The Famous Duck-Rabbit
Reading :
1. Steven Weinberg, “On Scientific Revolutions”
The New York Review of Books,
October 8, 1998, available on line at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/weinberg.html
2. Fay, Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science, Chapter 4 (I list Fay before O’Hear because I think his account is clearer and easier to read than O’Hear’s.)
3. O’Hear, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Chapters 4 and 5
4. T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Postscript (pp. 174-210)
Our goal for this unit is to try to arrive at a balanced assessment of Kuhn’s ideas. Kuhn’s views have been enormously influential, but are they right? And has some of their influence been based on misinterpretation of Kuhn?
Writing assignment:
Answer all of the following questions
1. According to physicist Steven Weinberg, Kuhn’s view of science is “wormwood to scientists such as myself” and, if it were true, science would lose its point. How so?
2. Weinberg also thinks that Kuhn’s view of science is (fortunately) false. What reasons does he give for thinking so? How persuasive are those reasons in your view? (Explain.)
3. Both Fay and O’Hear reject the idea that inquiry can go forward without any presuppositions. Both, therefore, accept in some form the view that observations are always “theory-laden.” (See pp. 83-84 in O’Hear and pp. 72-76 in Fay.) But they both also reject relativism and what O’Hear calls “the incommensurability thesis.” Explain briefly and in your own words:
a. What does it mean to say that observations are theory-laden?
b. What is the difference between what O’Hear calls the weak thesis and what he calls the strong thesis about the relation between theory and observation?
c. What does it mean to say that two paradigms are incommensurable?
d. What is the difference between what Fay calls perspectivism and what he calls relativism?
4. In criticizing relativism, both Fay and O’Hear make use of an argument derived from the work of Donald Davidson. Fay calls it “the Argument from Translation.” (See Fay, pp.82-88 and O’Hear, pp. 94-96. In your own words, how does this argument go? What do you think of it?
5. In the Postscript to his book Kuhn tries to clarify his position and answer some of his critics. Especially in sections 5 and 6 (pp. 198-207) he tries to answer charges that his position is relativist or that it makes science an irrational enterprise. Based on what he says there, do you think it is unfair for O’Hear and Fay to label him a relativist? (Explain.) Do you think Kuhn succeeds in giving a coherent account of how scientists come to accept a new paradigm? (Explain.)
6. Advanced, extra-credit question: In his book Problems of Knowledge, my favorite epistemologist, Michael Williams, argues that Davidson’s Argument from Translation doesn’t apply to the kind of differences that Kuhn is talking about. He says, “Kuhn’s scientists are not living in ‘different worlds’ in any sense of that phrase that conflicts with Davidson’s strictures on global conceptual relativism. Galileo and his Aristotelian rivals could agree on lots of mundane facts: they disagreed about what ‘world-system’ best accommodated them. Furthermore, their disagreement extended into fundamental methodological issues: the questions a physical theory ought to answer, the importance (and appropriateness in physical matters) of mathematically precise laws, and the sorts of observations that could be trusted. Even so, their dispute—however wide-ranging and fundamental—lies in the region of intelligible disagreement that Davidson’s argument leaves open.” Does this show that Fay and O’Hear are wrong to use the argument from translation to criticize Kuhn?