I did a course recently on the Sociology of Science, and it covered a study of Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Karl Popper's theory of falsification, and Mertonian norms (aka Ethos of Science).
I found that to be a really good foundation for scientists, and highly recommend these three to anyone in academia or science.
One less obvious area in which Kuhn has exerted tremendous influence, and one not mentioned in this story, is on philosophy, and especially the history of ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre's framing of moral thinking as "history-constituted tradition" was sparked by Kuhn's similar framing of scientific thinking. Except MacIntyre uses this approach to discredit the entirety of academic moral philosophy, from Hume to Rawls. And, while doing so, exposes popular ethical maxims as the arbitrary parodies of such work. He now advocates a return to "Thomistic realism," initiated by Aristotle and developed by Aquinas.
>Kuhn, like Popper, thought that science was mainly about theory, but an increasing amount of cutting-edge scientific research is data- rather than theory-driven.
Science always proclaims to be "data driven." Galileo and the Ptolemaics were working with the same "data." When Aristotle examined the bones of animals, he was working with the same "data" as Darwin. What changes is how they interpret it: what standards of truth and observation they observe in its collection and synthesis. There is no such thing as "raw data."
Re: "There is no such thing as 'raw data'" -- and of interest to Kuhnians everywhere -- this is a terrific book about climate data, climate models, & computation => https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vast-machine
Galileo did not work with the same data as the Ptolemaics. He was first-handed, observing and measuring the world himself, which is exactly what those other people were NOT doing.
Kuhn's really great book is The Copernican Revolution. He was a uniquely insightful historian of science. It's amusing that he took some lessons from the history of science, well known to scholars in that field, simplified and distilled them to the point where even academic philosophers of science could understand them, wrote a short book consisting largely of multiple repetitions of these ideas, and it is this book that made him a superstar among undergraduates and philosophers. Well, good for him.
Am I the only one who read the article and thought the Whig interpretation was more accurate? The "revolution" of quantum mechanics didn't overthrow Newtonian mechanics, Relativity didn't either. They added to Newton's view and corrected it in a few places but to this day the first thing you learn in physics is Newton.
There was no revolution. Newton was right with the caveat that if things are very large, very small, or very fast things may look different. To this day if something disagrees with the core of what Newton said it's almost certainly wrong. The fact that the "paradigm shift" from deterministic to probabilistic left most of science untouched should show how paradigms aren't all that important. Quantum mechanics has multiple "paradigms" describing the exact same things and they're doing close to nothing in terms of pushing science forward, some think they're holding it back because so much time is spent arguing about them.
Re-interpretation of Newton in light of quantum mechanics and relativity are part and parcel of scientific revolution according to Kuhn. Science weaves a narrative of progress. The extreme example, and the subject of Kuhn's earlier work was the Copernican revolution: we still get the heliocentric model presented as an astronomical refinement not a form of heresy. The standard science narrative doesn't see Newton through his own eyes, as principally a theologian, either: he spent a lot of effort trying to prove the existence of god [so did Descartes despite Discourse on Method].
None of this is to downplay their intellectual contributions. It is only to illustrate Kuhn's assertion that science constantly redefines past literature as continuous with incompatible contemporary beliefs: any interpretation of Newton's work orthogonally to the existence of god does not accurately depict his views.
Newton's scientific ideas, which are what matter here, remain largely untouched since they were published in the late 1600's. The fact that you'd resort to bringing up how little science focuses on his beliefs in things like numerology and alchemy doesn't bode well for the strength of Kuhn's work.
There's his scientific work which is widely available, and then there's his personal beliefs. I could really care less if we don't talk about his theology, but if you're accusing science of being dishonest about his mathematical and scientific contributions that's a claim which requires better evidence than you've provided.
I am not anthropmorphizing science, let alone accusing it of anything. Instead, I am explaining Kuhn's work [or at least my reading of it]. However useful it may be to partition Newton's work into mechanics and cosmology, its our partitioning, not Newton's. The "General Scholium" [1] was one of the improvements Newton made to the first edition of Principia in the two decades between first and second editions. There are sociological reasons why students of science are not encouraged to read Newton for themselves.
The General Sholium[0] was an addendum, not a set of corrections to The Principia. And what book doesn't have some corrections between the first and second edition?
> There are sociological reasons why students of science are not encouraged to read Newton for themselves.
