To what degree do Kuhn and Popper's respective descriptions apply, either normatively or descriptively speaking, to contemporary science?
Consider the recent LIGO report of gravitational waves as an index of two black holes of >20 solar masses colliding. The observer team published multiple manuscripts on this, including one in a nominally Popperian tone:
>Tests of general relativity with GW150914
>... Within our statistical uncertainties, we find no evidence for violations of general relativity in the genuinely strong-field regime of gravity.
In contrast, the reporting in the lay press is usually in a verificationist tone ("Einstein's theory confirmed" etc).
Conversely, when has a Kuhnian Revolution last taken place? Have there been any since the 1970s, when Kuhn first described them?
>>7943406
I'd say almost completely. The basic "science is models + falsation within a paradigm, not verification" definitely applies 100%. Whatever the media reports doesn't matter.
I imagine small revolutions take place within fields constantly and you'd need to be an expert in them to find out. I study math and I don't think there's been a paradigm shift since we jumped to formality with Godel and shit.
I like philosophy of science but this really isn't science or math and it sparks tons of discussion among people who don't know shit about philosophy. I'd try to keep this at minimum.
>>7943435
>I imagine small revolutions take place within fields constantly
A Kuhnian revolution is never small. It's a paradigm shift - e.g. going from Newtonian to Einsteinian gravity.
>I like philosophy of science but this really isn't science or math and it sparks tons of discussion among people who don't know shit about philosophy. I'd try to keep this at minimum.
It seems it didn't, in this case.
>>7943587
>It's a paradigm shift - e.g. going from Newtonian to Einsteinian gravity.
Then the next paradigm shift is from Einsteinian to Barnettian physics.
>>7943435
>I'd say almost completely. The basic "science is models + falsation within a paradigm, not verification" definitely applies 100%. Whatever the media reports doesn't matter.
But do physicists truly think like that?
>>7943716
In general, yes, especially experimentalists. Some particle theorists are so far removed from reality or the scientific process that they lose track of these principles, but particle theorists are a tiny fraction of physicists and they only rarely directly impact or interact with the science.
>>7943716
Also, it's worth noting that in practice, many physicists work in slightly different paradigms. Some nuclear theorists either work on advancing computational methods for lattice QCD or are making other steps toward computing nuclear transition matrix elements. This isn't working towards falsifying a model, just applying a model whose computations are exceedingly complex.
You also have a large number of physicists who day-to-day work in a sort of engineering capacity, like solid state, cold atom, biophysics, or quantum information people. Or people performing more of an exploratory role, like observational astronomers or again biophysicists.
On a fundamental level, the work that all of these physicists are doing is falsifiable model-and-evidence based, and this is how most physicists have been trained to think. But many experiments or lines of theory work are not directly based on this, with the exceptions of cosmology, particle physics, and precision measurement, which almost universally involve some variant of building exclusion plots on a model-violating parameter space.
>>7943716
>But do physicists truly think like that?
Scientists hardly think.
>>7943587
It has to be "big" relative to the field. I mean "small" in context of all science: you might not even have heard about a complete revolution on a small field if you don't work on it.
The words exist, it's that scientists and especially engineers are too culturally limited and unindividuated to understand them in nuanced ways. Most workaday scientists have unknowingly absorbed a mishmash of epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical positions, all interrelated, but think that they have no explicit positions whatsoever. The most unreflective vulgar positivist thinks he has infinite epistemic flexibility because he's "open to proofz, just proof it to me m8." And they all speak with the authority of scientism, not because it has trained them rigorously or anything like that, but just because they speak on its behalf.
The prewar/fin-de-siecle darwinian position thought it was "scientific" and perfectly "open" too, when it was churning out views of history that involved systematic genocide. So did 19th century positivism that seems cartoonish to us today. So does the pharmaceutical industry, when a trained chimp with an IQ of 104 doles out a bucket of pills because she was told that the Holy DSM must be obeyed. So do psychoanalysts when they think hypnotically suggesting you had a finger up your ass when you were five is a pure science. So did Foucault's Nurse Ratched-esque psychological profession.
It's not about explaining metaphysics to a scientist. It's about them rejecting the idea of metaphysics, then substituting their own, broken-down unconscious metaphysical model and claiming it isn't metaphysics at all, so there can be no further discussion.
Scientism is a closed system of thought, and it operates in the usual way, by making the peons at the bottom (e.g., engineering undergrads) think they will gain prestige by association if they act like zealots.
>>7944351
>scientists 100 years ago
>scientists today
>people of hair color
>you cannot know nothing
>>7944351
Where did you find that? I don't know if I agree with their ontological definitions but I'd have to see the context.
>>7943406
>To what degree do Kuhn and Popper's respective descriptions apply, either normatively or descriptively speaking, to contemporary science?
