[Thomas] Kuhn reflected on the moment that launched his philosophical career. He had been a graduate student at the time...trying to understand how anyone ever accepted Aristotelian physics. Kuhn vividly recalls gazing out of his window for some time before suddenly grasping that Aristotle had meant something very different by “motion” from his Newtonian successors. Aristotle’s notion was broader: it encompassed how an acorn grows into an oak...
It was essentially a problem of translation: of not being able to think oneself into an entirely different world, and not simply a problem of trying to capture the nuance of the original Greek.
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Kuhn’s insight would overturn how we think about scientific progress. The traditional model had assumed a steady process of conjecture and refutation, …
“Conjecture and refutation”: Hmm, okay. Kuhn’s insight was that the, image, I guess, that scientists and non-scientists alike had of the field, that it was a “cumulative discipline”, building grain-by-grain, layer upon layer (“If I saw farther it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants”-Newton) was false. Advances happened incrementally only in “normal science”; the great leaps were made in “revolutions” when the scientific paradigm shifted (Kuhn coined “paradigm shift”.)
beginning from a body of self-evident observations (the stone drops, this iron rusts, that raven is black)...
The raven is black to a human. The raven inhabits "an entirely different world", however. Is the raven black to a raven? It is not to a bat. It is not to a blind human.
…there are, in fact, no self-evident observations against which our theories can be tested.
Which isn't to say that it is incommensurability all the way down and we humans should throw up our hands. It is to recognize that we are limited in our ability to understand: temporally, that is, we are time-bound to a degree that a barrier is imposed between us and Aristotle; linguistically--translation, meant generally by Kuhn, in common parlance, from the languages of ancient Greek to Modern English, from Modern French to Modern English (Remembrance of Things Past), Modern Russian to Modern English (War and Peace), even from Middle English to Modern English (The Canterbury Tales)—something gets lost in literal translation; by the particular acuity of each of our senses as a species and then down to differently-abled individuals--these (and more) impose barriers to perfect understanding. Kuhn's "insight" was revolutionary, but Kuhn always saw, and spent the rest of his life after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions clarifying his vision to align more perfectly with Voltaire's aphorism that "the perfect is the enemy of the good". These are "problems", not without solutions (imperfect) or work-arounds.
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The comparison with translation is instructive: we begin with individual words and familiar phrases, and tentatively infer the overall meaning of the text, but the rub is that the overall meaning of the text guides the translation of individual words and phrases. There is no [perfectly] neutral starting point…
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If the standards by which one judges good scientific practice — and even what counts as scientific practice in the first place — are themselves determined by our overall scientific worldview, then those standards cannot be what determines the adoption of one scientific theory over another. In challenging the assumption that the past can always be judged (usually unfavorably) by the standards of the present, Kuhn had managed to problematize the idea that competing scientific theories can ever be compared at all. Indeed, Kuhn often spoke of a “Gestalt switch” or even a “conversion experience” to describe the transition from one scientific theory to another.
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Kuhn’s work was largely rejected by philosophers as implausible, or even self-refuting.
š¯… Now, I understand what you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen nowš¯…
…the years following The Structure of Scientific Revolutions saw Kuhn variously attempting to distance himself from his critics’ interpretations, or indeed misinterpretations, of his previous work. Ironically, he had become victim to his own problem of translation.
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The Plurality of Worlds. [provisional title given Kuhn to unpublished book]
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The central message of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was that the history of science is subject to radical and discontinuous change, which is why we struggle to translate between the terms of different scientific theories.
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…it makes no sense to look for a perspective outside ourselves from which we can judge the reliability of our knowledge…
It's all we have. The culture in which we are immersed, the language we use, our minds, our sensory perceptions, we have to make do with what we have--and we have quite a lot, more than any other species on earth.
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...translation is possible because texts do not operate within a closed circle but instead endlessly defer their meaning to other texts. They are also ABOUT something…
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As Kuhn notes, we would not even be able to recognize something as another scientific theory unless it were at least partly translatable…
Try listening to a snip of The Canterbury Tales (YouTube) as it was spoken in Middle English in Chaucer's time. I did once, I got about one word in three or four.
Ultimately then, it is those things we have in common — our neurological equipment and our biology, as well as our embodiment within a shared environment — that ensure that no scientific revolution ever descends into complete incommensurability.
The unfinished sections of The Plurality of Worlds were projected to extend this treatment of translation and incommensurability beyond the history of science and to include almost every aspect of human culture. …the conflicts and divisions between them are driven (or at least exacerbated) by problems of translation. But at the same time, he came to believe that, by broadening the scope of the problem of commensurability, we can see how to overcome those conflicts and divisions.
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Perhaps most importantly, the very fact that we can recognize the differences as conflicts in the first place proves how much we have in common.
That is the optimism of Kuhn. "Structure", as he called it, is acknowledged as one of the very few most influential texts of the 20th century. I have written much of it here and in my first reading I considered it transcendent. "Kuhn's insight," by the by, is reversible, that is to say Aristotle would be completely flummoxed by our "entirely different world." One of the first posts I wrote on this reversibility was on Benjamin Franklin. I belonged to a gym at the time. Would would Old Ben think if he walked into a Gold's Gym? "Ah, these are the slaves." Structure thrilled me as few books, maybe no book, ever has. I do consider it transcendent, transcending the 20th century back to Aristotle and into the unseen future. Philosophers continue to reject it for lacking philosophical rigor.