Like what? Do you think physics teachers are afraid their students will find out Newton believed in God and then they won't be atheists? Do you think they're pushing materialism or "scientism" and rewriting history to that end? This is close to a conspiracy theory. I think you're ascribing malice or ill intent to what are almost purely pragmatic choices.
Here's the text of The Principia[1], read a few pages and imagine a physics student trying to make sense of it. When I finally opened it I found exactly what I had always been told I would find: something interesting but hard to read and not the best place to learn physics. I don't think there are any physics books today that prove the fundamentals of calculus in the middle of their discussion of physics. That's a pedagogical nightmare. Today you learn calculus and then you do physics with it, but Newton developed calculus to do physics so there were no calculus books he could assume his audience was already familiar with.
Newton wrote Principia in Latin, not English. Latin being, at the time, the language of what Newton practised, natural philosophy and continuous with theology. There was no such thing as science. Thus, it was perfectly normal for Newton's thought to mature, and the Scholium reflected the progress of his thinking over two decades.
Aside from having to add Latin to the scientific cannon alongside German and English and Russian, the direction in which Newton's thinking evolved is disruptive in the context of contemporary science's self image...none of which is surprising given Kuhn's work.
Perhaps you should learn something from Kuhn and consider that attachment to your pet paradigm is holding you back.
When a scientist wants to build up the self-image of science they do the exact opposite of what you're suggesting. They use Newton as an example to prove that science is superior to the other disciplines he also practiced but bore no fruit.
The propensity of a not small portion of the professionally practising population of scientists to postulate the most high profundity to their belief system is a legacy of the discipline's origin among theologians and in the traditionally sectarian institutions that are universities. The proof of science's superiority is on as firm footing as proofs of god when it comes to logical validity, e.g. the Newton that is pointed it to is not the Newton who held the beliefs of Principia's author, as the Schollium demonstrates.
Be fair to theology, for it admits when it's proofs resort to revelation.
Newtonian mechanics is the mathematical limit of quantum mechanics for ħ -> 0. It is still taught to every physics major. It is still useful. We use it to calculate whether a bridge will collapse, to simulate car crashes, to simulate water flow, and I believe even NASA uses it to calculate rocket trajectories. The heliocentric model on the other hand is just wrong.
It is important to make this distinction if you want to accurately understand scientific revolutions. It is not accurate to think that quantum mechanics was just this new thing that replaced Newtonian mechanics. One has to keep the precise correspondence between Newtonian and quantum mechanics in mind. This isn't just a narrative that scientists use to feel good about Newton.
This brings into question whether revolution is a good word for this phenomenon.
It's true that Newtonian physics has not been discarded, but I think you're greatly underestimating the intellectual chasm that had to be crossed to get from it to relativity and quantum mechanics. The idea that not only velocity but also time, distance, and mass are relative; the wave/particle duality; the uncertainty principle; quantum entanglement; curvature of space-time -- all these were shocking, mind-bending ideas at the time they were first broached. They all seem to fit together neatly now, in retrospect, and we understand that Newtonian physics is a useful approximation that is quite sufficiently accurate in a lot of everyday situations, but the way we think about physics now is almost inconceivably different from the way we thought about it 200 years ago.
Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology.
It's true that Newtonian mechanics remains useful despite being based on a now falsified premise: time is a constant. Although his laws eventually break down, they do not lose all their power to predict effects from causes under certain common conditions.
Popular myth holds that Ptotomeic cosomology was conceived by dull-minded early men arrogantly imagining that God must have placed us at the center. But no. It was based on centuries of documented observation (now called "data") and brilliant reasoning. The predictive power of this well developed model was excellent, even after it was overturned.
So are these revolutions somehow categorically different? It's easy to think so, but that's based on an illusion of mind. Geometry is somehow much more tangible or "factual" in our minds than time. But is a flaw in the position of objects really more fundamental than a flaw in the understanding of time?
> Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology.......So are these revolutions somehow categorically different?
They're so different that I'm surprised it's even a question. If anything the illusion of mind is bending them to fit a narrative.
When Relativity explained the precession of Mercury's perihelion the existing physics was off by 1/12,000,000th of Mercury's orbit (per orbit.) Not only was the Ptolemic system off by entire degrees (as opposed to arcseconds which are 1/3,600th of a degree) it was highly dependent on the position of the observer, if you stood on Jupiter I imagine the Ptolemic system would give you complete nonsense as to where the planets would be.
