What is Paradigm Shift? (Thomas Kuhn & Postmodernism)

An explanation of Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm shift, scientific revolutions, Kuhn loss, and their relationship to postmodernism and logical positivism.

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Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Collier-MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, and more! (#Paradigm #Kuhn)

[InventiveHarvest]

Fortunately Lakatos was able to incorporate Kuhn's observations back into the meta narrative of falsifiable scientific methodology. To say it in an overly brief statement: When we go through a paradigm shift, we put a finer point on our knowledge. For example, when Einstein made the theory of relativity, it did not destroy newtonian physics. It only showed that newtonian physics was a specific case of a larger picture.

[JasonQuackenbushonGoogle]

also, Kuhn was responding more to Popper Austin and Wittgenstein, who had already dealt fatal blows to logical positivism by the time Kuh n was working.

[Pfhorrest]

Kuhnian paradigm shifts can trivially be integrated into a rational and progressive view of science, turning paradigm shift into a normative rational principle rather than just an observation of irrational habit, by formulating it in terms of parsimony, or in terms of how complex a theory needs to be to account for the evidence at hand.

The entire point of coming up with theories, abstract models to believe, is to have an easier, simpler representation of reality to work with than just the whole body of raw observational evidence thus far accumulated. In essence, the point of a theory is to compress the data of the observational evidence into a more compact formula while retaining the same informational content, as in the field of algorithmic information theory; and a more parsimonious theory is precisely one that can better compress the same data with no greater loss of information.

On my normative account, the period of pre-science is one in which no single theory has yet been devised that can account for all of the evidence at hand, and so there is no better, easier, simpler, more parsimonious way of describing all the evidence than many different theories used in a patchwork to account for each of the disjointed areas of evidence. Once a theory is devised that can account for all of that evidence, that then becomes the better, easier, simpler, more parsimonious way of describing it all, and so the patchwork of other theories are rationally, pragmatically discarded in favor of it. There may still be other theories that also account for all of that evidence, and so are equally unfalsified, but unless they are in turn even more parsimonious, there is no reason to use them instead, and pragmatic reason not to.

But as new evidence accumulates that cannot be reconciled with the existing paradigmatic theory, the best way to describe all the evidence at hand begins to grow again into an unwieldy patchwork of the main paradigmatic theory and all of the exceptions and special cases needed to be made and used to handle the anomalous evidence, until at some point that patchwork becomes so complex that other competing theories, previously rejected as less parsimonious than the paradigmatic one, are now more parsimonious than the old paradigm plus all of its exceptions, and it becomes rational to adopt the best of them instead of trying to cling to the old paradigm and its mess of special exceptions.

Any "Kuhn Loss" experienced through the paradigm shift will necessarily be outweighed by the greater explanatory efficiency of the new paradigm, otherwise it would not be useful to shift paradigms and so there would be no motive to do so.

E.g. in the example case of "you come home to your apartment" that you give here, sure you have to admit that you don't actually know whether your door is locked or your husband is home alone etc, but in the face of mounting evidence, you've either got to concoct a contrived conjunction of many improbable events to explain the evidence at hand, or else change your background assumptions in a way that makes all of that evidence fall neatly into place, at the cost of admitting that you still don't know a few small things you thought you knew.

But if the background assumptions that you had to change to accommodate the mounting evidence had *much larger* consequences on the state of your knowledge, making you question everything you ever thought you knew, then that would be a large (rational, practical, normative) pressure *against* changing those background assumptions, despite the difficulty of fitting all the new evidence elegantly into that background worldview. If the options were (for some reason) either "two strangers broke into my house, killed my husband, disposed of the body and cleaned up, then had sex in our bed" or "I am nothing but a brain in a vat and the entire world I thought I knew is an illusion", it's more practical to assume the former than the latter. If the latter option is just "I'm on a different floor than I thought", though, then it's more practical to adopt the latter.

TL;DR: Parsimony gives a rational reason to prefer one paradigm over another.

[Dayglodaydreams]

There is a post-modern reading you can do of science. It seems like you can read Kuhn's paradigm theory as being an explanation of how scientific progress occurs, and therefore interpret it as an explanation of a modernist metanarrative.

[GottfriedLeibnizYT]

One needs to be so misguided to think that science makes no progress or we can't know that we're making progress ...

[johnmanno]

Carneades, you and Kane are two of the bravest men on YouTube for your videos on science.

[garyleimback]

The paradigm shift from being able to only analyze blood type (type O or A or AB) to being able to determine potassium levels, iron levels, cholesterol or cocaine or heroin presence is a vast increase in knowledge (rather than a knowledge loss). The real methodology used in this instance of ground breaking chromatography chemistry was totally modernistic and raises serious doubts about Kuhn's work and the whole misguided (in my opinion) post-modern effort. You should also read Anthony Giddens critique of post-modern sociology in his book "The Consequences of Modernity".

[deepashtray]

Very interesting. When addressing those communities which deny science, such as climate change denialists, I'm not sure whether Kuhn has given them fuel or exposes their incompetence. It's one thing to claim a scientific consensus is wrong such as with climate change or the age of the Earth, but quite another to demonstrate where and how it is wrong that supports the alternative facts in the case.

[MGWM]

Hi, are you planning on making any videos on Foundationalism, Coherentism and 'The Myth of the Given'?

[philosuit]

Will you be also doing a series on Philosophy of Science..?

[jimmyfaulkner]

Great video. What are your thoughts on Kuhn’s statement that “it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition to a science.” Do you think Kuhn was correct in his view on this? Are there examples from the history of science and the philosophy of science that can show whether this is true or not?

[pichirisu]

postmodernism/post truth/etc. not a thing people are just stupid and prefer delusion over suffering and others dont want to accept it

[akrylic_]

Did he have the most cited academic publication of all time? I did some googling but couldn't find that

[MrPhiltri]

Frankly, I'm disappointed.

If the point is simply that a scientific theory cannot prove anything without some underlying assumptions, which in turn are fundamentally assumed without complete evidence, than this is weak.

The scientific process actively involves forming new theories with differing sets of assumptions and compare the accuracy of these using measurements.

Yes, at any point in time a new theory can arise based on some completely different set of assumptions leading to the same or better results, but this is is the whole point of it all!

Kuhn's proof that science cannot exist without paradigms is therefore comparable to the claim that a wheel cannot turn without an axis. It is true in an almost useless fashion.

[chrissidiras]

How does the fact that predictions based on science are getting better and better, i.e. more accurate, square with Khun's idea that science does not make cumulative progress?

[JasonQuackenbushonGoogle]

you know Magritte was a modernist, not a postmodernist, right?

[ben]

My dad sent me this when I asked him to get vaccinated. Can someone explain what’s the hell he means???

[korwi]

This is not a comment and you are not reading this

[TheologyUnleashed]

Please don't ruin good philosophy by labelling it postmodern

[Lamster]

Yes we lose the certainty that God did it!