I don't know what's coming but I suspect that anybody who can cite Thomas Kuhn had better start packing their bags. Proletarian revolutions rarely spare the intellectuals, and don't let their bank accounts fool you, these are proletarians.
I don't have any issues with reusing/repurposing Kuhn but I don't think this is what he himself meant at least by the „Postscript“-edition „SSR“ when you characterise „paradigm shift” like this:
“Wait a minute, if we cast aside assumptions X, Y, and Z of the existing paradigm, then we can explain these anomalies!”
Let's call this the simplicity model of paradigm shift or the S model.
This sounds like explicating paradigm shift as a rational mechanism by applying Occam's razor to a current paradigm. When a few individual scientists in the current paradigm decide to jump ship, Kuhn's characterisation is of this movement is religious (thus nonrational only if your norms of rationality are logic-based rather than practice-based): he uses „faith“ more than once in the „Postscript“ if I remember correctly. Let's call this the faith model of paradigm shift or the F model. An implication of the F model is that members of one paradigm do not think of comparing paradigms as a comparison of a list of features. This is what motivates Kuhn's incommensurability thesis, that is, paradigms are untranslatable. It's not a matter of adding or subtracting features of a paradigm, which includes in the broad sense much more than the „framework of assumptions“ (because I think that is the only sense applicable here); it's more Whorfian than Popperian.
Additionally, in „turning back” Kuhn to politics I am not sure what balance of analogies to disanalogies between theory choice and political cosmology obtains to allow us to make the kind of inferences you want to make about politics. Scientific methods don't necessarily get rejected all the time even in paradigm shifts despite changes in their „meaning“.
Thanks for this erudite comment. You're right about all that, and it is one of the reasons why some characterize the incommensurability thesis as slippery and even verging into Feyerabendian relativism. I prefer what you call the S-model to the F-model precisely because it steers away from that maximalist version of Kuhn. But there is a different reading of Kuhn's F-model which is that it's mainly about the social psychology of conversion from one paradigm to another, rather than a full embrace of epistemic incongruity. Heliocentrism IN FACT offers a more complete and accurate picture of celestial motion, even if making the cognitive switch required a leap of faith that many people were unwilling or unable to make.
As to your second point, concerning "turning back" Kuhn toward politics, you're of course right: it's not that, say, the transition from the divine right of kings to popular sovereignty produced (or took place because the latter is) a "more accurate" model of the world. How one assesses the differences between political regimes has largely to do with normative preferences, not with those regime's ability to produce better "objective truth" or material results -- or rather, preferring a regime that produces better objective truths/results is *itself* a normative preference, one that might be characterized as the central ideology of the educated class. In fact, as an overeducated person, I myself happen to subscribe to this ideology. (As a point of contrast, I often think about how Bill O'Reilly once described school shootings as "the price of freedom." He wasn't dismissing the horror of school shootings, but simply stating honestly that, given his own commitment to his idea of liberty, dead innocents were an unfortunate but payable price.)
In the end I think the re-analogizing of Kuhn's framework back to politics is useful mainly as a way to describe the patterned social psychology of epistemic consensus and crisis. Both in science and politics, there are periods where relative epistemic consensus reigns, and ones (where there is a widespread perception) of epistemic crisis. Kuhn offers a helpful model for thinking about how those epistemic crises manifest, what an epistemic revolution looks like, and how the revolution eventually gets resolved into some new epistemic equilibrium.
You said, "movement toward a technocratically managed future in which the norms of liberal democracy would hold and big planetary problems would be tackled rationally... Had Harris eked out a few hundred thousand more well-placed votes last November, they might have been able to sustain that belief — hell, they might even have been right."
It's not decided yet.
The people (like me) who voted for that path are still here. The Democrats as well as those voters who believed Trump and the right-wing media are being confronted daily with real-world evidence that things are not as one-sided as they thought. Their lives are directly and tangibly affected by government policies. Many widely-followed commentators (like Ezra Klein - https://youtu.be/lckYPwQj_NM?si=8LnC6DljO3L7Pimi, Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson) are explaining developments in clear, accessible language. Writers like you are adding valuable perspective and insight.
Kuhn's revolutions were invisible and irrelevant to most people's daily reality. They seem like kaleidoscopic jumps. This upheaval is more akin to the weather - a dynamic system where tiny initial differences can lead to vastly different outcomes.
Crisis is also opportunity. Each of us have the option of adding a tiny increment of momentum to shift the trajectory of history to one that is more sustainable and life-enhancing than the old pattern.
Yes, it is a pivotal time, and the world will emerge a different place, but as you said, "the character of the post-Trumpian equilibrium remains to be determined." Trump's idiocy on climate change may one day make his assault on democracy seem like a trivial distraction.