More importantly Newton's work has never been thrown out and you can derive classical mechanics as a special case of Relativity. You can also derive it from quantum mechanics. I don't believe you can show that the geocentric model of the solar system is a special case of the heliocentric model.
Newtoninan mechanics were once thought to be based on a set of laws. Settled truth, it was thought. A law is no longer a law when it fails to hold under particular conditions, although it might still be useful. The bulk of practical human knowledge fall into this same category. All current laws will eventually find their way there too.
Conditions where relativity manifests seem way out extreme to us today. How extreme would standing on Jupiter have seemed in 1500 when your goal is not to land a rocket on the moon but to develop a more accurate calendar or navigate the Mediterranean? What will they say of Newtonian mechanics after 500 more years of hindsight?
A point that Kuhn makes in his book is that yes, Newtonian mechanics is still very useful, but relativity demonstrated that it is wrong. That is, Newtonian mechanics implies that we live in a particular kind of universe. That implication is false. No matter how useful Newtonian mechanics is, no matter how close it is to being correct in the situation we're familiar with, it is wrong, and the implications of the kind of universe we live in is not correct. That is huge, as it required that the people who think about this for a living (physicists) had to change how they thought completely.
I recommend reading the book, as he goes into this kind of objection. One of his main points about the paradigm shift is that afterwards, the way scientists think about the problems has changed, and as a result, the kind of questions they ask - or even can ask - has changed.
When a theory is based on evidence, then all it really is is an abstraction of said evidence. So unless the evidence is overturned, the theory still stands as accurately as it had since inception.
What QM has is better accuracy and a different scope. It solves different problems, and where it overlaps, it does better. Also, it is not an extension of Newtonian physics, and hence is a new paradigm. It is not a better version of Newtonian physics.
I disagree that multiple paradigms describe the exact same things with respect to paradigm shifting science. They are merely different models, and are not new paradigms in the Khun sense. In fact, the fact that they are not pushing science forward attests to this. There are versions of reality because we are uncertain. Not because each is a different way of thinking that solves new kinds of problems.
I would describe the "revolution" in the following sense. Workers were aware of both successes and failures of the classical model, and did want to throw the baby out with the bath water. They adopted as a ground rule, that any candidate for a new theory had to contain the old theory as a corner case.
Rather than describing a dichotomy between conservatism and revolution, I'd say that the revolutionaries searched for and found a hybrid of the two.
I also think that if any departure from steady-state is defined as a "revolution," then it's self fulfilling.
You're right, and it's the article fault for poorly explaining Kuhn's thinking.
Newton's laws have never been overturned, merely refined, so we've never truly shifted away from a Newtonian paradigm.
A better example (and one that Kuhn himself used), would be phlogiston theory, which was fully overturned when oxygen was redefined as an element and not as simply being "dephlogisticated air".
You have a point but I forgot we were going back to Alchemy and before.
Phlogiston theory was overturned but the idea of oxygen is still standing strong despite the major advances in chemistry since 1773. Other puzzle pieces have been placed around it but they're additions to it. Even if the universe turns out to be a hologram the idea of oxygen will survive.
Once the big puzzle pieces are found they're rarely removed. Since the big shift towards empiricism most "revolutions" and paradigm shifts are happening in new areas or at different scales than the old ones. Much of what are being called revolutions I would call explorations of the unknown.
I think you're actually proving Kuhn's point when he argues that the progress of science involves wiping out almost all memory of obsolete paradigms. When we read a science textbook, all of the information is placed within the structure of the current paradigm, as if none other came before it.
To give an example, how much do you know about theories of geology before 1960? Any educated person today knows the basic idea of plate tectonics, but only a historian of science might know what came before.
According to Kuhn, the impression you get that "puzzle pieces are rarely removed" is something that happens after science has been rewritten to fit a new paradigm.
When was the last time you actually read a science textbook? When you learn a big idea you're usually also taught when it was figured out, who did it and what it replaced. If you think back to chemistry when you were taught about the Bohr model of the atom you were probably also taught about the plum pudding model, that "atom" means indivisible and so on all the way back to the Greek system of four elements.
A quick visit to wikipedia shows modern geology dates itself back to the 17th century. You can view the field since then as successive additions and modifications to what was started by Nicholas Sterno in 1669 when he stated the law of superposition, the principle of original horizontality and the principle of lateral continuity. Those are 3 of the 7 principles of modern stratigraphy that wikipedia lists, but according to you and Kuhn the "modern paradigm" of geology starts in 1965 and everything before that's been erased?
