Episode 217: Dropping Paradigms (Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions")

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:16] I don't know, Arthur. No do I, but I'm seeing things a lot more clearly now. I wish things were different, but it weren't us who changed.

[00:01:19] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, here we are face-to-face. It doesn't always happen for us at the Seaver Ranch in Montana, thanks to Dave and Helena Seaver. So what do you think of Big Sky Country?

[00:01:36] It's beautiful, as I've said multiple times. This is, I feel like they ripped off the scenery from Red Dead Redemption 2. I mean, feel a little original Montana. Like I've already seen this. Full trip so far, Dave, just reminded David that he wants to be playing.

[00:01:56] He would rather be playing Red Dead Redemption. No, it's gorgeous. It's beautiful here. Yeah, we have some very gracious guests and we are... Hosts. Well, they have very gracious guests. You have a very gracious host.

[00:02:08] It is weird sitting right next to you because I'm used to not making eye contact on the TV screen. Now I have to not make eye contact in person. It's very awkward. Yeah, and it's easier for me to tell. Yeah, that's right.

[00:02:23] Like what the fuck is he looking at? We're right now sitting in like a guest house overlooking just a bunch of mountains and it's just a stunningly beautiful place here. This view is incredible. All right, today we are going to talk about the structure of scientific revolutions.

[00:02:45] Thomas Coons controversial 19 masterpiece. Controversial. And honestly, it's not going to be today for us. It's not going to be today for us. It's going to be tomorrow. Thank God. This was the winner of our Patreon selected episode voted on by our beloved $5 and

[00:03:06] up subscribers and suggested by one of our patrons. And we love them all. And this was a challenge. Yeah, this particular one. I mean, we'll see. We'll see how obvious it is that it was a challenge. It's hopefully going to be a really good discussion.

[00:03:23] I'm interested to know what you think about it. I honestly don't know. Like part of me thinks you might hate it and feel threatened by it. Part of me thinks you might actually really like it and find yourself more in agreement

[00:03:34] than either you thought or than I thought. So why do you think I might be threatened by it? Do you think that it's like some sort of relativistic take on science? Well, you have publicly embraced the sort of paparian view of science as a progressive

[00:03:51] series of falsifications using like pure observations. So that's why this is not this is a different picture of science. I take Popper to be making a normative claim and Coontam be making a descriptive sociological claim. So I think they're not that inconsistent. But I haven't finished the book.

[00:04:10] Yeah. But first, what are we going to talk about today? This is an article I think you put in our Slack from Eon by Neil Levy. Yeah. It's an article called Final Thoughts. Do Deathbed Regrets give us a special insight into what really matters in life?

[00:04:31] Now, this isn't a funny article. This isn't going to be the most ha-ha of opening segments. That part of it that made me what actually probably brought it to mind since I had put this in Slack a long time ago is that Tamler probably had a near-death experience.

[00:04:49] Yeah. I think we both did several times actually. I had one additional near-death experience. So I was wondering if you're wisdom in that flash brief, the briefest of moments. Yeah. I realized I should not be spending my life doing a podcast though. What the fuck? So thanks everybody.

[00:05:13] It was fun. Dave, thanks especially to you. You know, 216 episodes. It's nothing to be ashamed of. No, but so it's kind of fascinated me before and I think I had it as a naive assumption

[00:05:28] that when somebody is on their deathbed and they say, you know, this is what life's all about, as the common saying goes. Nobody says, I wish I had worked more on their deathbed.

[00:05:39] It does seem as if you get perhaps because you have a perspective on the whole life that you've led in what like while you're about to die, if you know that you're dying, the things that you say about life might be particularly true or particularly valuable.

[00:05:55] So it seems like on one naïve take of it, it might be that like we should actually go around to people who are dying and ask them, like how should I live my life? And their answers might actually be wise, like in some deep source of wisdom.

[00:06:10] Because they're looking back on their whole life. You know, this reminds me back when I used to and I should do it and I don't anymore volunteer for this prisoners entrepreneurial program. This is a program where they take people who are about to be released from prison

[00:06:28] and try to set them up, try to make it so that they can succeed when they're released. The first things they do for those who enter the program is they ask them to write their obituary right now if they died and then also what they want their obituary

[00:06:46] to read, to be like. So two obituary's and I think both of those, you know, and especially the second one is sort of playing on this idea that the best kind of advice in this case, you know, kind of projecting to that perspective is going to be from

[00:07:03] someone who has the full perspective over your entire life. But Neil Levy, who I know, he's a philosopher who does a lot of free will stuff. He is skeptical that there is some sort of privileged epistemic perspective that comes from the deathbed.

[00:07:22] So I guess we'll talk about that. Should we say first what the five most common regrets are according to one bestselling book by Brani Ware? Right. She's a former nurse from Australia and she wrote a book about this, I guess,

[00:07:38] just, you know, walking around asking dying people what their regrets were. That sounds fun. I mean probably at it, you know, nurses are freaking angels. Yeah. And in fact, I've spoken to hospice nurses who seem to have like the actually the healthiest perspective, existential perspective. Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:08:00] So she says now Levy or Levy? Yeah. Levy points out that there is not a ton of systematic research on this. And even in this book, it seems sort of like these are anecdotes that she's collected. So perhaps take with a grain of salt.

[00:08:17] But number one is I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me, which seems like you're taking a long time to die if you're saying that whole thing. It's not their last breath necessarily, right?

[00:08:35] You want it? You want them to be more concise? They're sorry, you know, like they're they're in a lot of pain probably. Right. More morphine is actually the most wise thing. That will be my regret. I wish I had taken morphine regularly much earlier than I actually did.

[00:08:54] I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number two, that's one like I'm not going to be able to say. As we sit overlooking the planes of one, I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. Also, one that I'm curious.

[00:09:13] I wish I had maybe a little more strength about expressing my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Yeah, I mean, again, like, yeah. I'm number five. I wish that I had let myself be happier. What do you think that means?

[00:09:29] Again, this sounds really sort of culturally. I don't know how to say it specific to a particular kind of like of, you know, person who thinks, you know, like knows to the grindstone, you grin and bear it, you don't express feelings.

[00:09:47] It sounds like somebody of that, that ilk saying, if only I had done what I wanted to, like, gone, followed my impulses, followed my desires, then I would have been happier rather than adhere to duty and be what everybody else wants me to be.

[00:10:01] Yeah, I guess so it could just be a sort of summation of the first four. Like those are the things that would have made the person happier. I mean, I don't know how culturally specific this is. This does seem like if they did this in America

[00:10:15] and an American nurse wrote this, I would think that these five would be among the most common as Neil Levy points out, they are they do seem very Western cliches. Yeah, yeah, they do seem very Western because they're kind of about the individual.

[00:10:31] It's about it's not about I wish I had done more for my community. Or I wish I had been late. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So so so Levy says number one, he's skeptical about these that these really are or really, you know,

[00:10:49] do express the dying regrets or advice of of these people. He thinks it might be culturally influenced because in some ways they're cliches. Yeah, right. So he says I'm skeptical first of the reports themselves. There are various cultural pressures that might lead people to report such regrets,

[00:11:08] whether they feel them or not and might lead us to attribute them to the dying, whether they report them or not. You know, I think that's neither here nor there. We can't know. Like, I believe that a lot of people do have those regrets.

[00:11:20] You talk to people in their fifties who will say things like this about their life, you know, so. So it's not like I think that that's that's not the big. I mean, I guess the big interesting epistemological question is, is this something that we should take seriously?

[00:11:38] If we could get, you know, if this does represent the majority, you know, view of people who are dying, like is this something that we should privilege as opposed to, you know, our own view or the views of younger people?

[00:11:56] Right. If you yeah, if you ask a like a do a cross sectional interviews of people at various stages in life, is there some reason to think that the very last thing people say is more valuable? You know, there's one way in which this seems like a generalization,

[00:12:17] an overgeneralization of something that I do think is right, which is, you know, suppose you have a young kid entering the NBA for him to ask a 15 year veteran of the NBA, like what should I be doing now? Yeah. Seems smart, right?

