Jon Mandle points to one anticipation of Thomas Kuhn. Here’s another – this one about the romance of paradigm shift vs. the pedestrian dullness of ‘normal’ science:
In a philosophical view, consistency is a certain level at all times, maintained in all the thoughts of one’s mind. But, since nature is nearly all hill and dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in knowledge without submitting to the natural inequalities in the progress? Advance into knowledge is just like advance upon the grand Erie canal, where, from the character of the country, change of level is inevitable; you are locked up and locked down with perpetual inconsistencies, and yet all the time you get on; while the dullest part of the whole route is what the boatmen call the ‘long level’ – a consistently-flat surface of sixty miles through stagnant swamps.”
From Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (1857). Oddly, Project Gutenberg has no public domain e-edition of the book. You can get the full text here, though.
{ 5 comments }
Sirocco 04.06.06 at 5:11 am
Indeed quite a striking quote.
Among philosophers of science, the real John the Baptist is Norwood Russell-Hanson, most notably in Patterns of Discovery (1958), where even the title insists on the importance of what Popper refused to study.
Sadly, the good Norwood was a keen amateur pilot with a penchant for aerodynamical as well as philosophical innovation, hence his modest life span (1925–1967) and bibliography. Not that Kuhn made especially good use of his longevity.
Hieronymus bosch 04.06.06 at 7:20 am
Could any of the right honourable and enlightened academics inform my humble self whether a ‘paradigm shift’ theory has ever explicitly focused on there being an incommensurable change in the understanding of the concepts used to formulate ‘the question’? I suppose this would be opposed to the quote from Dewey in the first post about “getting over” the entire ‘question,’ or, I guess, the view that these changes are due to dying generations. A related query may be whether these views, including Kuhn’s, allow for a mere change in the meaning (or understanding) of key concepts in the relevant questions to explain away the sense we have of progress being made. It just seems that some theories that are now viewed as ridiculous – e.g. Aristotle’s theory of vision – might thus potentially be reconciled with what we now know to be the correct scientific explanation…
david 04.06.06 at 8:22 am
It’s a great book, but I’ve never been able to quite get it. I suppose I should read some criticism and be told what to think: any suggestions?
Sirocco 04.06.06 at 10:17 am
Well, I’m not a specialist here, but this discussion is concise and clarifying.
Jonathan Goldberg 04.06.06 at 10:39 pm
Could any of the right honourable and enlightened academics inform my humble self whether a ‘paradigm shift’ theory has ever explicitly focused on there being an incommensurable change in the understanding of the concepts used to formulate ‘the question’?
Yes. In fact, Kuhn cited the experience of his and his students learning to think like e.g. Priestly or a pre-Copernican as the motivation for developing the paradigm shift idea in the first place.
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