Science is About Language
How many young and old minds get turned away from science, because they’re not “numbers people”? It’s quite detrimental to progress of individual and humanity to pigeonhole ourselves into such a simplistic understanding of discovery process and one sided relationship with “experts”. Let’s face it, reductionism and numbers serve an administrative function to our understanding of the world. They are a means to an end. Just because I did better at math in high school doesn’t mean that I actually know how to apply “the mother of all sciences” or have any social and emotional skills or ethics in going about it. And what about the actual process of discovery – noticing patterns where others don’t see any or aren’t even looking or worse yet laugh at the suggestion. What in any scientific framework and curriculum addresses this elephant orgy in the room?
Ironically I chose finance after beating my head at math a little too eagerly in college. The incentives told me to do it. :) Guns don’t kill people, right? (Pardon the darkness, but the displacement of accountability is an unintended consequence of all external incentives. Not that we’ve figured out a better way yet, but let’s not hide from it. Running from it won’t help us understand it. I’m sharing my personal experience to show that I’m not just an artsy guy talking smack.)
Rafe’s model of Science 2.0 attempts to place the spotlight back on the creative aspect of discovery. But what are the rules of the game? If numbers are necessary, but not sufficient, then what else is more important?
Enter the Incommensurability of Scientific Theories, which convincingly argues that ontology and language are a necessary centerpiece of rational comparison of theories and thus any and all science. Science 2.0 framework has to be built around rational language reconciliation. The link is a bit long (but quite worth it and ought to be required reading for all “scientists”), so here are the highlights:
“In order to understand the meanings that scientists ascribe to their own statements, it is necessary to understand the theories that they use in order to interpret what they observe.
Because older ideas are misunderstood, as a result of taking them out of their theoretical context, proponents of incommensurable scientific theories misunderstand each other, both claiming to have the facts on their side. Kuhn and Feyerabend both claimed that in such a situation, even empirical arguments can become circular (Feyerabend 1965b, 152; Kuhn 1970 [1962], 94)
Feyerabend suggested that the insolubility is due to the unwillingness of philosophers of different persuasions to change the deeply entrenched meanings of their terms, and that in this case, the mental should be reinterpreted so that it is compatible with materialism (Feyerabend 1963b).
Different epistemic values, such as universality, accuracy, simplicity, fruitfulness may pull in different directions (cf. Hoyningen-Huene 1992, 492–496; 1993, 150–154; Feyerabend 1981a 16, 1981c, 238) allowing for the possibility of rational disagreement.
With the notion of incommensurability, Kuhn was not so much challenging the rationality of theory choice, as trying to make room for the possibility of rational disagreement between proponents of competing paradigms. In fact, according to Kuhn, “incommensurability is far from being the threat to rational evaluation of truth claims that it has frequently seemed. Rather, it’s what is needed, within a developmental perspective, to restore some badly needed bite to the whole notion of cognitive evaluation. It is needed, that is, to defend notions like truth and knowledge from, for example, the excesses of post-modernist movements like the strong program” (2000 [1993], 91).
A far cry from claiming that incommensurable theories cannot be compared, Feyerabend explicitly and repeatedly argued that incommensurable alternatives actually offer a better means of comparing the merits of theories than the mere development of commensurable alternatives (Feyerabend 1962, 66; cf. Oberheim 2006, 235ff.).
Finally, there is one central, substantive point of agreement between Kuhn and Feyerabend. Both see incommensurability as precluding the possibility of interpreting scientific development as an approximation to truth (or as an “increase of verisimilitude”) (Feyerabend, 1965c, 107; 1970, 220, 222, 227–228; 1975, 30, 284; 1978, 68; Kuhn 1970, 206; 1991, 6; 1993, 330; cf. Oberheim 2006, 180ff.; Hoyningen-Huene 1993, 262-264). They reject such characterizations of scientific progress because they recognize and emphasize that scientific revolutions result in changes in ontology. Such changes are not just refinements of, or additions to, the older ontology, such that these developments could be seen as cumulative additions to already established theoretical views. Rather, the new ontology replaces its predecessor. Consequently, neither Kuhn nor Feyerabend can correctly be characterized as scientific realists who believe that science makes progress toward the truth.”
Related posts:
-
http://ourhumancomplexity.blogspot.com/ Mike Gottschalk
-
Alex
-
plektix