[00:12:33] And and so that that people who have more experience should have more wisdom or insight into the matter, I think is a rational, you know, if not perfect, obviously heuristic. And that might go for in general wisdom about life from older people.

[00:12:49] So people who are not under deathbed, say it might it might be very meaningful to hear from elders about what they regret in life. Like I wish I had spent more time with my family. If you hear that from somebody who's in their seventies,

[00:13:04] that does have I think that does have some some meaning. And maybe we should privilege it. By the way, there's this there's a story of this guy. So there was a very, very famous card magician. He's considered like the biggest card magician in the 20th century.

[00:13:19] And he was a really eccentric guy. They called him the professor. This stats professor at Stanford named Percy Diaconis. He's a famous statistician now wanted to learn card magic. So he went to the Magic Castle in LA and he became his sort of like proj.

[00:13:35] He learned study, study, study. This guy was already probably in his seventies at the time. And one time he had the pleasure of just being sitting with the professor and you just them two alone and he asks him,

[00:13:51] what advice can you give me as like as an aspiring magician? Like you've had this amazing career. You know, you've traveled the world, you've been influential. I'm just starting like what can you tell me that might be of use? And Divert and the professor goes,

[00:14:07] fuck as many women as you can. That was the gem that he dropped. Yeah. And I think that that might be a regret of that you're not going to say that you're not going to actually say if somebody's

[00:14:22] asking you, but if you, you know, you give somebody truth serum, I think that would be a popular one. Sodium pentaval on your deathbed. That's the study that you should do. My husband more often. Fuck the UPS guy.

[00:14:45] Yeah, that was also something David Foster Wallace said like, you know, that he wished he had had more sex on his book tours. So so Neil Levy quotes, Schwitz Gibbel Eric Schwitz Gibbel, former friend of the show, former guest,

[00:15:02] a very bad wizard's guest, who's also skeptical about deathbed being, you know, a sort of privileged epistemic perspective. And he says, number one, dying might be subject to hindsight bias in the form of a tendency to assume that their current epistemic perspective,

[00:15:21] looking back on the past is identical to the perspective they should have adopted at the time. And so the example he gives is kind of interesting. You know, there's nobody says I wish I had made more money. Right. But it could be that they're

[00:15:34] forgetting like how much it sucked to be poor and forgetting like that. You know, that was a struggle and worth working a lot to like pull themselves out of whatever situation that that they're, you know, and maybe they're romanticizing the time of their poverty.

[00:15:51] You know, so that would lead them to underestimate how much money mattered to their to their life. I mean, I think that's probably true to some extent, but people continue to work, continue to try to make more money long after the point where

[00:16:08] they're they're struggling for financial security. And I think that's the regret that people report, not that, you know, I should have just lived in a shitty studio while I was 40 and work and collected my volumes of poetry. Which now I'm looking forward to reading those.

[00:16:30] Yeah, Schwitzgebel says also in his the blog post where he talks about this, that people who say, oh, I wish I would have spent more time pursuing my dreams, that this hindsight bias is actually causing them to think they

[00:16:41] actually had a shot more than they then they might have. So you're dying, you say like, I wish I could have gone to I should have gone to LA to be an actor. And the reality of the constraints might have been apparent when you were 25.

[00:16:54] But now that you're dying, you know, you're 80 years old and you're on your deathbed, of course, you think you should have tried that out because like the risks aren't so like this role in the way that they are when you're 25.

[00:17:06] And you just would have been like at best, you could have ended up just in some porn, like, you know, or sleeping with like Harvey Weinstein to get a tiny role and get your sad card. That's right.

[00:17:19] Schwitzgebel, by the way, says I prefer he concludes his thing by saying I prefer the wisdom of 45 year olds, the ones in the middle of life who gaze equally in both directions. Some 45 year olds also think you should pursue your dreams

[00:17:31] within reason and not worry too much about money. So I think, by the way, that means what? I mean, that means wisdom comes from me. It emanates from me. Yes, I am going to soak Dave's wisdom, having already been five years beyond.

[00:17:44] You should have you should have fucked more people. Hey, there's still time. So yeah, this is I think true, but also I think maybe I'm starting to reject the premise here. I think there's valuable perspectives from people of all ages.

[00:18:03] There's a way in which a 40, a 45 year old who is still in the midst of their day to day activities, but has the you know, this is like the NBA veteran. Right? They're not dead, but they're still kind of in the midst of

[00:18:19] of playing even if they're on the tail end of it. And so that gives them a like insight that somebody who's dying, you know, hasn't somebody who hasn't been in the like normal work a day world for 30 years won't have. So I think that's true.

[00:18:33] But then there's also things that that you'll lose if from the 45 year old because the 45 year old might be have just gotten a promotion and is really excited about like, you know, I, you know, like there are there are people who

[00:18:47] like, I remember going into academia, even people saying, you just have to work. You have to work your ass off and just put out those articles. And, you know, like that's not like that's something that I imagine maybe when they're on their death bed.

[00:19:01] They'll realize, oh wait, that didn't amount to that much in the end. Right. Right. So I think it's like every perspective and has value, the young immature, but full of energy and full of hope and optimism perspective has value. Like all of these perspectives have value.

[00:19:20] I think like the idea that we should like arrange them in order of what should be the most privileged, that might be the mistake here. Well, Levy wants to argue something else. Yeah. I think which is that all of the

[00:19:36] perspectives from all of those people, the 45 year old, the NBA veteran, you know, the old magician, all of those might be good or bad sources of advice. It the deathbed perspective he thinks is going to be especially distorted. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:52] And he thinks this because it's I think a clever way of framing this, which is, you know, many of our listeners have heard us discuss Thomas Nagel's essay on the absurd and we had a I think a really good discussion about meaning

[00:20:06] and the source of meaning and how the fear that nothing in life has meaning is really a fear that comes from a completely external source. Like if you're outside of this life looking in, you might think, oh yeah,

[00:20:19] like it's hard to find what meaning these little creatures have. They're like ants running around. Meaning comes from the things that we value. The goals that we have, the relationships that we have. The source of meaning is

[00:20:32] is the stuff of life, the stuff that we're involved in, the stuff that we care about. Those are deeply meaningful in some way. So what Levy wants to say is that the deathbed perspective is somebody who knows that they are external to all of those things.

[00:20:46] They'll never be able to participate in all those activities anymore. And because of that, they're giving us this kind of thing like, oh, I should have been happier. I should have, whatever, spent less time working when in reality,

[00:21:00] a lot of our meaning in life derives from perhaps pursuing work, staying up nights to get that project finished. That is the source of daily meaning for many people. Yeah, I'm not convinced by this criticism of Levy's at all.

[00:21:16] And I guess the reason is that I think somebody on their deathbed, he makes it seem like they're incapable of remembering or understanding the degree to which their long term activities gave their life meaning. And I don't see any reason to think that that's true.

[00:21:34] You know, talking to my dad as he got older, when he was past the point where he could live some sort of long term project as he had his whole career up till then, he still understood that that gave his life meaning. He still understood that, you know,

[00:21:54] that that was something that was personally rewarding to him. And I don't see like Levy makes it almost seem like the person is just completely incapable of identifying with. I mean, I don't think that it has to be typed to work or whatever.

