Why does Socrates spend so much effort defining and describing the soul in so much detail in the Phaedrus? He tells us outright, in the dialogue. It is because no man can gain true knowledge from a speech, if the orator does not himself know how his speech is going to guide the soul to its first memory of the unified reality of beauty, found in the divine realm. Dialectic is the way to wisdom, and dialectic can only be achieved through speech. So, a speech needs to be crafted and delivered in such a way that it both provokes and then satisfies the desire to know beauty (or truth, or goodness).
The question I’m addressing today, is on Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It was posed to me recently, in this form: “Is Kuhn right that we cannot speak of progress across scientific paradigms?” This paper will briefly summarize Kuhn’s own definition of progress both within and across paradigms, explore the implications of these definitions, and assess the conclusion Kuhn comes to at the end of Chapter XIII of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The overall argument of this paper is that the initial question is misleading when compared to what Kuhn actually argues, but that Kuhn is still mistaken in his rejection of the notion of progress because elsewhere he admits himself that incommensurability does not deny the possibility of measurement, and because the analogy to evolution is fundamentally flawed. The paper will conclude with a few summary remarks about progress, both as it relates to science, and as a general concept.
