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JoshuaZ comments on Book Recommendations - Less Wrong
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Expand? I read Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" right after reading Popper, and the contrast was striking. Popper tries to define from first principles how science should be done, and fails; Kuhn examines how good science is done in the real world, and succeeds. His concept of "normal science" - which Ken Binmore expressed as something like "small problems conclusively solved, building on one another" - helps me differentiate between good and bad science more reliably than Popper's criterion of falsifiability. You could say I'm addicted to incremental advances the same way as others are addicted to paradigm shifts.
My views on Kuhn are complicated. I agree with most of what you have to say, but roughly speaking I consider Kuhn to be wrong on three accounts:
1) He underestimates the level within people in different paradigms can talk to each other. For example, in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he tried to argue at one point that someone in a Newtonian paradigm can't really talk to someone in a relativistic paradigm.
2) He underestimates the degree to which people can during crisis choose one paradigm or another based on objective considerations (such as simplicity, ability to account for evidence, degree of consistency with other stable paradigms in related fields, etc.)
3) He underestimates the degree to which genuine progress can occur. (In the postscript to the later editions of Structure he argues that he's been misinterpreted and that he believes in some limited forms of scientific progress. But I think even the level given in that postscript is an underestimate). He especially fails to acknowledge that in the long-arc eventually new paradigms become finer approximations for predicting actual behavior of reality.
To make a linebreak appear without having to skip a line, put a double-space and the end of the line. (I assume that's what you wanted to do with the numbers.)
Yes, thank you.
What counts as more "simple" than something else is usually defined by the paradigm your working within (and so isn't really objective). For instance, Cartesian physics could be considered more simple than Newtonian physics, because it posits less kinds of forces (only contact forces, no forces that act at a distance).
On the other points I agree. All of Kuhn's main arguments (like Feyerabend's) would be sound if they weren't overstated.