I don't know what's coming but I suspect that anybody who can cite Thomas Kuhn had better start packing their bags. Proletarian revolutions rarely spare the intellectuals, and don't let their bank accounts fool you, these are proletarians.
Well done, Nils!
I don't have any issues with reusing/repurposing Kuhn but I don't think this is what he himself meant at least by the „Postscript“-edition „SSR“ when you characterise „paradigm shift” like this:
“Wait a minute, if we cast aside assumptions X, Y, and Z of the existing paradigm, then we can explain these anomalies!”
Let's call this the simplicity model of paradigm shift or the S model.
This sounds like explicating paradigm shift as a rational mechanism by applying Occam's razor to a current paradigm. When a few individual scientists in the current paradigm decide to jump ship, Kuhn's characterisation is of this movement is religious (thus nonrational only if your norms of rationality are logic-based rather than practice-based): he uses „faith“ more than once in the „Postscript“ if I remember correctly. Let's call this the faith model of paradigm shift or the F model. An implication of the F model is that members of one paradigm do not think of comparing paradigms as a comparison of a list of features. This is what motivates Kuhn's incommensurability thesis, that is, paradigms are untranslatable. It's not a matter of adding or subtracting features of a paradigm, which includes in the broad sense much more than the „framework of assumptions“ (because I think that is the only sense applicable here); it's more Whorfian than Popperian.
Additionally, in „turning back” Kuhn to politics I am not sure what balance of analogies to disanalogies between theory choice and political cosmology obtains to allow us to make the kind of inferences you want to make about politics. Scientific methods don't necessarily get rejected all the time even in paradigm shifts despite changes in their „meaning“.
Thanks for this erudite comment. You're right about all that, and it is one of the reasons why some characterize the incommensurability thesis as slippery and even verging into Feyerabendian relativism. I prefer what you call the S-model to the F-model precisely because it steers away from that maximalist version of Kuhn. But there is a different reading of Kuhn's F-model which is that it's mainly about the social psychology of conversion from one paradigm to another, rather than a full embrace of epistemic incongruity. Heliocentrism IN FACT offers a more complete and accurate picture of celestial motion, even if making the cognitive switch required a leap of faith that many people were unwilling or unable to make.
As to your second point, concerning "turning back" Kuhn toward politics, you're of course right: it's not that, say, the transition from the divine right of kings to popular sovereignty produced (or took place because the latter is) a "more accurate" model of the world. How one assesses the differences between political regimes has largely to do with normative preferences, not with those regime's ability to produce better "objective truth" or material results -- or rather, preferring a regime that produces better objective truths/results is *itself* a normative preference, one that might be characterized as the central ideology of the educated class. In fact, as an overeducated person, I myself happen to subscribe to this ideology. (As a point of contrast, I often think about how Bill O'Reilly once described school shootings as "the price of freedom." He wasn't dismissing the horror of school shootings, but simply stating honestly that, given his own commitment to his idea of liberty, dead innocents were an unfortunate but payable price.)
In the end I think the re-analogizing of Kuhn's framework back to politics is useful mainly as a way to describe the patterned social psychology of epistemic consensus and crisis. Both in science and politics, there are periods where relative epistemic consensus reigns, and ones (where there is a widespread perception) of epistemic crisis. Kuhn offers a helpful model for thinking about how those epistemic crises manifest, what an epistemic revolution looks like, and how the revolution eventually gets resolved into some new epistemic equilibrium.
The framework of fighting over the official future is very relevant for southern California water! Thanks for writing
You said, "movement toward a technocratically managed future in which the norms of liberal democracy would hold and big planetary problems would be tackled rationally... Had Harris eked out a few hundred thousand more well-placed votes last November, they might have been able to sustain that belief — hell, they might even have been right."
It's not decided yet.
The people (like me) who voted for that path are still here. The Democrats as well as those voters who believed Trump and the right-wing media are being confronted daily with real-world evidence that things are not as one-sided as they thought. Their lives are directly and tangibly affected by government policies. Many widely-followed commentators (like Ezra Klein - https://youtu.be/lckYPwQj_NM?si=8LnC6DljO3L7Pimi, Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson) are explaining developments in clear, accessible language. Writers like you are adding valuable perspective and insight.
Kuhn's revolutions were invisible and irrelevant to most people's daily reality. They seem like kaleidoscopic jumps. This upheaval is more akin to the weather - a dynamic system where tiny initial differences can lead to vastly different outcomes.
Crisis is also opportunity. Each of us have the option of adding a tiny increment of momentum to shift the trajectory of history to one that is more sustainable and life-enhancing than the old pattern.
Yes, it is a pivotal time, and the world will emerge a different place, but as you said, "the character of the post-Trumpian equilibrium remains to be determined." Trump's idiocy on climate change may one day make his assault on democracy seem like a trivial distraction.