[00:22:10] I think maybe if I read this Levy quote, we can see whether or not. Because I think I'm more sympathetic to what he's saying, but I'm not sure. So he says, once you know your death is imminent,

[00:22:22] extended plans and projects cease to have a grip on you as valuable activities, valuable for you. On the deathbed only a narrower, more immediate set of commitments continues to have significance when we know that we lack a personal future. We find ourselves external to the system of justification

[00:22:39] that underwrites longer term projects. It's not just about work, I think he's just saying like all of the things right that in our daily lives provide us with meaning. Yeah, I just don't buy that. Like I think you can remember and identify with your previous self

[00:22:55] being engaged in long term projects. So he says like as an example, he says, even starting a book or a box set as an enterprise that could require confidence in the personal future. It makes sense. You're not going to start reading Leo Tolstoy's 1392 page novel War and

[00:23:11] Peace if you know you just have 24 hours to live. You won't even start watching Game of Thrones. No, that's true. But you might remember that you read all of Jostoyevsky and but not you never got

[00:23:24] to War and Peace, it might you might still say I wish I had read War and Peace. You're not going to be like, I don't have any idea what it would even be like to want to read War and Peace or what the value of that might be.

[00:23:36] Like that's that this is what I don't get about this argument. Well, he's not. I mean, I don't know you're you're sticking on this memory thing. Of course, they remember what they used to value.

[00:23:45] I think what he's saying and part of this really depends on data that we don't apparently have, which is the people who previously valued or reading War and Peace. When they're dying, do they say things like read more?

[00:23:58] So if the data is right that we have, like if that woman's whatever, that doesn't seem to be what people say. I mean, like I think some of these things could be long term projects. Right. It's true that these five things don't seem to focus on that.

[00:24:15] But the way he makes it sound is that these things won't seem value. These long term projects won't seem valuable to somebody who is about to die because they can't undertake them. And that's just what I don't buy. Most of life is some kind of long term project.

[00:24:33] You know, spending more time with your family is a long term project. Yeah. I mean, he does, to be fair to leave. We say, you know, it's not that they can't have any access to it, but it will seem pointless and absurd to somebody on their deathbed.

[00:24:49] Maybe the idea is that because we're taking the external, legal perspective, some of these long term projects will seem will likely seem more absurd to us than than they would at the time. But I don't even buy that because I just don't think that,

[00:25:07] you know, say, say reading more, which is a long term project becoming. But that's something that will still seem valuable to you, even if you can't do it now. So so I think you're there. You're saying something different than what he's arguing because the question

[00:25:23] that I take and be asking is independent of what the people on their deathbed say. Right. So like let's forget the content of what they're saying. Should we value deathbed proclamations about what's meaningful over the declarations of a 45 year old or a healthy 80 year old?

[00:25:40] And I think he's saying the answer is no, because what we think is going on is that they have extra access to all of the stuff that makes our life meaningful from beginning to end. And he's saying when in reality they might actually have,

[00:25:54] since they know they're dying, they might have focused completely on something else, something like that's from outside of the perspective of like the meaning from daily life. And some of their long term achievements will look will be minimized in some sense because they have that perspective.

[00:26:11] That's a good thing. That's like so so when people say, you know what these these 25 Emmys and Oscars don't matter at the end of the day. I don't quite believe them. I mean, I know what they're saying because they're dying.

[00:26:26] So obviously it doesn't matter because they're not going to be here to enjoy it. But like, I think they really, really, really did care about them probably. Yeah, I just don't buy that they really would say that or that they wouldn't understand that those things actually were valuable.

[00:26:41] They might have a more ironic perspective about them. But like at the same time, you know, somebody who who keeps going on like a corporate ladder keeps climbing up it and thinking, well, if I just become, you know, junior vice president, then I'll be happy.

[00:26:58] And then, you know, somebody looking back on that and being like, oh, that didn't actually mean shit. I was I was no more happy than I was before when I was starting out like that. They have that right perspective.

[00:27:10] I think it just depends on what we're talking about. You know, I doubt that Tolstoy thinks, God, I shouldn't have written actually he might have because he went a little crazy towards the end. But like, you know, I think people who really did derive meaning from their

[00:27:25] long term projects are still in a position to appreciate that. But I think it still feel like there's this tension that we have where you keep going back to the content of like, like I think that you're right,

[00:27:36] that they might be have access to all of the sources of meaning. They might in fact actually say it. I think the question is if the guy says, see these 25 Oscars and Emmys, right, that's what life is about. Does that hold more weight because he's dying? Right. Right.

[00:27:53] And so, you know, I don't know. Like I'm sort of agnostic about this. It does make sense that what the thing that makes sense about this article is questioning my assumption that they would know better than anyone else what life is about. But yeah, right.

[00:28:10] This is why I was saying about the question. I think there's going to be some points where they have, you know, there's reason to take them more seriously epistemically in some points where there's reason to take them less seriously epistemically.

[00:28:25] And, you know, you got to it's you got to get a lot of perspectives. It's interesting how and how to. You know, wisdom is stuff that we should collect from people with experience knowing which people we should be listening to.

[00:28:39] I think it's a super interesting question because, yeah, you know, it's no obvious. It's not obvious that just because you're old, you're wiser or just because you're about to die at your wiser. Some 20 year old say some pretty wise shit. Yeah.

[00:28:52] And and figuring out I think maybe what's wrong is to think that anybody has a privileged epistemic access to anything that's aside, that's outside of the context. You might be wise or unwise within the context of everything you know. Exactly.

[00:29:08] I think maybe the mistake is to think that there's some category of like these people are more wise than that people. Because I'm sure you've had this too. But there has been times that Eliza has said something that's like just like, holy shit.

[00:29:25] Like just like my life has been illuminated a little bit more. And, you know, partly it's because she's an insightful and wise. But partly that comes from the fact that she is young and she has that perspective and it's a perspective that you can sort of

[00:29:39] forget about, but that isn't one that is less real. You know, it could still apply. Maybe it's been beaten out of you a little bit by then, you know? And like, but if you let yourself do it, you know, so I think like every age,

[00:29:52] every age group has a certain amount of wisdom and and a certain, you know, that's why you have to shop widely for well. Yeah, and I advice on how to live. And I think that the minute that you start thinking that there are people

[00:30:07] who by virtue of their particular stage in life or their particular occupation, age, whatever, that's the reason they have wisdom is because of that. Then you'll miss out on something, you know, a 26 year old Uber driver told you that might be really wise.

[00:30:26] You know, it's very easy to shut out people who we don't think, but as Jesus said, out of the mouths of babes, you know, sometimes you can really hear what I agree with you about what when your kid says something that seems like damn,

[00:30:39] that's mature and wise and a good point. But unlike you, I always assume that it's just because I at some point said it to her and then she's parroting it back to me. Obviously the wise one, it still comes back to you.

[00:30:52] You're the one that gets the credit. Yeah. No, I think there's a lot of stuff Eliza has a better perspective on than I do. And especially like in my case, than I had at that age. Oh, that's not even close. Like maybe the same ballpark difference. Maybe.

[00:31:13] All right. So don't just blindly follow the advice of people on deathbeds, but you know. But if you're about to die, join us an email and tell us what life is all about. That's a little morbid. But sure. All right, when we come back,

[00:31:31] we're going to talk about the structure of scientific revolutions and have really intelligent things to say about it. This episode is brought to you in part by a new podcast, a slight change of plans. So look, if you love our show, you know we love to discuss complicated

[00:31:51] and fascinating topics with wit and intelligence. I mean, this is the copy that they gave us to read, but that's so true. They know us. I mean, yeah, they've wit and intelligence. I like that they, you know, both of those things.

[00:32:07] Well, we want to tell you about a new podcast that will leave you thinking on a slight change of plans. Behavioral scientist Dr. Maya Shankar of Google asks the question, what exactly happens when we find ourselves at the brink of change?

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[00:33:45] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the episode where we love to take a moment and think our patrons for all that they do for us, including in one case, invite us to a beautiful Montana ranch. So thanks to Dave and Helena Siever.

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[00:39:16] Thank you. All right, let's get to Thomas Kuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions. All right, welcome back to very bad wizards. Dave, this is our last session that we're recording here in Montana. We're going back to Skype after this. It's going to be weird. Yeah.

[00:39:32] So let's get to the structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, which was the winner of the very bad wizards, Patreon listener selected episode. It was one that kind of just beat out, remember the trial? Yeah. By one vote, it was so close. I'm glad we're doing that.

