatch

[_Mister Scratch]

Additionally, you want the Book of Mormon to present an "anomaly" for current archeology and anthropology to face up to it seems. But here you are applying Kuhn to the more tenuous fields of archeology and anthropology as opposed to physics or chemistry. This is a problem in that Kuhn referred to neither field in his entire book. The problems of those fields were not approached by Kuhn. The subjectivity and best guessing involved in science was underscored for certain scientific views, but especially in terms of anthropology, for example, we get all sorts of new problems to deal with that Kuhn only mentioned in passing. Here I believe you are misusing Kuhn, interestingly enough, to abuse Mormonism from your apologetic viewpoint.

If this is the case, then why are LDS apologists, such as D. Bokovoy, calling for Kuhnian paradigm shifts in response to "anomalies" within fields such as anthropology and archeology?

So you are misunderstanding, in my view, how apologists understand or apply the premises of Kuhn.

As you pointed out, Kuhn ought to be applied primarily---if not wholly---to the "hard" sciences such as chemistry and physics. Thus, apologists for Book of Mormon historicity or Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Abraham, or whatever, ought not to be using Kuhn as an "escape hatch." At least by your own logic.

The more I think about it the more impressed I am with Christensen's reading of Barbour and Kuhn. If you think Kuhn is a mere "escape hatch" for an "apologist," I think you're welcome to that paradigm. I don't find it more fruitful than how I currently see it. ;)

Echoes of Wade Englund here.

[_LifeOnaPlate]

Additionally, you want the Book of Mormon to present an "anomaly" for current archeology and anthropology to face up to it seems. But here you are applying Kuhn to the more tenuous fields of archeology and anthropology as opposed to physics or chemistry. This is a problem in that Kuhn referred to neither field in his entire book. The problems of those fields were not approached by Kuhn. The subjectivity and best guessing involved in science was underscored for certain scientific views, but especially in terms of anthropology, for example, we get all sorts of new problems to deal with that Kuhn only mentioned in passing. Here I believe you are misusing Kuhn, interestingly enough, to abuse Mormonism from your apologetic viewpoint.

If this is the case, then why are LDS apologists, such as D. Bokovoy, calling for Kuhnian paradigm shifts in response to "anomalies" within fields such as anthropology and archeology?

You'll have to ask Bokovoy.

So you are misunderstanding, in my view, how apologists understand or apply the premises of Kuhn.

As you pointed out, Kuhn ought to be applied primarily---if not wholly---to the "hard" sciences such as chemistry and physics. Thus, apologists for Book of Mormon historicity or Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Abraham, or whatever, ought not to be using Kuhn as an "escape hatch." At least by your own logic.

Not according to Kuhn, who encouraged other fields to explore the implications his work had for their respective areas. But you probably didn't read the postscript to his book. Moreover, throughout the book Kuhn notes where there can be overlap even in the social sciences (which at the time were perhaps even more disorganized than they are now) as well as theology (specifically noted).

[_Gadianton]

Harmony,

Maybe there's a better answer. There are anomalies in fundamental physics, you know, protons and neutrons and all that, and plenty of unanswered questions. Experiments become more expensive and difficult to do. Theoretical physics is very popular now, and this is the application of very abstract math to the service of resolving anomalies in physics. Probably most scientists are very on board with the possibilities of theoretical physics but then plenty as well think that it goes to far, and becomes worthless in that there is little way to ever test these theories in the lab. So this might be a conflict in "paradigms" where there is a dispute over what counts as evidence. Will theoretical frameworks like M-Theory which makes the universe 11 dimensions prove fruitless because it's so out of touch with anything anyone can visualize let alone verify, or falsify with physical experiments? Or as we progress in our knowledge, is it difficult to say in advance that this kind of theorizing can't be science just because it doesn't fit nicely with the ideals of laboratory science that came into its own in the 20th century? The increasing mathematical speculations within physics might be as good as any example of a move into a new paradigm.

[_Gadianton]

Additionally, you want the Book of Mormon to present an "anomaly" for current archeology and anthropology to face up to it seems. But here you are applying Kuhn to the more tenuous fields of archeology and anthropology as opposed to physics or chemistry. This is a problem in that Kuhn referred to neither field in his entire book

I am just covering the options that the Book of Mormon or Book of Abraham have if Kuhn is right about paradigms. I understand it is very difficult to talk about what constitutes a paradigm in something like Egyptology, since in the philsophy of science, it's hard enough to meaningfully talk about Phyiscs, the ideal of what science is. But it's the apologists, not me, like Gee who are applying Kuhn to these less ideal sciences. I'm just giving the benefit of the doubt to the apologist and saying, ok if Egyptology has a Kuhnian scientific paradigm, then the Book of Abraham is apparently, neither an anomoly or a puzzle that Egyptologists feel they need to deal with, so there is no chance of a critical mass of Mormonesque anomalies arising in Egyptology for it to one day revamp its underpinnings such that all of a sudden the Book of Abraham becomes an increasing part of the normal Egyptological literature.