Dude, I thought you were interested in this subject, so I wanted to give some examples of how Kuhn's theory works, seeing as the article did it poorly. I guess I didn't do a much better job myself.
I'm not here to argue with you in case you have that impression.
My intention isn't to be argumentative but to point out that the field of science described by Kuhn doesn't match the field of science that I've seen in reality. Let me be more specific.
> "When we read a science textbook, all of the information is placed within the structure of the current paradigm, as if none other came before it."
Newtonian physics isn't taught from within the frameworks of quantum mechanics or relativity. The opposite is true, it's taught as if we live in a constant-time, deterministic universe. That's an exact wrong prediction for the most central and fundamental field of science. To make it worse it's something that's easy to check. That's frustrating.
You cannot explain the motions of planets with Newton. Not Mercury at least. You cannot launch a rocket with Newtonian physics either. It will explode, and it did indeed. I don't think you can make efficient photocells either by just using Newtonian physics.
So, the new paradigms were a shift from Newtonian physics for sure.
Given his methods and genius, I trust if Newton had had the (modern) data about Mercury's orbit he would have developed further insights in his understanding of the laws of nature.
He explicitly rejected dogmatism and did not claim that his identifications were to be used against new facts if and when such would be discovered.
I agree you need physics Newton never dreamt of for photocells. Explaining Mercury's precession was a big deal for Relativity as well. Out of curiosity, what's non-Newtonian in a rocket launch?
Sorry, my bad about rocket part (There is a difference in Newtonian and Relativity calculations but it is too small). For space technology it is not the rocket launches but, for instance, GPS satellites, that work with the principles of relativity, that cannot be explained by Newtonian physics.
Off topic: I have no idea how this voting stuff works, and I don't know why mine is -3
Kuhn's book can be argued to be one of the most important books of the last 100 years, because it shows the difference between how we think we learn things and how we actually learn them.
Kuhn's book is mostly crap. He cherry picks his revolutions to argue his point better. But the overall idea is solid, if not useful--in some ways it's just Marxism applied to academics.
I found a copy of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" sticking out of a dumpster when I was in college, grabbed it, and read it.
It was surprisingly enjoyable, and surprisingly personally influential. I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about what it was in the human brain that caused this pattern of 'normal science' versus 'revolutionary science' to be stable—and it was time well spent, I think.
Derrida and the other postmodern semioticists, theologians, and literary critics can't hold a candle to Kuhn in the way they banished modernity. Each of our personal "social locations" has a huge effect on how we think.
He might have changed the way a few scientists and a few more philosophers think about science but most people including most practising scientists don't think about such things at all. The general public, I suspect, isn't even aware that there is a 'way the world looked at science' much less that there is a different way of looking at it.
I wouldn't have bothered writing this rant except that the sloppy use of words like 'world' when all that can really be meant is something like 'the world of science' or possibly 'the views of some academic observers of science' is one of the defining characteristics of journalism (both high brow and mass market). When one claims far more than is plausible one does a disservice to the truth and misleads the interested lay person and when that person discovers that the claim is untrue the reputations not only of the journalist but also of the original work suffer.
> He might have changed the way a few scientists and a few more philosophers think about science but most people including most practising scientists don't think about such things at all. The general public, I suspect, isn't even aware that there is a 'way the world looked at science' much less that there is a different way of looking at it.
There's a word for the state of these scientists and laypeople: ignorance.
Edit to add some substance to the name-calling:
There's a certain perspective held by many scientists that the scientific method can and will describe the purposes and meaning behind every phenomena both natural and man-made that have any relevance or importance to our lives as humans. If those holding this perspective grant that valuable knowledge lies outside the ability of science to observe and explain, they tend to view it as irrelevant and frivolous. Those who hold this perspective tend to view philosophy as mere wordplay, and the idea of studying science from the perspective of philosophy (as Kuhn did) as pointless or an usurpation of their position at the top of the intellectual ladder.
Feynman embodied this attitude when he said, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."
It's a belligerent and proud ignorance that puts a black stain on the practice of science today, and an attitude that threatens some of the most valuable academic disciplines in the humanities, to the detriment of our culture.
My brief statement above was meant to call attention to this belligerent ignorance and poke fun at it a little bit.
This is a popular view that philosophers have about scientists, but as usual it fails to mention how exactly philosophy of science has been or is to be useful to scientists. Ironically, science has been very influential in advancing the state of philosophy.
