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Not
only did the sociologists get things mixed up, when
they adopted a philosophy instead of an empirical
theory for their consensus paradigm, they
furthermore got things backwards, when they made
Romanticism their consensus-paradigm philosophy of
science.
While the natural sciences rejected
Positivism and then moved forward to the
post-Positivist philosophy of contemporary
Pragmatism, sociologists rejected Positivism and
then moved backward to the pre-Positivist philosophy
of Romanticism.
This contrast has its origins in the
different histories of physics and sociology.
Sociology is a new science with no noteworthy
empirical accomplishments to supply its academic
culture with precedent.
Physics on the other hand has a long and
glorious history of accomplishments; the historic
scientific revolution started with the astronomy of
Copernicus and was consummated with the celestial
mechanics of Newton.
When the twentieth-century revolutions in
physics, namely relativity theory and quantum
theory, revealed the inadequacies in the early
Positivism, the physicists did what they had
previously found successful: they embraced the
pragmatically more successful theory on the basis of
its empirical test outcomes alone, rejected the
ontology described by its predecessor, and attempted
to cope with the anything-but-intuitive or
commonsense semantical interpretation and consequent
ontology of the radically new theory.
Furthermore in the twentieth century this
practice had become sufficiently routine that they
were able to recognize and articulate their
reactions.
It took the philosophers of science, however,
nearly fifty years to capture the practice by
developing the new systematic philosophy of
language, which defines the contemporary Pragmatist
philosophy.
The contemporary Pragmatist philosophy of
science differs from both Positivism and Romanticism
in a very fundamental way, because both of these
latter include ontological considerations in their
criteria for scientific criticism.
They differ between one another only about
which types of ontology they will accept: the
Positivists reject all mentalism in social and
behavioral science, while the Romantics require it.
The contemporary Pragmatists on the other
hand subordinate all ontological questions and
commitments to the empirical adequacy of the
scientific law or theory, a view now known as
scientific realism, even if some such as Kuhn view
empirical criticism to be less conclusively
decidable than do earlier philosophers such as
Popper.
And the result of subordinating ontologies to
the outcomes of empirical criticisms is that
ontologies change as science develops.
Ironically the philosophy of science that the
contemporary sociologists impose upon their
membership is not only anachronistic but also quite
at variance with the philosophy which Kuhn uses for
his philosophical interpretation of the history and
dynamics of science.
The followers of Parsons accepted Weber's verstehen
concept of social science explanation, whereby
empathetic plausibility is the principal criterion
for scientific criticism.
Whatever one may think of Kuhn's solution to
the problem of scientific belief and the thesis of
the consensus paradigm that constitutes his solution
to this problem, the issue of freely ignoring
empirical anomalies in normal science becomes moot,
when there can be no empirical anomalies.
The
verstehen criterion reduces scientific criticism
to what one or another particular critic finds
intuitively acceptable, empathetically plausible, or
otherwise comfortably familiar, however covert or
idiosyncratic to the particular critic.
It reduces criticism to quarrels about
intuitions; empirically adequate work is rejected
out of hand, if it "doesn't make sense"
according to the intuition of the particular critic.
This institutional criterion may be
contrasted with empirical criticism in modern
physics.
When modern physicists were confronted
firstly with Einstein's relativity theory and then
with quantum theory, their profession in each case
decided to accept the new physics, because it is
more empirically adequate in spite of the fact that
it is anything but intuitively familiar or
platitudinous.
This is not possible even today in American
academic sociology, because the American
sociological profession accepts and enforces
consensus about Weber's strong version of the
Romantic philosophy of science, and consequently
they can make no distinction between contrary
empirical evidence and contrary intuitive opinion.
Parsons had never referenced Kuhn, and
probably never read him; he had his own agenda for
sociology long before Kuhn.
The enforced consensus about Parson's
sociology may be explained in part by the
appointment of Parsons to the presidency of the
American Sociological Association (ASA).
In his The
Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970) the
sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner observed that Parsons
used this position to influence the appointments to
other executive positions in the ASA including most
notably both the ASA's Publications Committee and
the position of editor of its American Sociological Review.
Gouldner reports that there existed a
continuity-convergence ideology that produced a
blanketing mood of consensus that smothers
intellectual criticism and innovation.
However, no conspiracy theory involving
Parsons could adequately explain the sociologists'
willingness to adopt his distinctive functionalist
sociology and its associated German Romantic
philosophy of science.