[00:39:56] I think we needed them to vote on it for us to do the episode. And because it's it's it's a big book. It's longer than I remembered. And I think we needed external pressure to get us to do this. So I'm very grateful for that.

[00:40:10] And you have bravely volunteered to give a short synopsis of Kuhn's ideas in this book and so take it away. We'll see how that goes. All right, the structure of scientific revolutions, as Tamler said, by Thomas Kuhn was published in 1962.

[00:40:29] Kuhn was actually first trained as a physicist and taught at Harvard University. And while he was at Harvard, he started teaching a class sort of on the history of science and moved to Princeton where he fully embraced his role as historian and philosopher of science.

[00:40:44] So in this book, Kuhn is I think attempting to describe the progress of science over time, sort of from the perspective of a historian of science. And what motivated him was that he saw that there was a kind of a widely accepted

[00:40:57] standard view of how science seems to proceed, that it's gradual and linear in its accumulation of knowledge and sort of it builds over time. But Kuhn thought that this view was actually mistaken. And in this book, he develops what is like a stage like description

[00:41:14] of his approach to how scientific progress works. So for Kuhn, we begin people who start doing working in science in what might be called pre science or pre paradigmatic science. There are just many approaches to scientific questions that are worked on independently.

[00:41:34] There's very few shared assumptions and methods. So this is where you get like a bunch of people writing entire treaties on how the world works, but they're not in communication with each other. But after a while, and especially probably through the emergence

[00:41:48] of communication with each other, there is an emergence of a shared paradigm. So here's where I'm going to try my best to to give a quick definition of what a paradigm is, although this is controversial, sort of a collection

[00:42:01] of beliefs, assumptions, methods, definitions and probably some other stuff that guide scientific practice. It sort of describes the set of questions that should be asked and the phenomenon that should be observed. And it guides what Kuhn calls normal science.

[00:42:17] So once a paradigm gets set into place, normal science begins. And normal science is sort of people plugging away at the questions and the phenomena that have been defined by the paradigm. But after a while, the current paradigm, the dominant paradigm, starts to accumulate some failures.

[00:42:33] It starts being unable to account for some of the observations out in the world. These are what Kuhn refers to as anomalies. Now, at first these are brushed aside or they're explained by making some adjustments, maybe some adjustments to local theories,

[00:42:47] maybe some confirmation bias goes on and people ignore them. In fact, because paradigms shape so deeply the way scientists see the world, these anomalies really are often fought against or ignored. But this after a while can no longer be a tenable thing to do.

[00:43:03] So so after that's no longer possible, people can't keep fighting against these anomalies. This is a crisis ensues and this crisis gives rise to what Kuhn calls revolutionary science, that kind of science begins to be conducted here.

[00:43:16] The explicit and the tacit long held assumptions of the current paradigm begin to be questioned and potentially a new paradigm emerges that can account for these anomalies. This is the so-called paradigm shift. Once a new paradigm kind of kicks in, everybody goes back to doing normal

[00:43:34] science, albeit under a new set of guiding beliefs. So critically for Kuhn, the two paradigms, the previous paradigm and the new paradigm are incommensurable. We'll probably have a lot more to say about what that means. But he made the claim in this book that the concepts, rules, definitions

[00:43:48] from one paradigm aren't translatable into the old paradigm. In some cases, even the same terms mean different things. Toward the end of the book, Kuhn attempts to tackle the question of scientific progress, which is as I was reading the book,

[00:44:02] was wondering what he had to say about this. And he gets there trying to answer the question of do these paradigm shifts actually move us closer to the true nature of underlying reality if there is one.

[00:44:14] Now, Kuhn's views on this are probably what have been what have given rise to the most discussion, and many people have sort of just dismissed the entire work because of what they perceive to be a fundamentally relativistic or anti-realist take on science.

[00:44:28] And I think a lot of scientists who hear about Kuhn might think that this is what he's arguing and so they dismiss it. But others have defended it, saying that that Kuhn's claims about progress have been misunderstood at best caricatured at worst.

[00:44:41] I think Kuhn himself thought he had been misunderstood and I'm sure we'll have a lot more to say about this. So, Tamler, what did you think of the book? Well, first of all, great job. Thank you. I'm impressed. So I love I really like it.

[00:44:57] I mean, you know, I am temperamentally less attached to the kind of naive realism that scientists and often philosophers kind of embrace or assume. And we're even just realism, period. I'm a moral pluralist and I can be pluralist about practically anything.

[00:45:18] And I think this this book makes a really good critique of a and here's where I would use the word naive of a naive picture of how science works to give us this true or with greater approximation of true representation of reality.

[00:45:43] And I think unlike some of the truly postmodern or or kind of hardcore extreme or relativists takes on this kinds of questions, he kind of lands around where I would land. You know, just temperamentally or just kind of what I'm comfortable with,

[00:46:02] which I think is a real valuable notion of progress within the sciences, but not one that requires us to think that we human beings are somehow coming closer and closer to understanding the truth with the capital T of how nature really is.

[00:46:25] I mean, I just think there's so many and he talks about a lot of these. There's so many like barriers to that that are just part of being human. We have here's like my content side, which I guess Kuhn also shares here.

[00:46:40] We perceive the world through certain categories that are that we have just by virtue of being human and, you know, he extends this to art, that the theories themselves bring along certain categories with them. The paradigms bring categories with them.

[00:46:56] And so while we can say that these paradigms or these theories are better than the previous ones at solving certain problems at engaging with the world, I think I'm with Kuhn where where he says we don't lose that much by not thinking

[00:47:16] of it as progressing towards one ultimate goal, which is truth or reality. I mean, we'll get to a lot of that stuff. I want to go into the details because whatever you think of that stuff, like I think just his description of normal science and how it works

[00:47:31] and then the transitions of how you go into the crisis mode and then revolution into revolutionary science, that stuff is just really fascinating. And while he exclusively ties it to science, I do think and I'm not alone here

[00:47:49] that you can apply some of these ideas suitably adjusted to other fields as well, including my own philosophy in ways that are, I think, pretty interesting. So it's a really valuable way of looking at inquiry, you know, at inquiry of all kinds. Yeah. What did you think?

[00:48:09] That's because that's what I did. You've been asking me for the last few days, curious what I was going to think about this and so I had not read this book before. Right. I had just gotten sort of the I'm glad I did because I had just gotten

[00:48:23] that whatever gets soaked into you like through higher education about what Kuhn said and and his the use of Kuhn by people who are like hardcore anti-realists and relativists put me off a little bit. But but my understanding of Kuhn was never that he was like a staunch

[00:48:45] anti-realist or relativist. In fact, there's a there's a funny quote. I don't remember now where I read it. It might have been in one of the articles that we shared with each other on his how he agreed more with his critics than with his fans,

[00:48:59] because a lot of his fans are just like, yeah, you were totally right. Science is nothing or something like that. You know, and I did gain a respect for him as a scientist who went on to do philosophy of science because,

[00:49:15] you know, this this in this book, you can tell he knows what he's talking about. You know, obviously the science is was the science that he knew from the 60s or the 50s, but he uses a lot of examples from the history of science.

[00:49:29] He goes into great detail about, you know, the theories of electricity and Newtonian mechanics and and Ptolemaic versus Copernican understanding of astronomy and Einstein relativity. Like he he knows his stuff and he's I think good at building a case for the descriptive claims that he's making.

[00:49:51] So I actually really enjoy the bulk of his book as being a descriptor of the sociology of science, like as a sociology of science, I find the idea deeply appealing. It seems to resonate well with what I know about how science progresses.

[00:50:09] I think and so I think it could have ended there and I would have thought it was a great book. The parts where he starts talking about the whether or not we're approaching truth. I'm I'm less and less warm than maybe it's because I am a realist,

[00:50:31] I believe in an objective underlying reality. But here's where I wanted to take it back to you because there's two two things that you might be saying when you're talking about what you like about Kuhn. So there's an epistemological question, which is can humans actually get there?