[_Gadianton]

I can see many useful ways Kuhn can be employed to help understand how people can understand the world differently but not lose faith in the "world."

Well, so do I. And that's the opportunism of the apologist, where Kuhn was trying to understand what science is, the apologists are interested in just using some of the odd results in order to avoid "losing faith".

Kevin Graham, for example, lost his faith in Mormonism but this paradigm shift was not enough to make him lose faith in God.

This is an example of an apologist (LoP) equivocating the word "paradigm" to make a point that has nothing to do with Kuhn. Kevin Graham did not undergo a paradigm shift. communities have paradigm shifts, not individuals, in Kuhn.

[_LifeOnaPlate]

I can see many useful ways Kuhn can be employed to help understand how people can understand the world differently but not lose faith in the "world."

Well, so do I. And that's the opportunism of the apologist, where Kuhn was trying to understand what science is, the apologists are interested in just using some of the odd results in order to avoid "losing faith".

To the contrary, Kuhn discussed specifically how a certain kind of "faith" was needed, even in the scienciest of sciences. He also mentioned certain people who, not being able to deal with the struggle, give up on science as a profession (apostatize, if you will.) This is where I believe you may misunderstand Christensen's (and my) understanding of Kuhn. It is not geared to making people "doubt" science in any damning way, nor is it intended to "bolster the faith" in and of itself. It is intended to show a number of things. For example, it shows that being patient in the face of anomalies can pay off. It also shows the subjective nature of how the anomalies are understood and dealt with. It shows how one's understanding, assumptions, etc. can have a huge impact on the ultimate belief of a certain position, if you follow me. It shows how people can look at the same data and reach different conclusions based on what each finds more important, what one accepts as evidence, how crisis helps move study along, etc. It helps people understand how they structure their beliefs, etc. In short, the paradigm thing isn't to be used as a safety net, or a free pass, but as a way to understand the reasons you believe something. I think Christensen's take on it (and I will revisit it once more to be sure) is a solid argument.

Kevin Graham, for example, lost his faith in Mormonism but this paradigm shift was not enough to make him lose faith in God.

This is an example of an apologist (LoP) equivocating the word "paradigm" to make a point that has nothing to do with Kuhn. Kevin Graham did not undergo a paradigm shift. communities have paradigm shifts, not individuals, in Kuhn.

[/quote]

Then we read Kuhn differently here. You seem to believe Kuhn's scientific revolutions must always involve a wholesale rewriting of an entire scientific field, etc. In actuality, a person can approach a paradigm shift apart from the community. Kuhn worried that people conflated the "paradigm" with the "scientific community." I believe you may be doing just what he warned against in his postscript here. In this instance, Graham's paradigm which included his understanding of Mormonism was changed by anomalies. A paradigm shift can- nay almost always- involves an individual first before the views spread. In fact, such shifts are generally resisted by the larger scientific community. I believe you have missed this distinction.

Further, a paradigm shift can include aspects of the former paradigm, only reinterpreted or understood in a different light, etc. So again, I think it is you who misunderstood Kuhn on this account and not me "the apologist" misusing Kuhn.

[_Gadianton]

In actuality, a person can approach a paradigm shift apart from the community. Kuhn worried that people conflated the "paradigm" with the "scientific community." I believe you may be doing just what he warned against in his postscript here. In this instance, Graham's paradigm which included his understanding of Mormonism was changed by anomalies. A paradigm shift can- nay almost always- involves an individual first before the views spread. In fact, such shifts are generally resisted by the larger scientific community. I believe you have missed this distinction

This will take some work. Let me quote myself a couple days ago, for starters:

Now things get really fascinating here, because a paradigm is supposed to be inspired or based on some kind of famous experiment or discovery.

Now Godfrey-Smith,

In structure, the term is used in several different ways; one critic counted as many as twenty-one different senses. Kuhn later agreed that he had used the word ambiguously, and throughout his career he kept fine-tuning this and other key concepts. To keep thinks simple, though, in this book I will recognize two different senses of the term "paradigm."

The first sense, which I will call the broad sense, is the one I described above. Here, a paradigm is a package of ideas and methods, which, when combined, make up both a view of the world and a way of doing science...But there is also a narrower sense. According to Kuhn, one key part of a paradigm in the broad sense is a specific achievement, or an exemplar. This achievement might be a strikingly successful experiment, such as Mendel's...So paradigms in the broad sense...include within them paradigms in the narrow sense. In Structure, he defined it in the narrower sense. But in much of his writing, and in most of the work written after Structure using the term, the broad sense is intended.

