Mopologetic Case Study: The Kuhnian Shift

[_MrStakhanovite]

DrW and Morely,

Thanks for the compliments! I appreciate them.

[_MrStakhanovite]

You have inspired me to create my own Mopologetic Case Study: Critical Biblical Scholarship edition. I'm hoping for a grant from Cassius to become a visiting scholar, complete with funding.

I hope this gets pushed through and the project sees the light of day.

[_Simon Belmont]

semantics is arbitrary, every word is 'made up' by someone. You don't get to decide what is a word and what is not a word.

Well yes, words evolve over time (and usually long periods of time with the exception of Xerox). I don't make the decision about what is and is not a word, I was just wondering why you bought into it. That's all.

[_Gadianton]

Thanks for sharing your paper Mr. Stak. The apologists love Thomas Kuhn (much more than he would have loved them). I request for your next paper, you deal with this flip of the Kuhn Switch* by Gee:

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... m=1&id=171

What this means is that Kuhn did not see science as an enterprise that could explain the unobservable, because the unobservable did not exist.

paradigm can be understood as your worldview, though Kuhn meant the term in a much more narrow focus.

Indeed, indeed. Niether Mopologists nor Mormons in general can have a "paradigm" in the way Kuhn meant it, though they do have one in the Stephen Covey sense of the word. In fact, Mopologetics runs explicitly contrary to Kuhn, since Kuhn argued that scientists should work within the paradigm. If mesoamerican research has a paradigm, then the LTG is heresy, a complete waste of time and hurtful to science. The institution is key for Kuhn, he's like a socialist when contrasted with Richard Feynman, whose rhetorical excess painted the academy as bunch of blustering false priests, ever in danger of being overturned by the underdog in "free market" competition.

Mopologists wish only to scrape the cream from the top of sociology of knowledge approaches to science. They want the relativism, so their stupid-ass psuedoscience can be appear legitimate. But these are not otherwise theories that help the cause of the marginalized revolutionary. If Paul Feyerabend could question the legitimacy of Galileo's free thinking, you bet your ass that FARMS's ain't worth a crap.





*basically an "eject" button

[_MrStakhanovite]

Egyptology has only recently begun to feel the impact of Thomas Kuhn's work on the hard sciences.

LOL!

[_Dr. Shades]

Is there any way to alert Kevin Christensen himself to this thread?

[_bcspace]

No working examples of TKS? Just like there are no examples of the elusive Internet vs. Chapel Mormon dichotomy. I think this can all be chalked up to one delusion or another on the part of LDS "critics".

Hi BCSpace.

Hi Stak. Pseudo-intellectual pursuits the highlight of your day again?

[_MrStakhanovite]

Hi Stak. Pseudo-intellectual pursuits the highlight of your day again?

Yeah, I usually start off with navel gazing in the morning, then I read the liberal media looking for Mormon related stories, so I can engage in yellow journalism and presentism. Due to my overwhelming introversion, I then get high, read wikipedia, and troll Mormon forums.

[_bcspace]

Yeah, I usually start off with navel gazing in the morning, then I read the liberal media looking for Mormon related stories, so I can engage in yellow journalism and presentism. Due to my overwhelming introversion, I then get high, read wikipedia, and troll Mormon forums.

Just as I thought.
;)

[_EAllusion]

For most when I've seen the Kuhnian shift, it's had virtually nothing to do with Kuhn. The name is just brought up because it has a certain slightly esoteric academic-sounding cache'.

Rather, it's just an example of the hoary apologetic that current science unfriendly to faith has the capacity to be upturned and replaced by new scientific knowledge friendly to it. In other words, it's a variation on the classic, "problem of induction; therefore I can believe almost anything I want" gambit that is used by cranks and fringe theorists the world over.

Indeed, in John Baez's infamous and semi-seriousphysics crackpot index, you'll see variations of this all over the place, including claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a paradigm shift or comparing your views to people who have a reputation for being scientific revolutionaries.

You see, regardless of whether Kuhn overstated the revolutionary nature of scientific progress, the vast, vast majority of fringe ideas are just bad ideas. Just because scientific understanding has the capacity to change down the road, that alone isn't justification for believing something that hasn't obtained that justification nor reason to think science is going to change in any particular direction. We still are bound to believe what is reasonable now.

Regarding the Kevin Christenson types, I think Stak has it wrong. He is very much interested in the incommensurability that Kuhn offers. It's meant to insulate criticism of the Mormon apologetics from mainstream science, though at the cost of something equivalent to epistemic relativism. Fundamental objections to that aside, I think Gad's point is the right one to bring up. Kuhn faults a person for not engaging in "puzzle-solving" within the dominant paradigm. People can't just imagine themselves to be in a hermetically sealed alternative paradigm and call it a day. He's no friend of the crank.