Recent years especially have deeply vindicated the materialist perspective.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/10/kuhn-o28.html
>>7944384
I'm not so convinced by a *marxist* accusing Kuhn as misunderstanding the scientific method.
reminder that Khun was accused, by many people, of relativism, which is the nightmare of any rationalist, since not even the scientific realist-rationalist can destroy relativism
>>7944351
>this is what philosoplebs actually believe
>>7944890
>>this is what philosoplebs actually believe
>this is what normalplebs believe
>>7943406
not read the whole thing but already bumping. Threads like this are the reason I still visit /sci/
>>7944095
But are you sure these actually apply?
What's an example?
>>7944565
The kinds of knowledge deemed worthwhile and produced by the sciences, and how we interpret that knowledge into our everyday worldviews, is socially constructed. Hope that helps!
Rationalism/positivism is an affront to the actual goals of empiricism.
bumpr for fun
Science assumes the real world in the same sense we assume that the Sun goes around the Earth in our everyday lives, or mathematics assumes an ideal realm populated with numbers and structures. It is a practical attitude of a working scientist (farmer, mathematician,...) that saves time and effort on complications irrelevant to the task at hand. Upon reflection one could conjecture that this attitude does reflect operation in a mind independent world inhabited by real things. A realist might even argue that doing otherwise undermines our usual activities, scientific activities in particular, and leaves them hanging. But this reasoning is moralizing and emotional, not rational. Which bring us directly to what it means to have "faith in science": what is the goal of science?
Plato once taught that the goal of geometry is to lift the soul from the bonds of the sensible to higher pastures of philosophy. In a similar vein a realist might say that it is uncovering the hidden reality of nature that animates science. But this stance naturally undermines itself, once science replaces the apparent reality of everyday life (or older theory) with deeper scientific reality, and transfers its realist commitments to the latter, the same doubt arises about the latter as it raises about the former. Indeed, scientists are trained not to take appearances at face value and seek ever deeper explanations. Cao and Schweber give an interesting account of how this dynamic plays out in modern physics in Conceptual Foundations and the Philosophical Aspects of Renormalization Theory:"the recent developments support a pluralism in theoretical ontology, an antifoundationalism in epistemology and an antireductionism in methodology. These implications are in sharp contrast with the neo-Platonism implicit in the traditional pursuit of quantum field theorists... which assumed that, through rational (mainly mathematical) human activities, one could arrive at an ultimate stable theory of everything." (see especially pp.73-77).
The scientific method itself is not a natural extension of realism, but something in tension with it. The hypothetico-deductive origin of mature scientific ontologies plainly means that they took shape in speculation, only empirical consequences of which were confirmed afterwards. This gives rise to the famous problem of underdetermination of scientific theories associated with Duhem and Quine. And the "no miracles" argument from empirical success to realism is acknowledged to be logically uncompelling even by realists. Looking at history it is hard to expect that fundamental theories of today can not share the fate of geocentrism and ether, whose empirical consequences are nonetheless fully integrated into the modern theories, affirming the empirical continuity of science.
Anti-realism in ontology goes hand in hand with instrumentalism in epistemology, and a different understanding of the goals of science. They are empirical adequacy, and more remotely practical success of applications, rather than a search for hidden reality. This may strike a realist as lowly and demeaning of science, but that again is appeal to emotions, and mechanics too once "corrupted the good of geometry", according to Plato, for it "uses bodies needing much vulgar manual labor". There is no being right or wrong about goals, they are not matters of fact. This is one reason why the dispute is perennial. Anti-realism and instrumentalism take the scientific method itself at face value, and view the ontologies it produces only as tools. Anti-realism takes an agnostic position on reality of theoretical entities, and the idealism/materialism dispute in particular, and questions if one can even make sense of "mind-independent" (as opposed to just not mind-determined) reality. Unlike realism it is a stable position, starting at anti-realism one is anchored there, whereas starting at realism one has to resist being led away from it. And it has as much faith in science as does realism, but on its own terms.
Here is Quine's description of his faith in science in On What There Is, that an anti-realist can sign under:"The physical conceptual scheme simplifies our account of experience because of the way myriad scattered sense events come to be associated with single so-called objects; still there is no likelihood that each sentence about physical objects can actually be translated, however deviously and complexly, into the phenomenalistic language... Viewed from within the phenomenalistic conceptual scheme, the ontologies of physical objects and mathematical objects are myths. The quality of myth, however, is relative; relative, in this case, to the epistemological point of view. This point of view is one among various, corresponding to one among our various interests and purposes". Technically, Quine self-identifies as a realist, see however How does Quine answer the metaphysician's claim that scientism is self-refuting? for the nature of his "realism".
SO scientists are glorified story tellers, big news.
