Philosophy and the Sciences
Transcript for lecture 1.3
Duhem and Kuhn
Michela Massimi
Before the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, developed falsificationism
as a possible method of science, at the turn of last century the French
physicist and philosopher Pierre Duhem had already made an important
discovery. Namely, that scientists never test hypotheses in isolation, but
always with a set of other hypotheses, both main theoretical hypotheses
and auxiliary ones. Consider for example Newton's Law of Gravity. We
never test Newton's Law of Gravity by itself, but always in conjunction with a
set of hypotheses. Some of those hypotheses are main theoretical
hypotheses, for example, Newton's Three Laws of Motion. Others are
auxiliary hypotheses, for example the hypothesis about the number of
planets in the solar system, their masses, whether gravitational attraction
among planets is weaker than the attraction between the sun and the
planets, and so on. Now, suppose that from this set of hypotheses we go on
and deduce a piece of evidence, and suppose that we look for this piece of
evidence in nature, but we can't find it. How should we interpret this
negative result? Well clearly something has gone wrong with one of our
hypotheses. But we don't know which among all those possible hypotheses
is responsible for the negative piece of evidence. So, whenever we
encounter a piece of negative evidence, we actually don't know whether
the piece of negative evidence is evidence against one of the main
theoretical hypotheses, say one of Newton's three laws of motion, as
opposed to being an evidence against the auxiliary hypotheses, for
example the number of planets in the solar system. This is what
philosophers of science call the problem of undetermination of theory by
evidence. Very often our experimental evidence is not enough, is not
sufficient to determine the choice between tweaking or modifying one
auxiliary hypothesis as opposed to replacing altogether a main theoretical
hypothesis. And this is an important topic to which we will go back in the
session on dark matter and dark energy in cosmology.
But before we finish this introduction, I want to mention one more
philosopher of science whose work has been hugely influential in the field.
Thomas Kuhn's seminal 1962 book entitled 'The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions' changed our way of thinking about science. Kuhn began his
career as a physicist, and from physics he moved to history of science,
where he had the chance to engage with outmoded lines of reasoning, for
example, Ptolemaic astronomy. And by reflecting on these sort of signs,
Kuhn came to the conclusion that probably science doesn't have a
distinctive method, no matter whether it's inductive or deductive, and that
probably also we need to rethink the notion of progress in science, and
how science is meant to deliver true theories, theories that capture exactly
the way the world ought to be. So, how did Kuhn change our image of
science?
Before Kuhn, philosophers of science had a certain picture of how science
grows and unfolds based on a sequence of scientific theories each of which
were supposed to build on its predecessor and improve on its predecessor
by delivering a more accurate or more likely to be true image of nature. But
according to Kuhn this picture is totally wrong. If we look at the history of
science, if we look at the actual scientific evidence, we obtain a radically
different image of how science grows and unfolds. According to Kuhn,
science goes through periods of normal science, crisis, and scientific
revolutions. In periods of normal science, scientists work within a scientific
paradigm. This is the expression that Thomas Kuhn introduced in 1962.
Kuhn didn't define exactly what a scientific paradigm is, but roughly a
scientific paradigm includes the main scientific theory, the experimental
and technological resources and those by the community at the time, as
well as the system of values of the community. So, the kind of value like
simplicity, mathematical elegance, parsimony and others that scientists
deem valuable.
During periods of normal science, according to Kuhn, a scientific
community works on a well-defined textbook. For example in the case of
Newtonian mechanics, as a scientific paradigm, the main textbook will be
Newton's 'Principia'. And all the scientific activity consists in solving
problems, a specific puzzle arising from this textbook tradition. So, despite
what Popper said, according to Kuhn during periods of normal science
there is no attempt to falsify or refute a scientific theory. So the accepted
scientific paradigm undergoes a period of crisis only when a sufficiently
large number of anomalies accumulates. During periods of crisis, a new
paradigm may come to the fore, and the scientific community may decide
to abandon the old paradigm and shift to the new one. This is what Kuhn
called the paradigm shift. Kuhn, however, stressed how the paradigm shift,
or the process of theory choice is not dictated by the superiority of the new
paradigm over the old one. On the contrary, Kuhn claimed that the new
paradigm should only be able to have a higher puzzle-solving power than
the previous one. So, the new paradigm should be able to solve the
anomalies, solve the puzzle that the previous paradigm wasn't able to solve.
So, in this way, Kuhn redefined the whole idea of how science progresses,
not in terms of scientific theory being true or more likely to be true, but in
terms of their capacity for solving puzzles and problems.
This shift of focus from Popper Falsificationism to Kuhn puzzle solving has
far reaching implications for the debate on the rationality of theory choice.
Kuhn famously argued that some scientific paradigms are
incommensurable. Incommensurable means they lack a common measure,
common measure to assess and evaluate them, not to compare them. Kuhn
was absolutely clear that we can compare paradigms. But it was also clear
that we don't have a common measure for judging, assessing or evaluating
whether one paradigm is better or superior than the other one. Different
scientific paradigms use very different theories, very different concepts, but
also different experimental, technological resources and system of values.
So that, whenever we have a paradigm shift, we experience something
similar to what psychologists call Gestalt switches. Like those we're all
familiar with as in the case of a famous bistable images, such as the duckrabbit. We will go back to Duhem, the problem of underdetermination of
theory by evidence, Kuhn and the rationality of theory choice, in our session
on dark matter and dark energy, where we discuss whether current
cosmology is undergoing a possible paradigm shift. We very much look
forward to seeing you all in the next class. Thank you.
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