Thomas Kuhn's Critics: Evaluating Views on Scientific Revolution
Thomas Kuhn's "critics"

hello...

I have read this chapter XI of Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions...

Are there such philsophers who were...
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irony of truth said:

hello...

I have read this chapter XI of Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions...

Are there such philsophers who were for/against Kuhn's invisibility of revolutions? I am interested to know what are their sides to Kuhn's invisibility of revolution...

http://wc0.worldcrossing.com/WebX?14@165.8dWZcIAWHbe.9@.1dde5f07

I would have to look specifically and will. But I would first draw your attention to self Adjoint's assessment.

Self adjoint said:

Kuhn's two examples of paradigm shift that he produced professional histories of are Copernicus' revolution and Planck's introduction of quantized emission and absorption of radiation. In both cases they justified their new ways with traditional math. Copernicus showed that the diameters of the planetary deferents always passed through the sun, in terms of the epicycle theory. And Planck showed that the quantum followed form 19th century mathematical idealizations of the black body

https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=281651&postcount=66

In my time spend with this other poster I approached this subject from a different angle, and incorporated questions and insights of this gentlemen. I was then able to catelogue his insights(distilled questions from reading Kuhn) with pespective views in my research.

Of course these had to incorporate some of the views of today. New roads to describing this quantum geometry of quantum gravity. Certainly a revolution in my books. We find that this struggle was not limited to the views share for us by Einstein's insights, but his resistance meet in Bohr's view in the issues of Solvay.

Paradigmal change, even when new insight is developed in regards to these anomalies, is not a bad thing, if taken seriously. Because it forces people to go to their books, much as Bohr did when thought expeirments were placed in front of him and Schrodinger. As a result the world of quantum mechanics we also went through with it's own revolution.

So this squaring off if I may, has certain advantages all around. Einstein was very comfortable I believe with the model he had created, so the world presented by Bohr of quantum mechanics although unsettling has a issue it had to contend with. Everything worked fine in a cosmological setting, but did not work very well down below.

People are working on this today.

Chapter XI - The Invisibility of Revolutions.

Because paradigm shifts are generally viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge, and because the history of the field is represented in the new textbooks that accompany a new paradigm, a scientific revolution seems invisible.

An increasing reliance on textbooks is an invariable concomitant of the emergence of a first paradigm in any field of science (136).

The image of creative scientific activity is largely created by a field's textbooks.

Textbooks are the pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science.

These texts become the authoritative source of the history of science.

Both the layman's and the practitioner's knowledge of science is based on textbooks.

A field's texts must be rewritten in the aftermath of a scientific revolution.

Once rewritten, they inevitably disguise no only the role but the existence and significance of the revolutions that produced them.

The resulting textbooks truncate the scientist's sense of his discipline's history and supply a substitute for what they eliminate.

More often than not, they contain very little history at all (Whitehead: "A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.")

In the rewrite, earlier scientists are represented as having worked on the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution and method has made seem scientific.

Why dignify what science's best and most persistent efforts have made it possible to discard?

The historical reconstruction of previous paradigms and theorists in scientific textbooks make the history of science look linear or cumulative, a tendency that even affects scientists looking back at their own research (139).

These misconstructions render revolutions invisible.

They also work to deny revolutions as a function.

Science textbooks present the inaccurate view that science has reached its present state by a series of individual discoveries and inventions that, when gathered together, constitute the modern body of technical knowledge—the addition of bricks to a building.

This piecemeal-discovered facts approach of a textbook presentation illustrates the pattern of historical mistakes that misleads both students and laymen about the nature of the scientific enterprise.

More than any other single aspect of science, that pedagogic form [the textbook] has determined our image of the nature of science and of the role of discovery and invention in its advance.

http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/Kuhn.html

irony of truth said:

Thanks.. but can I ask some questions.. I want to know more deeper but simply about Kuhn's invisibility of revolutions...

- What does invisibility means in "Invisibility of Revolution"? Is it literally not seen by our naked eye?

- Also... why is it that the revolution, Accdg. to Kuhn, is invisible..? "Because paradigm shifts are generally viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge, and because the history of the field is represented in the new textbooks that accompany a new paradigm, a scientific revolution seems invisible." This is the reason, right? I want to fully understand this in layman's term...

- Are there some practical examples that could explain this invisibility of revolutions?

- Also, I want to know what constitutes the invisibility of revolutions...what are those?

And, what are the factors that would constitute the invisibility of revolutions?

Because of the "existence" of invisibility of revolutions, what could be the effect?

Yes, Nereid spells it out in regards to the textbooks.

The quiet revolution and what is invisible is leading researchers, and here I could have referred to Smolin or a Witten, and find that these might be the professors, crossing the room kind of people( that's a Higg's joke) and how such thinking could have been formalized, as it spreads through communications like these forums.

On the outer most extreme civilization(the outer rim and the gravity associated measured in the professors original idea, and inverse square length tells us much about these views from there origination) is being warmed to the views of Kip thorne and Wheeler, although we would have not recognized the tangible of their association in LIGO.

Most people in society do not know the origins of this world cosmologically, yet it has physically manifested itself here on earth. Voila

You had to know where this thinking emerged, to my way of thnking, and this is tracible(call it history[ the books are not showing this becuase they are frozen views in time], No!? ) although not easily perceptible.

Something triggers in the mind( a anomalie) and further insightual development occurs, the revolution is manifestng itself today, and the war of the worlds(words) is continuing. Somehtng will come out of it as both arose out of Einstein and Bohr's relative positions, as it wil arise out of strings and LQG. They are driving each other?