Science

Thomas Kuhn, Revolutions, Paradigms, and Progress

The Problem of Progress

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.

Cosmos: Sagan vs Tyson

I have been thinking about this on-and-off, recently. What is the difference between the Sagan Cosmos, and the Tyson Cosmos? There are lots of fairly uncharitable things to say about both of these men, but if we were forced to provide an actual explanation, I think three things could be said:

  1. Era / Audience. The original Cosmos was released in 1980. Not since the early eighties, have I felt the same sense of optimism and yearning for the promise of the future. I think the 1980 Cosmos nicely captures both that sense of hope and the sense of “wonder” often talked about by folks like E. O. Wilson and Sagan himself. The Tyson Cosmos was released in 2014. Post Gulf War(s), Post 9/11, and deep into the “disappointment phase” of the Obama era. The culture was much more cynical and exhausted in 2014, compared to 1980.