This is a popular view that philosophers have about scientists, but as usual it fails to mention how exactly philosophy of science has been or is to be useful to scientists.
Wouldn't Karl Popper's work on emphasizing the importance of falsification be an example of how philosophy of science was useful to scientists?
My parents, both scientists educated in the 1950s, never heard of them. They followed a pretty simplistic notion of scientific methodology, that mainly revolved around intellectual honesty: Report everything that you observe, and be willing to change your beliefs when confronted with new information.
I never heard of Popper or Kuhn until after I finished my science degree, and then, only in the context of debates about evolution versus creationism. But I don't know if I'm typical or not.
I honestly don't know. I'd always assumed that all of that happened well before I was born, but never bothered looking for any exact dates. It's just something I've always been exposed to, and have always taken the importance of falsification as a given.
A quick search turns up this[1] from Wikipedia:
"In work beginning in the 1930s, Popper gave falsifiability a renewed emphasis as a criterion of empirical statements in science."
OTOH, the entry on Popper at Plato[2] says this:
"However, in the 1970's a series of papers published by researchers such as Miller, Tichý, and Grünbaum in particular revealed fundamental defects in Popper's formal definitions of verisimilitude."
which suggest that his work had achieved enough signficance by the 1970's that other people were basing work on it (and in this case, perhaps refuting bits of it).
Miller, Tichý, and Grünbaum are philosophers. He definitely had a big influence on philosophy of science, but the question is to what extent he had an influence on science. The works of physicists before 1930 are so sophisticated that I honestly can't imagine that they didn't understand these ideas and more already. These weren't some dark ages; the Michelson-Morley experiment was done in 1887!
The idea of falsification suffers from three issues: (1) it's binary true or false (2) it's asymmetric (falsifying a theory T vs falsifying the theory not T) and (3) it's kind of vague what constitutes falsification. Bayesian incorporation of evidence into beliefs arguably gives a superior solution to the problem, and Laplace (1749 - 1827) was already fully aware of this.
The scientific process, since it is based on empirical observation, can only address entities and phenomena that possess a position in time and space[1]. Asking it to directly address subjective subject matter is like asking a flashlight to study the darkness.
Philosophy may not be directly beneficial to the narrow practice of science, but it is critical to almost every activity surrounding it.
For example, philosophy can help scientists answer questions like:
- Does the pain caused during animal research justify the knowledge obtained from it?
- Should we fund scientists to study better methods of farming, or atomic bombs?
- Should we publish the details of the specific mutations required to produce a superbug from bird flu, or omit those details from our methods?
- What is scientific knowledge, and how does it differ from other types of knowledge?
And on and on and on.
Let's look at Feynmann's statement again, that "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."
We're supposed to read that and think 'Hah, yeah - birds don't know and can't know anything about ornithology, how can it be useful to them?!'
Of course it can be useful to them. We study birds to better understand them and their behavior. We use the results of ornithology to make their lives better by answering questions like:
- What can we do to minimize the impact of wind-power generators on the migratory patterns of birds?
- How can we save and preserve this near-extince species of bird?
- How do birds influence the spread of jungles and other forests?
And on and on and on. Ornithologists study birds, and the interaction between birds and humans - of course such knowledge will be useful to birds.
In the same way, an individual scientist can be completely ignorant of philosophy and still be a good scientist - but philosophy (and other non-scientific disciplines) support and inform every aspect of life around her job. If she wants to explore the ethical ramifications of her work, needs to justify support of her work, or discuss the process of science contrast to other disciplines, she must begin to use the terminology and processes of philosophy, not science.
[1] 'Soft sciences', such as psychology, sociology, economics, etc. attempt to study subjective phenomena but do so by directly observing behavior of the entities/systems under study.
Note in parent comment the phrase "it fails to mention how exactly philosophy of science has been or is to be useful to scientists". You are arguing for some kind of general usefulness of philosophy to scientists, but the parent comment was much more narrow and specific than that: it was about usefulness of philosophy of science to the practice of science.
> We're supposed to read that and think 'Hah, yeah - birds don't know and can't know anything about ornithology, how can it be useful to them?!'
I think you misunderstood the quote. Birds will not fly any differently whether ornithologists study them or not. That is what it means that ornithology is not useful to birds: the birds will not use ornithology to make decisions about flying. Feynman, as a practicing scientist, was well-placed to say whether philosophy of science informed his practice of science, so his comment absolutely does not reflect his ignorance.
