Notes on Kuhn

Two days immersed in Kuhn's magnum opus The Structure of Scientific Revolution have caused me severe brain damage; but the book is a must-read alright. This is one of the few books that most of us have not read but wish we had; this is classic.

Too little time to elaborate on too many ideas and comments after reading. I shall list them here, abusing yet another "paradigm" of we moderners, listing:

1. The idea of scientific progress not as "closer to truth" but as "away from primitive states" is a good warning sign for most futurologists. I mean, how many of you acting as the prophet before apocalypse, have actually the "closer to" instead of the "away from" in mind? how many of you actually assume without much pondering the more or less "inevitable" end of humanity as devoured by deux ex machina? If your answer is Yes, shame on you.

2. Scientific work requires more practice than imagination; only those among top of the top need just a little bit imagination, as compared to the enormous time and effort invested in practicing and getting familiar with the current paradigm. The disenchantment many scientific workers experienced after working for a while comes largely from this prior misimpression.

3. Social or political sciences (including economics and psychology) may never attain the high level of capability as natural science in puzzle solving, because the society at large will never allow them to be (the high level of insulation from society is impossible; the constant interaction with society at large is both duty and source of inspiration), and because the components required for a globally unified paradigm is largley lacking (symbols/definitions, metaphysics, even exemplars -- tell me, how many of you have seen an "exemplar" of good writing in social or political sciences? what would that be like, if not boring journal papers?)

4. If as Kuhn said, scientific communities as groups are indeed held together by "paradigms", and if we accept Freud's theory of group psychology (that every human group is held together by a leader or an image of a leader, by the mutual libinidal ties among each other as brothers and towards the leader as towards a common father), how on earth is a paradigm acting as the leader or the image of a leader? Maybe scientists and scientific groups are, after all, quite different from other human groups? Maybe the leader is not the paradigm but the one that was assumed to have invented that paradigm (the one who showed the whole discipline "how the job is to be done"?)

5. On scientific paradigm shifts as convictions (changing beliefs), I would like to dive back into William James's masterpiece, Varieties of Religious Experience, to see what James said about conviction. Actually the parallel between scientific work and religious work, between natural science and theology, may prove to be much more rewarding that one might suppose.

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