The doctrinairism of the American
sociological profession and its receptivity to
Parson's Romanticism is firstly explained by the
thesis of the functionalist sociological doctrine
itself.
The thesis of the functionalist doctrine is
that social controls producing conformity to a
consensus of views and values explain the existence
of social order in any group.
And this in turn implies that failure to
conform is dysfunctional in a pejorative sense of
being disorderly even to the extent of threatening
complete disintegration of the group.
Advocates of Parsons' functionalist sociology
could not easily escape the inclination to apply
these concepts to their own profession with
Parsonian functionalism itself serving as the
consensus view, and to persuade themselves that
Kuhn's theory of the development of empirical
science is a logical extension of the Parsonian
functionalist sociology.
Contemporary academic sociologists not only
believe that social conformity to a consensus
paradigm in the scientific community functions to
produce social order, with Kuhn's philosophy they
also believe that it functions to produce scientific
progress.
Secondly Kuhn's theory made its appearance at
an opportune time.
Lundberg's initially popular Positivist
program for American sociology had waned, because it
never got beyond the stage of a programmatic
proposal, and years earlier Parsons had launched his
distinctive functionalist sociology from the
prestigious platform provided by his faculty
position as chairman of the sociology department at
Harvard University.
When Kuhn's sociological thesis of progress
in science appeared, the parvenu
scientific profession seeking acceptance among the
empirical sciences was predisposed to impose an
ostensibly progress-producing consensus paradigm.
The outcome of this combination of Parsonian
Romanticism and Kuhnian normal science has been a
chimerical science, a Romantic folk sociology that
is about as normal as the gothic caricature of
science depicted by Shelley's character, Victor
Frankenstein - a Romantic grotesque deserving the
epitaph "American Gothic" sociology.
As it happens, American Gothic sociology
seems to have become the appalling specter to
prospective sociology students and to sociology
students' prospective employers.
In its
Science and Engineering Doctorates the National
Science Foundation (NSF) has released statistics
revealing a thirty-nine percent decline in the
number of doctoral degrees in sociology earned
annually in the United States since 1976.
This compares with a nearly seven percent
growth in doctorates for all sciences during the
same period.
The NSF also reports that the median age of
receipt of the doctorate in social science is
between thirty-two and thirty-three years.
And since the post-World War II baby-boom
years of rising aggregate number of births did not
end until 1961, it is clear that American academic
sociology has been in decline during a period in
which the pool of potential students has been
rising.
Therefore sociology's decline is not merely a
demographic phenomenon circumstantial to the history
of the profession; it is the consequence of a
pathological condition intrinsic to the American
sociological profession's institutional values,
normative standards, and research practices.
Kuhn’s
Linguistic Analysis of Incommensurability
Philosophers of science such as Feyerabend
typically start with linguistic analysis.
But Kuhn firstly wrote his interpretative
description in history of science, and only after
many years did he attempt any language analysis to
explain and defend his thesis of semantic
incommensurability.
In the years following Structure of Scientific Revolutions this thesis evolved
considerably, but he never repudiated it, because it
is the corner stone for his philosophy of science,
without which his metatheory collapses.
Or better, it might be called the keystone of
his architectonic, because it separates and supports
his correlative ideas of normal and revolutionary
science together with all their philosophical,
methodological, and sociological concomitants.
Pull away this keystone and his
normal-revolutionary dichotomy would differ only in
degree, thus causing his distinctive thesis of
scientific revolution crumble.
Kuhn’s
attempts at language analysis expressed in his later
papers have been collected and published as a volume
titled The
Road Since Structure (2000), and in the chapter
titled “Afterwords” (1993) he states that his
efforts to understand and refine his
incommensurability thesis has been his primary and
increasingly obsessive concern for thirty years,
during the last five of which (since 1987) he has
made what he calls a rapid series of significant
breakthroughs. Thus it is in his later papers that
his definitive statements are to be found.
But Kuhn seems not to have been comfortable
with philosophers’ language analyses, and the
knowledgeable reader of Road
Since Structure will find himself struggling
through Kuhn’s lengthy, laborious, and loquacious
re-inventions of his incommensurability thesis, as
Kuhn struggles with language analysis to recast,
revise and rescue his semantic incommensurability
thesis.