> but philosophy (and other non-scientific disciplines) support and inform every aspect of life around her job.
The things that you listed won't inform how a scientist does science, so they don't really address the core of the question.
But the original assertion does not mention any specifics: "it fails to mention how exactly philosophy of science has been or is to be useful to scientists"
It just says "useful to scientists". I feel that my argument shows quite clearly how philosophy can be useful to scientists - maybe not in the actually practice of doing science (as that is practicing science - not practicing philosophy), but definitely useful for the scientist when he attempts to integrate his scientific findings or practice with the surrounding culture.
One might take this question, 'How is philosophy useful to the practice of science', flip it around, and come at it using your approach:
How is science useful to to the practice of philosophy?
Well, the answer there, since we've focussed on the actual practice instead of general utility, is that science isn't very useful to the practice of philosophy.
EDIT: I should qualify that last statement - scientific discoveries, when they overlap with assertions made by philosophers, can help to invalidate inaccurate philosophical assertions, and lend support to valid statements. So it can be helpful during the validation stage of the philosophical process.
There are good answers to that question, but let's answer that in the same style that you answered, albeit a lot more concretely: cars rely on science, philosophers use cars, therefore science is useful to philosophy.
Cars do not rely on science, primarily. The existence of cars is primarily due to engineers developing technology (a different process than that of science), not scientists doing science.
If you believe that science can explain everything, your conceptual map widens the concept of 'science' to include practically everything that refers to the objective world, making the concept less useful for precise thought about epistemology.
And philosophy is more directly useful to scientists than cars are to philosophers. For one thing you're comparing a concrete artifact to epistemological processes. We're comparing processes, not artifacts. The concepts developed by philosophers have direct relevance to scientists, see my examples above.
My reading of Feynman is a little different: I think the point is that philosophy of science has only analysed history so far and has never by itself brought about a change in the way science is done.
This is not to say that the philosophy is useless or that it will never influence science in the future - Feynman is just stating how things have been.
Put another way, I simply don't see philosophy of science as it is helping someone do better science. I would be very interested if this were false.
Feynman had the luxury of working in a dynamic field - not one that had been stuck eating its own regurgitations and chewing its cud for hundreds of years and needed a fresh start, like physics in Newton's time.
I agree with the sibling comment[0] on the interpretation of Feynman's quote. Also, rejecting the usefulness of philosophy of science doesn't imply accepting the view that the scientific method can and will describe the purposes and meaning behind every phenomena both natural and man-made that have any relevance or importance to our lives as humans. I think the following is a good summary of Feynman's lack of commitment to any philosophical viewpoint[1]:
I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it, that would be very nice to discover.
If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is, but whatever way it comes out its nature is there and she's going to come out the way she is, and therefore when we go to investigate it we shouldn't predecide what it is we're trying to do except to try to find out more about it. If you say your problem is, why do you find out more about it, if you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you're going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature, but I don't look at it [like that]. My interest in science is to simply find out about the world, and the more I find out the better it is, like, to find out.
Kuhn's key point is that scientists (like many humans) tend to be herd animals. When you get results that are inconsistent with the public record, not to mention current dogma, there's a tendency to dig seriously for systematic errors. And when you start getting results that are consistent with the public record, you tend to get on with the writeup. Being aware of that stereotypic behavior is the first step in being free of it. No?
I don't know what Feynman was talking about, when he said that. Much philosophy of science is bullshit, in my considered opinion. But Kuhn's and Popper's work, for example, are not. And I'd be very surprised if Feynman claimed that they were.
Also, maybe Feynman was just fucking with the interviewer. He was like a physics version of Lenny Bruce. But warmer, like Bill Clinton.
I read Kuhn in my second year of grad school and his bit on the structure of a scientific paper I found very helpful. His section on what goes in an introduction to was supremely helpful in demonstrating how to frame your work so that it finds acceptance.
After reading that portion, I observed that I was getting much nicer peer reviews, and I've since recommended it to several people.
Anyone who enjoys Kuhn's Structure should go on to read Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and Farewell to Reason. To summarise: there is only one rule in science, and that is "anything goes!". There are interesting parallels between scientific method and software methods...
I found Against Method to be intellectually dishonest. Feyerabend cherry picks anecdotes from history, and distorts history, to support his pet idea that there is no such thing as the scientific method or falsifiability.