[00:50:47] And I bought like I fully accept that we have a whole bunch of barriers to understanding truth with the capital T. But I believe that there is a truth with the capital T, whether or not we're capable of understanding it. Who knows?

[00:51:04] But I also tend to believe that we are closer to approximating something that like we're bet we know more. Like I want to cling to the idea that we now know more than we used to. We can explain more phenomena than we used to.

[00:51:19] But I guess that might be controversial. Well, so first of all, like I think the epistemological claim is the claim that he's making. He's not saying there is no objective reality. I think as Philip Kitcher pointed out in some essay that I sent you,

[00:51:35] if there's no objective reality, how does normal science even work? Like what is what causes these anomalies? Why does a why does a theory go into crisis? Like there is an objective reality that is out there.

[00:51:51] And the question that Kuhn is dealing with is is science progressing more towards revealing it or representing it? Or is it doing something different, which is more pragmatic, giving us a better way of interacting with it and understanding it within

[00:52:10] like the limitations that we have as human beings? And I think that's the thing that he rejects, but he doesn't reject that. There is an objective reality. I don't even know what that means in some sense to object to reject an

[00:52:22] objective reality. I'm sure there's an answer to that question that will that could be coherent perhaps. But whatever it is, it's not what Kuhn is arguing for. Right. But what are we getting? So you're saying that he's saying that we're not getting closer to reality through the progress?

[00:52:41] I just think he thinks that that's not the right way to think about it, right? Like that there is this that there is this single truth because given the limitations that we have, given the lenses that we both are lenses as

[00:52:56] just cognitive creatures that are homo sapiens, but also the lenses of what we can do with science and the lenses of what we can do culturally like that's there. There's just going to be lots of different ways to branch off in different

[00:53:14] ways of capturing certain aspects of what's going on, but they'll always be tied to our specific. We can't transcend ourselves. We can't transcend even. And this is, I think, one of his important points. We can't transcend the paradigm that we are in

[00:53:37] in a way that this is part of the incommensurability thesis in a way that would allow us to say, OK, well, this one is closer to ultimate truth, T, than this one. And I don't like I just that just doesn't bother me.

[00:53:53] You know, like I don't have grandiose visions about what we're it's even enough that we're that when you get into some promising, fruitful paradigm that you're able to answer a lot of questions and solve a lot of problems

[00:54:06] that you weren't able to solve and that we're able to send rocket ships to Mars and that we're able to develop computers. And that like but only because those those new those new approaches track something external to us. So like you say, you're just about the epistemology part.

[00:54:26] But you really do seem to be saying that that there there's no need to think that there is some singular truth. There's no need to think that the goal of science is to get closer and closer to it.

[00:54:42] That's what I think Coombs point is like he talks about evolution, right? So if you think of the like I feel like I don't maybe we shouldn't get into this debate right now because it would it would run over some of the other things.

[00:54:57] But I think that I remember earlier today you were saying he's losing me with that analogy and to me that analogy, I get that there are some issues with it. But it seems more promising and again, less unsettling for someone of my ilk

[00:55:18] or just way of suffering someone who is an anti-vaxxer. Here's one I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm an anti like I should shove like four of those vaccines in my body because of fucking Delta for it. I got vaccinated long before you got back for what? Because you could.

[00:55:41] Although I did have the death shot like every every week there's some new way that the Johnson and Johnson vaccine will kill me. Like it's a new increasingly horrible way. But it's OK because it's not true in any way that it's going to cause.

[00:55:55] Or there's no way to compare like, you know, the paradigm that says that I'm dead versus the paradigm that says that I'm alive. Plus your comeback is yours. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you in part by one of our very favorite sponsors, Givewell.

[00:56:14] Dave donating money to help people is a wonderful and selfless act. But how are you going to feel confident that your donations are improving or saving the most lives? How that's an epistemological problem. It's not ontological. It's not ontological.

[00:56:32] You could do weeks of research to find the charities that are out there, what programs they run, how effective those programs are and how the charity might use your money. That's one way to do it.

[00:56:42] It would take you pretty much like six months to even begin to scratch the surface there or you could visit Givewell.org. And there you'll just get a short vetted list of the best charities they've found at saving or improving lives the most per dollar.

[00:57:00] Givewell is like that restaurant, that really good restaurant that you go to where there's only like six things on the menu, but they're all fucking great. That's right. You don't have to ask people like what like those terrible, terrible restaurants where everything is bad, but there's 100 things.

[00:57:17] There's like eight pages of like, you know, poultry. With pictures. Yeah, with pictures. Givewell is not like that. Givewell has spent more than a decade researching charitable organizations and only recommends a few of the highest impact evidence backed charities. Yeah, seriously, if you wanted to do this yourself,

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[00:57:59] Givewell wants to empower as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about their donations. They publish all of their research and recommendations on the site for free. No sign up required. So if you're one of those open science nerds open as well, AF. I'll leave it there.

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[00:59:28] OK, I want to so let's let's table that. But I think that would be a good way to end is to talk about that. I want to talk about like this idea of a pre-paradigm into paradigm and the way

[00:59:40] I thought of maybe entering this conversation is to ask you because Coon is really not talking about the social sciences at all in this book. He mentions them, but none of his examples, they all come from chemistry and physics and occasionally biology, but none of the social sciences.

[01:00:01] Social sciences often may be used as an example of something. Yeah. So so take social psychology for an example, would you call social psychology in a pre-paradigm or a paradigm stage like normal science? Because I could see an argument for both. Yeah. And well, you know, so

[01:00:23] part of the problem that many people have pointed out is that he offers like a whole bunch of different like ways of defining paradigm in the strongest way where it's like that whole world view rather than sort of like a guiding exemplar, which is sometimes what he uses.

[01:00:41] I don't I think we're pre we're pre-paradigmatic. I think we're just going about everybody sort of turning away at specific different questions and like you have you know, at best you have like some some agreement about methods.

[01:00:59] In fact, a lot of times people use paradigm to refer to like a particular method in psychology, which kind of bothers me. But we have things like a widespread agreement about the task of experimentation and but it still feels so it still feels too early.

[01:01:23] There are other areas of psychology that I would have called paradigmatic. So when I think and when I think of paradigms in psychology, I think of like behaviorism. So like the dominant paradigm of behaviorism did seem to me to go through

[01:01:38] the the normal science phase and the anomaly crisis and then abandonment, large abandonment. But in social psychology, yeah, should people do it on their own shit? They're like, yeah. So like in like philosophy is also clearly pre-paradigm, but in saying that it doesn't mean that like analytic philosophy

[01:02:04] doesn't have its own methods and its own standards. It's just that there are all these other schools like continental philosophy or just a certain kind of, you know, a different a different sort of analytic philosophy that these people can't talk to each other.

[01:02:18] They can't there's not enough shared assumptions about the methods about the problems worth discussing about. So here's here's something Kuhn says about a paradigm. He says, one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm

[01:02:33] is a criterion for choosing problems that while the paradigm is taken for granted can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent, these are the only problems that the community will admit as a scientific or encourage its members to undertake.

[01:02:47] Other problems, including many that had previously been considered as a standard are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline or sometimes is just too problematic to be worth the time. A paradigm can for that matter even insulate the community from those

[01:03:01] socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools, the paradigm supplies. And that last thing I had highlighted, it can insulate the community

[01:03:16] from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle because this actually makes me think that even something that you would call pre-paradigm still has a lot of the qualities of the paradigm where the people

[01:03:28] within it are operating as if it's like normal science or whatever. So in philosophy, for example, this happens all the time that that problems will be rejected as even like worth disgusting because they can't be reduced to the puzzle form.

