I think I'll go in chronological order instead, using an example like the early study of electricity. Now by "early" I don't mean going back before Newtonian mechanics became a thing, but early enough that we really only know that a few strange things are happening but no clue why. So actually let's back up one more step and say that you don't want to study electricity, but instead you want to study why static shocks happen. After all, "studying electricity" implies that you know a whole bunch of events and data are connected. In your study of static shocks, you learn that rubbing certain materials causes shocks more than others, sometimes. You learn that certain combinations work better. You also might realize that shocks come off of batteries (or rudimentary things like them). But now you have to try to put all of this together. Here are some of Kuhn's thoughts:
In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant. As a result, early fact-gathering is a far more nearly random activity than the one that subsequent scientific development makes familiar. Furthermore, in the absence of a reason for seeking some particular form of more recondite information, early fact-gathering is usually restricted to the wealth of data that lie ready to hand.So before you get started, you have no idea if anything could affect your measurements of static. Time of day, how dusty your floor is, what shoes you wear, and whether you hold your pinky out or not are all variables that could somehow matter. In the case of static, air moisture actually does matter and was probably really hard to control or even measure. I can imagine a number of scientists trying to discern esoteric patterns out of the day to day (or yearlong) fluctuations caused by moisture in the air. Suppose, after years and years of data collection and analysis, they finally did figure it out without a more general theory of electricity. All that analysis would tell them is that water makes shocks more conductive. I suppose there could be some benefit there, but from a modern perspective it seems like a big distraction.
Also, without a paradigm, you have no way of agreeing with any data collected by someone else studying the same thing. If any variable could matter, then it's impossible to report your results. Did you collect your data over multiple days? Did you include the moisture level? If I'm someone who thinks that's incredibly important, and all you want to talk about is the materials you rub together to make static shocks, you may not have taken the time and energy to collect the moisture data (or the data that some third person really cares about). If one hundred people all think something different matters to the creation of the static shocks, then collecting the right data to discuss becomes practically impossible.
So now we see we need some way to agree on what's relevant and what isn't. To do that we need a paradigm. More Kuhn:
Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules
and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i.e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition.
...
No wonder, then, that in the early stages of the development of any science different men confronting the same range of phenomena, but not usually all the same particular phenomena, describe and interpret them in different ways. What is surprising, and perhaps also unique in its degree to the fields we call science, is that such initial divergences should ever largely disappear.So once you've gathered enough data early on, and you convince a few fellow researchers that some set of parameters are what matter, you're on your way to studying static. Another aspect of the paradigm (mentioned above) is the way you interpret your data. I actually think that the parameter paradigm and the interpretation paradigm are separate things. Both make it easier to communicate to likeminded researchers, but the data is still the data. A highly religions mystic and a hard materialist could agree on a parameter paradigm but then one would interpret electricity as the wrath of spirits while the other might interpret it as the emission of stored energy. Those disagreements will make it harder to agree on what follow-up experiments should be, and peer review will likely be tricky, but the data itself would still be acceptable.
After all of this is agreed upon, we get to do what Kuhn calls normal science. Kuhn sometimes talks as though normal science happens most of the time, but at other times, when he's talking about paradigms within a very specialized field, it makes me wonder if paradigms are almost always shifting. In psychological research there is constant discussion and disagreement about which human behaviors, optical illusions, or EEG signals should be lumped together and why. My only experience with something like normal science was when I was on a team designing a sonar array (set of microphones on a string behind the boat). Even in that case, where the behavior of sound in water was almost entirely agreed upon, when I came up with some unintuitively good results (a computer model of the array could detect torpedoes in the water better than we expected), and someone else replicated them, everyone was still incredibly skeptical. In spite of having a shared paradigm, it felt as though pushing people out of their comfort zone still required a shift in how they thought, eventually using non-simulated data. In the end, though, this process of convincing the Navy using real data probably does fall within normal science because there was a final agreed-upon test of the real system that would prove I was right.
One interesting note from this chapter is that Kuhn spends a few pages talking about book-making. It took me a while to figure out what he meant, but I guess in his day, writing a book would be done if you're addressing the public while just writing journal articles or reports would be for one's peers.
Only in the earlier, pre-paradigm, stages of the development of the various sciences did the book ordinarily possess the same relation to professional achievement that it still retains in other creative fields. And only in those fields that still retain the book, with or without the article, as a vehicle for research communication are the lines of professionalization still so loosely drawn that the layman may hope to follow progress by reading the practitioners’ original reports.
...
Although it has become customary, and is surely proper, to deplore the widening gulf that separates the professional scientist from his colleagues in other fields, too little attention is paid to the essential relationship between that gulf and the mechanisms intrinsic to scientific advance.
So Kuhn is arguing that because of the community that is created by a scientific paradigm, it separates from the lay public and develops its own subculture, which in turn makes it harder for the scientists in that subculture to communicate with others. People often complain that scientists are terrible public speakers, and this gives a reason why that may actually be necessary. It's an interesting thought, and it leaves open the possibility that scientific translation may become more valuable as science progresses. I'll just leave a link to the interesting idea of research debt that I've seen a few times this week. If Kuhn is right that the development of a paradigm automatically separates the scientists from the lay community, then I think the solution to bringing research to a wider audience is more nuanced than many people presume.
PS - I improved the layout a bit. I hope it looks decent.
No comments:
Post a Comment