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Reasonable Objectivist's avatar

This author, Mr. Klee, is giving us a kind of "Whig history" of science. He does not take into account the insights of Thomas Kuhn, from "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", who demolished any such naïve Whig history of the Forward March of science.

One is free to disagree with Kuhn, and challenge his analysis, but one is not free to ignore his book, perhaps the most famous book of the 20th Century on the philosophy and sociology of science. Kuhn's anti-"Whig" analysis of the history of science must be grappled with.

Kuhn had argued that science does **not** progress by some mere accumulation of data-points + theories, where new evidence that would overthrow an older, well-established theory is duly embraced as the old theory is swept out, and a new, better one is crowned. (This story of "duly embraced" new data promptly sweeping out old theories--this myth-- is a "Whig" history of science.)

Kuhn gives considerable evidence for his argument that this is not *at all* how science actually is practiced.

Quite the contrary: Kuhn shows, again and again, that new data-points that conflict with "well established theory" get consistently *ignored* or minimized or dismissed, if acceptance would require overthrow of the current, reigning paradigm of the field. Example: Many, including Lord Kelvin, believed that the report of the discovery of X-rays was a hoax. And Einstein was not keen on embracing quantum theory. Usually, per Kuhn's analysis, the older generation clings to the old paradigm, and the new paradigm prevails only after the old-guard has died. (Look at Kuhn's many examples, in his book.)

The new paradigm does not necessarily subsume all the "data-points" of the old paradigm; nor is it necessarily better in every way in predictive power, over the old paradigm. Example: The Copernican system was NOT better than the Ptolemaic system at predicting actual observations--and this is one EXCELLENT reason for the Church to reject Copernican heliocentrism. That, plus the observation of retrograde motion of certain planets, seemed to support the Ptolemaic system. Once one sees that the Ptolemaic system was at least consistent with Aristotle's notions, one can see that there were rational grounds for the Church to reject Galileo's heliocentrism. There was thus no rational ground to reject Aristotle's science (just yet).

Galileo had a brilliant counter-argument, of course, to prove heliocentrism, but at a bare minimum, the heliocentric model was far from *self-evidently* true--and the Church had reasonable grounds to not accept heliocentrism right away. Paul Feyerabend talks about this at length in his book, "Against Method".

So Mr. Klee writes, in his piece, "A world in which nobody would dream of established theory overturning actual empirical evidence is a better world than the one that Galileo lived in."

Actually, this kind of "world" is exactly the kind of world that Kuhn says we do in fact live in.

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Rohit Krishnan's avatar

Good essay Trevor. Quibbles aside, is the idea of us going back to an existing tradition of philosophy then well dead in the modern era.

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