In his
autobiographical interview in 1999 he reports that
he took the idea of incommensurability from
mathematics, where he firstly encountered it in high
school while studying calculus and specifically
while pondering the proof for the irrationality of
the square root of the number two. In a later
statement of the idea set forth in his
“Commensurability, Comparability,
Communicability” (1987) reprinted in
Road Since Structure he gives other common
examples of incommensurability from mathematics: The
hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle is
incommensurable with its side; the circumference of
a circle is incommensurable with its radius.
He notes that these cases are incommensurable
because there is no unit of length contained without
residue an integral number of times in each member
of the pair.
Mathematicians say that incommensurable
magnitudes have no common integer divisor except the
number one.
In mathematics incommensurability means there
is no common measure, and for his thesis of semantic
incommensurability Kuhn substitutes “no common
language” for “no common measure” for
metaphorical use in his Structure
of Scientific Revolutions.
Initially
in Structure
of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn’s discussions
of incommensurability were vague.
He says that relied on intuition and
metaphor, on the double sense - visual and
conceptual - of the verb “to see.” In his
“Commensurability, Comparability,
Communicability” (1983) he noted that his view of
revolutionary change has increasingly moderated.
He said that his concept of a scientific
revolution originated in his discovery that to
understand any part of the science of the past, the
historian must first learn the language in which it
was written, and that the language-learning process
is interpretative.
He maintains that success in interpretation
is achieved in large chunks involving the sudden
recognition of the new patterns or gestalts, and that the historian experiences such revolutions. In
the autobiographical interview he noted that in Structure of Scientific Revolutions he had very little to say about
meaning change, and instead following Russell Hanson
he relied on the idea of gestalt
switch, but now (as of the time of the 1999
interview) he maintains that incommensurability is all
language, and that it is associated with change of
values, since values are learned with language.
Early reviewers of Structure of Scientific Revolutions understood Kuhn’s use of
incommensurability to mean that it is not possible
to define any
of the terms of one theory into those of the other.
And Kuhn admits that careful reading of Structure
of Scientific Revolutions reveals nothing other
than this wholistic view, because he explicitly
rejected the Positivist theory-neutral observation
language thesis.
Thus incommensurability strategically
precludes any neutral, i.e. theory-independent,
observation language.
But as critics noted in Criticism
and the Growth of Knowledge, the wholistic
interpretation makes both scientific communication
and scientific criticism very problematic.
In response to these criticisms in Criticism
and the Growth of Knowledge Kuhn announced his
thesis of partial or local incommensurability, which
enables continuity, comparability, and partial
communication between theories outside the area of
incommensurability in episodes of revolutionary
change. In the “Postscript” to his “Possible
Worlds in History of Science” (1989) reprinted in Road
Since Structure he explicitly denies in response
to a later critic that the change from one theory to
another is a discontinuous change, and he says that
he has reformulated his past view which had invoked
discontinuity.
Kuhn
believes that historians dealing with old scientific
texts can and must use modern language to identify
the referents of the out-of-date terms.
In “Metaphor in Science” (1979) reprinted
in Road Since
Structure he explained the referential
determination that offers continuity with his causal
theory of reference.
The causal theory of reference denies that
proper names have definitions or are associated with
definite descriptions.
Instead a proper name is merely a label or a
tag, and to identify the individual, one must ask
some else who can point it out ostensively, or use
some contingent fact about it, or locate its
lifeline.
Kuhn extends this theory to naming natural
kinds by adding that multiple ostensions (examples)
are needed instead of just one, in order to see
similarities and contrasts with other individuals.
Illustrating his thesis again in the
Copernican revolution he says the techniques of
tagging and tracing of lifelines permit astronomical
individuals, e.g. the earth, and the moon, Mars, and
Venus, to be traced through episodes of the theory
change.
The lifelines of these four individuals were
continuous, but they were differently distributed
among natural families as a result of that change.
Kuhn does not further elaborate the causal
theory of reference, and in his autobiographical
interview he said that the causal theory of
reference does not work for common nouns, but it has
some survivals in his philosophy of meaning.
Thus in “Afterwords” he says that one of
the characteristics of kind words is that they are
learned in use by being shown multiple examples of
the referent that supply expectations of things and
general concepts of properties of the world.
Many philosophers noted that reference is not
possible without characterizing concepts.
Later he
further elaborates his theory of referential
determination in his “Commensurability,
Comparability, and Communicability” (1983)
reprinted in Road
Since Structure, where he distinguishes
reference determination from translation.
