Kevin T. Kelly
Department of Philosophy
Carnegie Mellon University
Paradigm change = world change.
The only "recourse" to the world is through action and observation.
After a revolution:
Look in new places
Find new things in old places
Therefore, the world changes.
Gestalt switch analogy.
Student sees tracks in bubble chamber.
Scientist sees familiar particles in bubble chamber.
World = environment + paradigm.
Incommensurability: new paradigm ---> new observations.
Disanalogy:
Gestalt experiments have "external checks"
experimentor is higher authority in card experiment.
Necker cube can be flipped back and forth at will, revealing that the lines do not change.
Revolutions have no "external checks"
no higher authority than the two paradigms.
can't see the flipping:
Not: I used to see a planet but now I see a satellite.
Rather: I used to mistake the planet for a satellite (115).
Examples:
Herschell and Uranus: after Uranus, many planets discovered.
Copernicus: after Copernicus, many comets observed using traditional instruments. Chinese recorded sunspots and novas long before the West (didn't believe the heavens are immutable).
Hauksbee: effluvium theorists saw rebounding, Hauksbee saw electrostatic repulstion of like charges.
Lavoisier: saw oxygen, not dephlogisticated air. "different world".
Galileo and pendulum: Aristotle: violent constraind fall; impetus theory: repeated replacement of impetus with height. Galileo's vision enabled by impetus paradigm.
Aristotle considered: weight, medium, vertical height, time required to equilibrium. No law possible.
Galileo considered: weight, radius (circle, neoplatonism), angular displacement, period (impetus).
Seeing vs. seeing-as
Immediate experience:
data not stable across revolution.
transformation of vision, not reinterpretation.
explicit interpretation is normal science.
revolutionary changes are sudden flashes of insight: "scales falling from eyes", "lightning flash", "illumination".
revolutionary changes of meaning are holistic, not piecemeal or logical.
Galileo could explain why Aristotle saw what he saw, but Galileo didn't see it anymore (125).
Analysis of unstable "given" into stable components.
neutral observation language
paradigm-dependent:
efforts in this direction start with a theory (space-time) and eliminate non-observational terms
to analyze a pendulum into sense-data, one must already know what a pendulum is.
retinal images and sense-data are less immediate in experience than pendula and oxygen.
experience is not piece-meal or atomic: shifts in experience occur in large (paradigm) units.
laboratory operations
carefully selected to articulate paradigm
different operations relevant in different paradigms
Many operations do survive, but change in two ways
relation to paradigm (combining weights in affinity-based vs. Daltonian chemistry)
results (lack of simple proportion of combining weights revealed isotopes in Daltonian chemistry).
Souces of cumulativity myth
Textbook science
teach vocabulary and syntax of current paradigm
commitment to textbook uniformity is part of normal science
textbooks are rewritten after each revolution to exorcise the old paradigm
"great heroes"
present only "lasting contributions"
current paradigm is intelligible without historical context.
Popularizations
teach same to general public
Philosophy of science
analyze logical structure of current paradigms