[01:03:44] They can't be reduced to some sort of puzzle that you use the methods of normal science or in this case, normal philosophy to solve. Right? I think that's a big problem with analytic philosophy. Like you you reject things that can't be

[01:04:00] solved in terms of a puzzle like what is knowledge or what is more? What are the conditions to be truly morally responsible or whatever it is? But if there's these other things that come in, then those things are rejected, not out of some like

[01:04:17] real principle stand, but just because the paradigm has been set. So it's it's like there's something else besides the shared methods and assumptions because you can have that, I think, in something that's pre-paradigm.

[01:04:29] It just has to be like widely accepted by everyone or by most people who practice that that that form of inquiry. Right? And so if you if social psychologists just there was this huge wide,

[01:04:47] not unanimous, but getting much closer than you are right now to a set of methods, a set of statistical ways of approaching experiments and also agreed about the value of experiments, which is the value of other forms of inquiry. Like then you would have a paradigm.

[01:05:06] Yeah, it's super interesting. By the way, it's always funny to me when we have the exact same thing underlined. You had that. Because as I'm thinking about it, you know, it's almost as if in psychology and maybe in a bunch of other disciplines,

[01:05:25] there is increasing splintering and insularity. It's something that we were talking a little bit about when we were mocking that evolutionary psych article in a previous episode or two ago where it's like, well, there's this cottage industry and they all share

[01:05:39] these assumptions, they think this is a good science. They accept each other's papers. So like social psychology to me has to like there are two things going on. Or let's just say behavioral psychologists say broadly.

[01:05:51] One, there is constant fighting about what methods are the best to arrive at truth, including which statistical tools like whether or not we should do null null hypothesis testing or whether we should be Bayesians, whether we should measure things using scales or not.

[01:06:09] Like there's all this debate that makes it seem pre-paradigmatic because people don't seem to agree. But then when you zoom in on one particular aspect of like the study of social cognition or whatever, there everybody has to agree about the methods

[01:06:25] or else you couldn't submit to a journal. Somebody would be like, what did you do? You actually measured attitudes. That's stupid. And and so maybe this is a feature of the splintering, the increased communication and the splintering and hyper-specialization.

[01:06:40] But like maybe paradigms in the Kunian sense can actually exist. You know, Kuhn talks about the Newtonian view or the standard model of physics. These are this is a huge thing. But here I think maybe it's possible that we have all of these

[01:06:57] little paradigms going on in all of these fields that are actually in some ways maybe not close to incommensurable. And and certainly have that feature of different paradigms of people talking past each other, they don't have a good way of communicating.

[01:07:13] They don't agree about the same values, the same problems, the same like what? What count what is within the scope of their field and what is outside the scope of their field? And so sometimes you have agreement about the questions and wide disagreement about the method being used.

[01:07:30] So so sometimes I'll go to like a behavioral, well, let's say an economics talk and they're because they're asking a question that I'm super interested in. Like it'll be a question that I think really is valuable.

[01:07:41] And the method that they use seems to me so drastically wrong to answer the question that they're asking. Of course, they feel the same way about me. But and it would be hard to even get to the bottom of your

[01:07:52] disagreement because your assumption, your bottom like ground level assumptions are so different. I think that's the big thing is like your ground level assumptions have to be like shared or else there's that talking past each other.

[01:08:06] Should we talk about like a paradigmatic paradigm shift in that Kuhn discusses? I was thinking maybe Ptolemaic astronomy to Copernican astronomy, something like that that most people will know and that we will have that we will be able to speak on with without too many inaccuracies.

[01:08:26] Yeah, I mean, sure, go ahead. I said without too many inaccuracies realizing, wait, I don't really know shit about this, but I guess the idea is you have Ptolemaic astronomy, which is based on the idea that the Earth is at

[01:08:42] is stationary and all these and the sun and the planets are rotating around the Earth and and that's the paradigm. Everyone just takes that for granted. Nobody's nobody's asking if if like is the earth moving or something like that.

[01:08:59] No, that's not that would be that would be rejected. It's not it's not a question that you can ask within this paradigm. And so there's still a lot of puzzles like Ptolemaic astronomy had a lot of virtues and could make a lot of predictions

[01:09:14] and the predictions could be pretty well supported. The problem was that over the course of time, its predictions, there were these anomalies and to correct for these anomalies, famously Ptolemy proposed that the orbits of the planet so like if the if if the theory predicted

[01:09:38] the planet would be here at this time, it wasn't according to because he had this idea that everything goes in an exact circle because everything has to be perfect. So he had the idea instead of that that the orbits are in a perfect circle,

[01:09:55] but they also do other little circles called epicycles. Loops, yeah, they do little loop-de-loops as they're going around. But soon like this kept happening and it it became even to people within that paradigm a little too ad hoc in their view.

[01:10:14] Meanwhile, now Copernicus comes along and just says and he's not steeped into the paradigm. And this is I think a really interesting thing that Kuhn says is when you have the beginnings of a revolution, it's usually started

[01:10:30] not by somebody who is like a respected member of the normal science crew. But it's usually someone either younger or a little bit on the outside who can just have the the ability because they're not indoctrinated. Like I think he even uses the word indoctrinated, right?

[01:10:51] Like just to just to think about like a little bit outside the box, what if and of course he thought, well, what if the sun is at the center and the earth is just one of the planets revolving around the sun?

[01:11:02] Now, the key at first here is that that view doesn't Copernicus's view. It's not till Galileo that you start getting better predictions. But at first, the Copernicus view, at least the way Kuhn tells it, is it makes it has no greater predictive power than the Ptolemaic view.

[01:11:23] And the move towards considering the Copernican view, whereas before it would just been inconceivable and blasphemous and whatever, is guided more by this just frustration with all the anomalies and the kind of crisis mode that Ptolemaic astronomy is in.

[01:11:42] But slowly the Copernican revolution starts to gain a toehold and more people start to get on board. But for reasons that don't involve like predictive power or greater explanatory power, but more either aesthetic or maybe appeals to simplicity.

[01:12:00] And and then once that happens, that makes it possible for for new experiments to come in and start gaining hold and then you go to the new paradigm, which becomes eventually the Newtonian paradigm of planetary motion. Yeah, in that point that that the Copernican view

[01:12:28] isn't picked up right away or is adopted maybe not because it explains things better, but rather because it's just more elegant. Other people have referred to what can happen is in the adoption of a new paradigm, you actually lose predictive power.

[01:12:45] Right. So you people have referred to this as a Kuhn loss. So you pick up the new paradigm, all of those complexities that the Ptolemaic model had had to inject in order to be able to fully account for the motion

[01:12:58] of the planets hadn't been fleshed out in Copernicus's model yet. What, you know, like the best predictions for for how things because he was still saying they moved in circles rather than lipses. So it wasn't obviously like until Kepler came around that he could really,

[01:13:16] really flesh out that their elliptical orbits and that explains things. But Copernicus was right after all. So you incur a loss in this paradigm shift because the old paradigm has gone to great lengths to account for all of the observations that they have. And it's not as if

[01:13:34] it's not as if they didn't see that there were problems with their theory. They just found ways around it. Now, one more radical claim that Kuhn makes about that particular shift is that and this is about the incommensurability of the Copernican or the Newtonian.

[01:13:52] This is what I really want to say. The the Ptolemaic is that although they're using the same terms, those terms mean different things. And I think he says something. I wish I'd written this down. Maybe you did. But like that Earth means something different for the Ptolemaic astronomer

[01:14:12] versus the Copernican or Newtonian astronomer. Earth has built into its meaning that it's stationary and Earth obviously doesn't have that if you are a Newtonian. And so when they both talk about Earth, even though they're saying the same word, they're not they're not referring to the same thing.