He says that no common language means that
there is no language for which either theory in a
revolutionary transition can be translated into the
other.
While most of the terms common to the
successive theories function in the same way for
both theories, such that their meanings are
preserved and admit to translation, there is a small
group of mutually interdefined terms that are
incommensurable.
The terms that preserve their meanings across
a revolutionary transition provide a sufficient
basis for discussions of differences and for
comparisons for theory choice.
But he acknowledges that it is not clear that
incommensurability can be restricted to a local
region of discourse, because the distinction between
terms that change meaning and terms that preserve
meaning is difficult to explicate.
He attempts to evade this problem with his
thesis of co-referencing discussed below, but he
does not solve it.
In “The Trouble with the Historical
Philosophy of Science” (1991) reprinted in Road
Since Structure he states that the rationality
for scientists conclusions requires only that the
observations invoked be neutral for or shared by the
members of the group making the decision, and for
them only at the time the decision is being made.
But this thesis offers a neutral language of
preserved meanings, which supplies historical
continuity and is neutral relative to the time of
the revolutionary transition and for the affected
scientific group.
This neutral language is not the same as the
Positivist observation language, and Kuhn rejects
the existence of any Archimedean platform outside
space and time.
In “Afterwords” he states that it is kind
words that enable identification of referents,
things that between their origin and demise have a
lifeline through space and time.
Kind words constitute the lexicon that is
strategic to his thesis of incommensurability.
Kuhn offers
two reasons for incommensurability. The first reason
is stated in his rejection of translatability in his
“Commensurability, Comparability,
Communicability”, where he defines translation as
something done by a person who knows two languages,
and who systematically substitutes words or strings
of words in one language into the other, in order to
produce an equivalent text – i.e. salva
veritate.
He denies that the two successive theories in
a scientific revolution can be translated into one
another.
This is obviously true in the sense that the
two theories make contrary claims, but Kuhn’s
reason is not contrariety but incommensurability.
The thrust of his thesis is that one theory
cannot even be expressed
in the vocabulary of its successor nor vice versa.
Kuhn maintains that the new theory must be
interpreted, which in Kuhn’s terminology means
learned.
The interpreter need know only one language
and he confronts another language as unintelligible
noises and inscriptions.
Quine’s radical translator is not a
translator but an interpreter, because successful
interpretation is learning a new language.
The interpreter must learn to recognize
distinguishing features initially unknown to him,
and for which his own language supplies no
descriptive terminology.
Thus incommensurability is due to semantics
that is unavailable in one language.
Kuhn
attempts to illustrate this kind of
incommensurability in the transition from the
phlogiston theory of combustion to the modern oxygen
theory.
In the phlogiston theory the phrase
“dephlogisticated air” can mean either oxygen or
oxygen-enriched air, while the phrase
“phlogisticated air” means air from which oxygen
has been removed.
In the phrase “phlogiston is emitted during
combustion”, the term “phlogiston” refers to
nothing, although in some cases it refers to
hydrogen.
Kuhn maintains that for the historian of
science incommensurability in this case is dealt
with by learning the meanings in the old texts by
reference determination.
He agrees that historians dealing with old
scientific texts can and must use modern language to
identify referents of out-of-date terms.
Like the native’s pointing out
“gavagai” referents in Quine’s radical
translation situation, such reference determinations
may provide concrete examples from which the
historian can hope to learn the meanings of
problematic expressions in the old texts.
Presumably in the case of phlogiston the
reference situation is a repetition of the
eighteenth-century chemists’ experiments and the
comparison of the old language and the modern one
describing the observable experimental outcomes.
But there are some difficulties with this
example as described by Kuhn, because he says that
translation is impossible since phlogiston is
nonexistent, an approach that is nominalist, while
Kuhn accepts intensions and rejects nominalism or a
purely referential theory of meaning.
Existence is neither the same as nor a
condition for meaningfulness, and Kuhn says that he
joins Hesse in maintaining that an extensional
theory of meaning is bankrupt.
Furthermore translation is not relevant,
since the new and old theories express contrary
claims and cannot both be true.
The issue is expressibility, for which both
referenceable existence and truth are irrelevant.
The expressibility problem due to
incommensurability is that the semantical resources
needed for the modern theory are not available in
the older one.
Kuhn does not discuss this first reason for
incommensurability again after this paper, which was
initially delivered at the Philosophy of Science
Association annual meeting in 1982.
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