By equating Kevin's changes in opinion with the "narrow sense" would make it virtually worthless to do the work Kuhn wants it to do. People are different, people change over time, but for there to be such a thing as a "normal science", then all these differences have to cancel out to some degree in order to acheive the agreement, the paradigm for the community, the paradigm in the broad sense. In other words, a paradigm reaches deep enough to allow for a lot of opinion changing, self-discovery, originality, and whatever else without actually "shifting a paradigm".

So you are right that a change in paradigm first has to begin with an individual. But you are trivializing the degree to which the individual, in his famous experiment or model, breaks with the status quo. Since shifts in paradigms involve incommensurability, it would make "normal science" impossible if all the Kevin Graham, Scottie, and David B scientists were constantly shifting their paradigms, it's absurd, if "narrow paradigms" shift that easy, then normal science would be impossible as no one would be able to communicate with each other.

From the SEP:

In the postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn says of paradigms in this sense that they are “the most novel and least understood aspect of this book” (1962/1970a, 187). The claim that the consensus of a disciplinary matrix is primarily agreement on paradigms-as-exemplars is intended to explain the nature of normal science and the process of crisis, revolution, and renewal of normal science.

To quote my earlier self again:

Now things get really fascinating here, because a paradigm is supposed to be inspired or based on some kind of famous experiment or discovery.

So unless you are refering to another "postscript" (not that I remember it distinctly after 6 years anyway) I haven't missed any distinctions.

[_LifeOnaPlate]

By equating Kevin's changes in opinion with the "narrow sense" would make it virtually worthless to do the work Kuhn wants it to do. People are different, people change over time, but for there to be such a thing as a "normal science", then all these differences have to cancel out to some degree in order to acheive the agreement, the paradigm for the community, the paradigm in the broad sense. In other words, a paradigm reaches deep enough to allow for a lot of opinion changing, self-discovery, originality, and whatever else without actually "shifting a paradigm".

So you are right that a change in paradigm first has to begin with an individual. But you are trivializing the degree to which the individual, in his famous experiment or model, breaks with the status quo. Since shifts in paradigms involve incommensurability, it would make "normal science" impossible if all the Kevin Graham, Scottie, and David B scientists were constantly shifting their paradigms, it's absurd, if "narrow paradigms" shift that easy, then normal science would be impossible as no one would be able to communicate with each other.

Again, you appear to believe Kuhn's paradigms, or more importantly the scientific revolutions he speaks about, are completely confined to the actual overall shift of a community of believers. This completely misses the micro for the macro. There is, quite simply, no reason to think paradigm shifts only apply to "scientific data." I just finished a short introduction to literary theory by oxford u press and a great deal of it dealt with, you guessed it, paradigms. It didn't mention them by name but the concept was remarkably clear. I wondered if the author had read Kuhn. Tell me, was this carryover apologetic in nature, or was it a way to understand changes in the way a person or group sees the world, understands the issues? You have given, simply, no good reason for your opinion that the overall structure of paradigms and paradigm changes cannot involve an individual. Indeed, you have conceded that it does happen to individuals before whole groups. If the group doesn't follow this doesn't mean the individual didn't undergo a change in paradigm. Your argument is, as I have suspected from before, much too limited, ironically, in thinking "paradigm changes" as Kuhn outlined them could only occur among a group of chemists or something. Again, Graham can be understood as experiencing a change in paradigm.

I just went through Christensen's paradigms article. I see no conflict there with Kuhn or misuse.

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/revie ... m=2&id=193

Enjoy!

[_Gadianton]

LoP,

You're not reading what I write, especially the quoted material from SEP and Godfrey-Smith which makes the case for me concerning the "micro" and the "macro", I'll return to that briefly at the end here, or in another post.

There is, quite simply, no reason to think paradigm shifts only apply to "scientific data." I just finished a short introduction to literary theory by oxford u press and a great deal of it dealt with, you guessed it, paradigms. It didn't mention them by name but the concept was remarkably clear.

LoP, congratulations on discovering literary theory. If you keep going down this route, you'll understand why at one point, Kuhn came close to sounding like he regreted even writing his book, e.g., the vast applications of "paradigms" to a growing anti-science academic culture which had been largely spearheaded by literary theorists. Clearly, I don't think Kuhn can copyright the word or concept of a "paradigm", but it is wrong to take a later adaption of the word "paradigm" or even worse, a similar concept under a different name, and then attribute it to Kuhn as if he's the one who argued for it and he's the authority by which one rightly appeals to.

[_harmony]

Depending on the audience, words mean different things.

"Recommend" means something entirely different to a Mormon than it does to most of the rest of the population.

Gay means something different in 2000 than it did in 1950.

Kuhn may not like the shift in "paradigm", but it's just one more word that means different things to different people.