[01:14:35] So yeah, he uses that example specifically, but he does use the same kind of example with mass from an Einsteinian relativistic perspective versus the Newtonian. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the incommensurability

[01:14:49] because he goes to quite an extreme view, in my opinion, when he talks about the inability for people from these two paradigms to not only communicate with each other, but even see the same things. So he actually

[01:15:05] he borders on a kind of view that even visual perception backs away a little bit from it, but he says like even two people from these two different perspectives looking at the exact same thing aren't seeing the raw precept like the raw

[01:15:23] perception of what's there, but rather they're seeing something different that is infused by their background set of beliefs. And he tries to use the some work in visual perception, cognitive science, cognitive psychology of visual perception, arguing that we

[01:15:41] actually see, in some cases, two people might actually be seeing two different things based on their experience. Background assumptions. Like cards, you give somebody like six of clubs, but that's red. And they will either think of it as a six of hearts or they'll think of it

[01:16:00] as a black six of clubs unless they've been doing this like a lot. And then they will be and start to notice it. Yeah. But in that case, there's an objective way of determining that's like which one of them is right.

[01:16:13] And Coon's point is there's not in the case of the scientists from different paradigms. Right. And he talks about the pendulum, you know, the Aristotelian view of what was going on with the pendulum versus the Galilean

[01:16:32] view, maybe, whereas he says like one is seeing just an object falling, whereas the other one is being constrained, not like Aristotelian and seeing an object that wants to fall. Yeah, that wants to fall because of its telos. Yeah.

[01:16:47] Now I think I think he pushes it too far because I think he probably, you know, there is some commensurability in the sense that paradigms do change and sometimes the same people who see, who understand the old one then come to understand the new one.

[01:17:06] I feel like we do have a common way of like getting to the bottom of something. Yeah. But it's a good start shift, I think is his main point. It's not that it's impossible for somebody to come around to it. But like with the I think, you know,

[01:17:19] and definitely better to understand the visual perception stuff as a metaphor rather than a specific case of what he's talking about. But like like in those cases, you can after a lot of work, after a lot of training,

[01:17:32] come to see, oh yeah, that's a red six of clubs, even though that doesn't wrap it. Yeah. Or you can come around to see, I mean, that one doesn't require like a lot of training that just but it is this

[01:17:43] gestalt shift. In other words, you can see it as a duck or you can see it as a rabbit. What you can't do is see it as both. And what you can't do is like, see, oh, this is the duck part and this is the rabbit

[01:17:54] part or whatever. And like, and so that's I think. I don't know. Again, like I think of it as useful like the so. It's a metaphor. It's a metaphor that I think is is a value. But he pushes it to be, I think,

[01:18:12] sometime in this is just me being a picky about the cognitive science of it all because I don't like, I don't think that his description of seeing things differently is actually right. Like it's more just judgment and categorization. Like we we make different judgments of seeing.

[01:18:26] We see the same thing. We just have a different judgment about what it is we're seeing or we categorize it differently. Well, maybe the way to like bring this out. So it's a distinction between his view and Popper's view.

[01:18:38] So Popper's view is that you have all these theories out there. I mean, maybe a simplistic way of understanding it is we're in. We're all in the same paradigm, which is we come up with theories and then we try

[01:18:51] to falsify them. There is this one dominant scientific method, which is you come up with theories and you test them. You rigorously test them and it's, you know, it's like a cage match. You know, that's W.W. Old W.W.S.

[01:19:06] Gage matches only one will survive and you test them. And Coon's view is this is just not a picture of how science works or but stronger than that. It's not a picture of how science could work because anytime you're in normal science, there are tons of anomalies, right?

[01:19:28] There are tons of times where your theory makes a prediction and the prediction is wrong. But you can always, because your predictions depend on your observations, depend on certain instruments that you have, as well as certain background

[01:19:47] theoretical assumptions that you make, you can always adjust the theory or or just blame your instruments and say that and often and of course the instruments aren't perfect. So you might have it might be legitimate to blame your instruments.

[01:20:02] So I think like Coon's critique of Popper here is saying that it's not just that this isn't how science works, but it's just not how it how it could work. There's always going to be

[01:20:14] there's always going to be anomalies and the question of how to deal with them or how important they are will depend on the background assumptions of the paradigm that you're in. Here's what he says. So he says talking about Popper's falsifications. He says, I doubt they exist.

[01:20:30] No theory ever solves all the puzzles with which is confronted at a given time, nor are the solutions already achieved often perfect. On the contrary, it is just the incompleteness and the imperfection of the existing data theory fit that at any time define many of the puzzles

[01:20:46] that characterize normal science. If any and every failure were to fit to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times. On the other hand, if only severe failure to fit justifies theory rejection,

[01:21:01] then the Popperians will require some criterion of improbability or of the degree of falsification in developing one they will almost certainly encounter the same network of difficulties that have haunted the advocates of the various probabilistic verification theories. There is referring to logical positivists and

[01:21:20] the verificationism that was already out of favor by the time Kuhn is writing, but he's saying ultimately, Popper is just going to face that same problem that that they that that those people faced based on trying to decide how what degree of probability you need

[01:21:40] to say that your theory is verified. I think that's an interesting critique of Popper and it seems right to me. It seems so this is where like I endorse the Kuhnian approach as a descriptive approach to to what's going on. I'm I'm not so convinced.

[01:21:59] So some form of falsification, I think has to occur. I think it's just going to be it's harder and it takes longer to maybe convince people that this was an instance of falsification because, you know, like not even right.

[01:22:16] So I imagine all of the instances in which somebody does an experiment fails to get it right, like an eighth grader in chem lab, right? Who does something that everybody knows is supposed to work, but they do it wrong. Nobody's going to like to stop the presses.

[01:22:29] We falsified this theory of how this chemical reaction works. There is, I think a lot of the minute you start providing counter examples like experiments that seem to falsify what the paradigm or the theory within the paradigm predicts, those are going to be

[01:22:49] not published, told that they're wrong, that somebody did something wrong. All of those sociological forces really will work hard against accepting that the paradigm might be wrong. But like in some broad sense, or the theory. Yeah, but in some.

[01:23:10] I mean, this might just get down to whether I believe that this is tracking reality, like after a while, if a theory is wrong, it will be falsified. Given the right experiments. But I guess the idea is that that Kuhn is objecting to.

[01:23:29] So like on the really simplistic way of understanding Popper, like we should be able to design a test that everyone will agree will either, you know, and this is an eighth graders. These are the people who are at the top of their game.

[01:23:42] We will be able, we should be able to design a test that will either falsify the theory in which case you discard it or it will keep it alive to face another experiment, right? But in practice,

[01:23:56] first of all, there are going to be theoretical assumptions that just go into the deciding whether the observation did or did not falsify the theory. There's going to be these background assumptions. This is the Kuhn-Duhem's thesis that that observation is theory laden. There's no pure observation, right?

[01:24:17] We don't we don't get to look at the world in a way that is divorced from our background assumptions, from our instruments, from all sorts of ways in which we measure and test things. So so number one, it will never be that clear cut

[01:24:33] whether that test falsified the theory or not. But number two, like you said, it's when these things start piling up. And now you want to say that, OK, that theory has been falsified. What's the difference between that and what Kuhn is saying, which is at a certain

[01:24:53] point, the anomalies just start to get too untenable. And so you move to a different paradigm. Well, I mean, the difference, I guess, is in the right. Like one is just a a so proper imprincipal thinks that a good theory ought

[01:25:10] to be falsifiable, that coming up with a falsifiable prediction doesn't mean that the scientific community will accept it. Does not mean that falsification isn't an important part of the scientific method. And people often, I think, completely underestimate this falsification, the ability to falsify.

[01:25:28] So there's a really well known example. The biologist, Hal Dain, when people were he was an evolutionary biologist and people were always telling him like, evolution is bullshit. It can't be falsified. And his his answer was always sure it can.

[01:25:47] If you find a snow bunny in the Precambrian, then you falsified like my theory of evolution. So there's like you ought to be able to come up with claims of a theoretical approach where you can generate a falsifiable you can make a prediction that can be falsified.

[01:26:06] I think it was Lakatos that just called this like a big protective blanket around the theory, because if you found a snow buddy in the Precambrian, it's not like everybody would reject it like immediately. They would all be like, are you sure?

