coberst

Paradigm: A Criterion for Choosing Problems

I graduated in 1959 as an electronics engineer. I had been taught how to use math to solve engineering problems. I was taught how to do math but never taught what math and science was really about. After reading Thomas Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” several years ago I began to understand the ways of math and the ways of solving problems in the natural sciences.

Normal science is a puzzle-solving enterprise. Normal science is a slow accumulation of knowledge by a methodical step-by-step process undertaken by a group of scientists.

“One of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions…A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm supplies.”

The author notes that all “real science is normally a habit-governed, puzzle-solving activity” and not a philosophical activity. Paradigm and not hypothesis is the active meaning for the ‘new image of science’. Paradigm is neither a theory nor a metaphysical viewpoint.

Kuhn’s new image of science—the paradigm—is an artifact (a human achievement), a way of seeing, and is a set of scientific problem solving habits. Normal science means research based upon one or more past achievements ‘that some particular community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice…and these achievements are sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group pf adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity’ furthermore they are sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to solve’. Such achievements Kuhn defines as paradigm.

“A puzzle-solving paradigm, unlike a puzzle-solving hypothetico-deductive system, has also got to be a concrete ‘way of seeing’.”

Kuhn constantly refers to the ‘gestalt switch’ when discussing the switch in reference from one paradigm to another as ‘re-seeing’ action. Each paradigm has been constructed to be a ‘way-of-seeing’. Here Kuhn is speaking not about what the paradigm is but how the paradigm is used. He is defining a paradigm as a newly developed puzzle-solving artifact that is used analogically to understand another artifact; for example, using wire and beads strung together to facilitate understanding the protein molecule.

I think that we place “Science” on too high a pedestal and thereby distort our comprehension of political and social problems. We cannot solve social and political problems like we solve the questions formed by the normal sciences.

Do you think that we place Science on too high a pedestal?

Lucius

Obviously, some people place science on too high a pedestal. On the other hand, we haven't really given it a chance yet. Let me get back to you in another thousand years.

coberst

I shall look forward to that future observation with delight.

galteeman

it seems that for thousands of years the world of spirituality has been an equal and unquestioned part of the human existance. people accepted without question that there is more to the world then what we see before our eyes, or can measure scientifically.
recently this spirituality has been rejected by huge groups of people entirely in favour of science and rationality. the very word spirituality can now invite thoughts of scorn and derision in the minds of many.
mabye a mistake is being made in rejecting sprirituality out of hand in favour of logic. surely all of the people over the ages who have achieved satisfaction from their spirituality aren't crazy? there must be something in it?
the question is how does a mind that has rejected spirituality completley for a very long time go about trying to examine it as an option? where does one begin?

avon

I think the first step would be to think logically about it before calculating the best direction in which to take that first measured step.

galteeman

back to square one then lol

Cadell

Science provides one explanation of reality, take it or leave it.

Gile na Gile

I think you were right the first time Galteeman. Inspiring.

Gile na Gile

Coberst,

I agree with you in every particular. Science and the scientific perspective in general is ludicrously over-valued when applied to problem-solving in the social field. You might say that we are living under the tyranny of an absolutist scientific rationalism in as much as this avenue is too readily deployed for problems whose evident resolution can only lie in the emotional domain.

coberst

Gile

It seems to me that we have become too fixated upon trying to make our self more god-like creatures by accentuating the mind/body dichotomy promoted by philosophy and theology. We love the mechanical sciences because I allows us to push our body further and further behind us because our spirit or soul or mind places us closer to god and further from our animal nature.

The overt effort of theology is to accentuate the misconceived mind/body dichotomy while the covert effort of philosophy is to accentuate this same mind/body dichotomy.

Theology does this legitimately because it believes that humans are both body and soul. The body is what we must put-up-with for our short stay on earth while the soul will last through eternity in an environment determined by our brief stay on earth.

I claim that philosophy does this illegitimately because it vainly wishes to be respected in the manner like mathematics or physics. Philosophy wants to use word symbols to describe truth in much the same way as math uses their particular symbols of equality, greater than, minus, plus, differential, exponential, etc.

Theology and philosophy are twin handmaidens of the human urge to separate itself as much as possible from its animal heritage and to move closer toward being god-like.