I read this book in college (1970s), but the bit that sticks in my memory was his discussion of observations through Galileo's telescope. His observation, and others' confirmation, of Jupiter's moons, the phases of the planets, and other phenomena helped end the Ptolemaic era, and had a profound effect on the development of science. Feyerabend starts with the idea that "anything goes" and tries to support it by describing some anecdotes of people who looked through Galileo's telescope and said they couldn't see anything. He thinks these anecdotes should be weighted equally with the body of detailed astronomical observation, and thinks it was arbitrary to base scientific models on observations of what, after all, were real things. He starts with his conclusion and finds anecdotes to support it. I suspected at the time that he wasn't even taking himself seriously, but plenty of other people seem to have been.
You're missing the point of the discussion. The point is that observation is a far less straightforward thing than it's sometimes made out to be. It is clear with hindsight that Galileo was indeed observing the moons of Jupiter, but it was far from clear at the time. The reports of people who didn't see anything are no more "anecdotal" than Galileo's reports that he did see something, and there is little reason to doubt the veracity of either set of reports. It is well known that there's a certain knack to seeing things through telescopes and microscopes, and if you look through one for the first time you may simply fail to see what a trained observer sees. Neither the telescope nor human visual perception were well understood at the time, and it must have been difficult to know what to make of the conflicting reports. Feyerabend's entire argument depends on the assumption that Galileo was - at least in retrospect - doing the right thing. However, the right thing in this instance turned out to require the violation of pretty much every prescription of the "scientific method".
If that were the point, it's unlikely that I missed it, because it was a commonplace before Feyerabend wrote his book, and I was and am steeped in the idea.
Feyerabend's position was far more radical. He (and, again, I'm trying not to misrepresent him, but I haven't read any of his stuff in decades) was trying to show that science is no more rational than anything else that people do, that scientists accept or ignore evidence arbitrarily, and that the existence of a scientific method is a myth. He was wrong, and the Galileo stuff is a good example. On the one hand, you have, not just Galileo himself, but a bunch of other people, observing very specific things, and the same things, repeatably; things that have natural physical explanations. On the other hand, you have some people who didn't see anything, or just a blur. You're right that there was little experience of looking through telescopes. But the failure to make an observation is not an observation. That scientists were influenced, in their model building, by observations, even in the face of the inability of some people to make them, does not mean that science is irrational. That the course of science is complex and mired in politics doesn't mean that there is no such thing as a scientific method.
Again, you're analyzing what Galileo did with the benefit of hindsight. With hindsight, we know who was using the telescope correctly and who wasn't. At the time, you had a complex set of rather fuzzy observations made using a poorly understood instrument, and some of these observations were in conflict with arguably more reliable observations. Feyerabend is pointing out that Galileo wasn't right because he was more scientific and more rational than his critics. In that sense, his decisions to accept certain bits of evidence and ignore others (e.g. the apparently obvious fact that the Earth is not in motion) were arbitrary. That is, these decisions did not follow from (and in fact sometimes went against) the scientific method as it is typically enunciated. With hindsight, we can offer a post-hoc rational reconstruction of each decision, but that can't be taken seriously as an account of what Galileo was actually doing. So yes, the scientific method is a myth if understood as a set of guidelines the following of which has been a major cause of scientific progress.
Feyerabend didn't understand QM whatsoever, not just on some philosophical level. Among his other sins, he went around parading van Leeuwen's theorem like it was some deeply profound philosophical statement.
Yes, I can dig up references if someone asks, I'm just lazy atm.
"Parading" must mean something different to you than it does to me, then. I'd be wary of taking those sorts of secondary sources too seriously. It is not very difficult to get academics to say mean things about each other.
He doesn't appear to ever have written about it. This is a very odd way to criticize him. Why not focus on his published work? He wrote a lot about QM, so his purported total lack of understanding should be evident in that body of work. Much better than digging up some rumors that you can't even provide a reference for. (The commentary that you're referring to appears to be rather well hidden, by the way.)
I would rather suggest to read Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery or works of Lakatos before reading Feyerabend's Against Method. Feyerabend was a former assistant of Popper and mainly criticised his methodological views.
I loved reading SoSR in the Philosophy of Science course I took as an undergrad. I wrote a term paper about how the discovery of quasicrystals didn't fit his model. I'd probably be embarrassed to go back and read it, but I had fun writing it.
I found that to be a really good foundation for scientists, and highly recommend these three to anyone in academia or science.