[01:26:19] Richard Dawkins will be like, the trial actually is a great event. It was it was metamorphosis. Yeah, right. The metamorphosis. Yeah. No, right. They will they will come up with some reason how that would be possible. Yeah. Right. And and that's a value judgment.

[01:26:40] Yeah, they were they would fight to the nail to say that you did not this. This you didn't measure it right. You didn't dig in the right place. You actually made up your data. But if you keep finding snow bunnies in the Precambrian, then then presumably.

[01:26:57] And I guess, yeah, and I don't know how different that is from Kuhn's theory either, because there is this famous quote about evolution. Nothing makes sense except in light of evolution. So that's why well, especially eating pussy. Right. Determining. That's the only way partner.

[01:27:15] Like actually, that's the cornerstone of evolutionary. It was the insight actually that generated Darwin's theory of natural selection. He just didn't want to say, you know, you don't read that in the canonical text, but that is what kind of caused his Darwin's Gestalt shift.

[01:27:32] This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp online therapy. Check out betterhelp.com slash VBW. Tamler, I am sitting here next to you looking out at the most calm, serene view that I've had in probably years. And I'm feeling very mentally healthy.

[01:27:56] But when I go back home in a couple of days, I guarantee you I'm not going to be feeling this at all. And when I go back, I might need some help with the stress levels that will surely

[01:28:08] mount. Yes, it doesn't matter who you are or what you have. Your life is probably stressful. We know ours is. You may not be feeling down and out or depressed or like you're at a total loss.

[01:28:21] But if your stress is high, your temper is shorter than usual, as we could already see on this episode. And even if you're starting to feel strain in any of your relationships, this is hitting too close to home. A little weird. Yeah.

[01:28:35] You could use the chance to unload when there are things you can't tell anybody or feel like you can't unload to family and friends. That's what therapy can be. BetterHelp is customized online therapy that offers video, phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist.

[01:28:51] So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. It's much more affordable than in person therapy. And you can start communicating with your therapist in under 48 hours. Unload the stressors and get some unbiased feedback.

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[01:29:19] That's B E T T E R H E L P dot com slash VBW are thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. So no, OK, look, I don't know. Maybe we'll set the disagreement with Papa aside.

[01:29:37] I do want to talk about this idea, which you were talking about before of you know, the Ken paradigms, people from different paradigms talk to each other. Yeah, this is the quote I wanted to read on that.

[01:29:51] It's on I don't know if you have the same page numbers as I do, but it's we can't talk to each other because we don't like here. It's on page 94, at least in my version, like the choice between competing political institutions. That's an interesting analogy here.

[01:30:12] That between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life, in this case, the scientific community. Because it has that character, the choice is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science for

[01:30:29] these depend in part upon a particular paradigm and that paradigm is at issue. So it can't just be like, all right, well, if this test works, then this we go to this paradigm, but if this test, if this prediction fails,

[01:30:42] we stay with this paradigm when paradigms enter as they must into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm's defense. But then so now this is sounding maybe very relativistic.

[01:30:58] But then he says the resulting circularity does not, of course, make the arguments wrong or even ineffectual. The man who premises a paradigm when arguing in its defense can nonetheless provide a clear exhibit of what scientific practice will be like for those who

[01:31:12] adopt the new view of nature. This is like I feel like this is sort of what you were saying. The exhibit can be immensely persuasive, often compellingly so. Yet whatever its force, the status of the circular argument is only that of

[01:31:24] persuasion and it cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle. The premises and values shared by the two parties to a debate over paradigms are not sufficiently extensive for that. As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice,

[01:31:40] there is no standard higher than the ascent of the relevant community. Yeah, I agree. You know, it's weird because so much of what Kuhn says I find to be really actually insightful, like, do you remember me? I actually found the whole book to be insightful.

[01:31:56] I was yelling to you from my room that he was insightful as I was reading it. And this is a case where I think that's it's true. I mean, there is the there is always the the flirting with relativism that,

[01:32:09] you know, kind of bothers me and that which I think Kuhn, as we said before, Kuhn backs away from it. Sometimes I don't think he is what the crazy, crazy relative is that people claim him to be. But this particular point about, you know, the analogy with politics,

[01:32:24] it seems to me to be deeply true as a description of things that go on when paradigms are changing. And I'm reminded of the I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but that that Einstein really didn't like quantum theory. Right? Right.

[01:32:40] God does not play dice, spooky action at a distance. He didn't like any of that. Exactly. And here is somebody who is presumably rational knows the mathematics. But I think if this story is true, he was holding out, you know, the possibility that we had gotten something wrong.

[01:32:55] And why? Because he was coming from a particular point of view where, you know, that didn't seem like the kind of thing that ought to happen. Again, I'm not sure for all I know he was like. But but there is like aspects of this, I guess, that are

[01:33:12] that would have that whiff of relativism that I think would would bother you, which is that part about how this is a matter of persuasion. Now, as he makes clear in the in the post script, it's not that

[01:33:24] it's a kind of arbitrary, like whether somebody has persuaded or not. There are better or worse reasons. And this is true with the political revolution, too. Right? It's not that there aren't good reasons for you to become, you know, for you to finally become a Bernie bro.

[01:33:41] But there are the thing that will decide it. The only thing that will decide it is the ascent of the community. And that's the thing I would think that you would that you would resist because it does seem to at least tie it.

[01:33:55] But I guess you might say that's sociologically true. It's a skill. Yeah. But, you know, I think that part of the problem that I have with this book, maybe is Kuhn as philosopher, where I think a lot of the things that he says

[01:34:08] are under specified and not precise. And I think he had to sort of deal with answering critics a whole lot because a lot of what he said was up for interpretation. So yes, on the one hand, he says it's only through persuasion that this

[01:34:23] is going to happen. But then in the very next sentence, he says, but the persuasion is going to be good when it's based on good reasons, which I just take to be, well, yeah, that I mean, truth persuades people.

[01:34:33] But it's not it's good reasons that isn't like, well, this is not reduced to this just wasn't falsified or this theory wasn't. It's like. But it's also not like, well, I like the way you look. So I'm going to buy your argument. No, right. Right. Exactly.

[01:34:50] But I guess the the thing is there's going to be no independent way of saying, well, they shouldn't have gone from this paradigm to that paradigm or like some sort of tribunal that can independently judge the two different

[01:35:05] paradigms. Like at one point he calls it like a conversion experience. It's like this big just, oh, I get it now. You know, like I see it now. I didn't see it before. I was too steeped in the assumptions of the other paradigm that like I didn't

[01:35:23] even have a window into what this is talking about. Now I get it. Now, maybe the thing that clicks is somebody who like, you know, finds a new way of describing it to me. But but still that is going to be something that is ultimately not fully

[01:35:40] determinate, you know, in terms of the scientific method which hangs over all of these paradigms and as a way of adjudicating between them. Right. So this is where I find it to be frustrating the way that he flirts with

[01:35:57] one versus the other and I want to get back to what you were you brought up earlier about his analogy to evolution, which I think is for me, it's a wrong metaphor for what's going on with scientific evolution. So he says

[01:36:13] rather than be just successively approximating truth where each paradigm gets us closer and closer to truth, maybe it's more like biological evolution. We some you know, on some naive view, you might think that there is some, you know,

[01:36:30] that evolution is getting organisms to be better and better in some in some sense where where there is forward movement, movement toward improvement, some normatively better end state than beginning state. We know that that's not true of evolution.

[01:36:45] We know that biological evolution is not driven by any end goal. And he says, maybe we can understand science that way. That seems like what he's saying is that it is that these paradigms that replace other paradigms are driven by not

[01:37:05] not approximation to truth, but by what I might call at least compared to the view that it's approximating truth as fairly arbitrary characteristics, like like one paradigm might replace another paradigm for reasons other than that it is truer.

[01:37:20] So I'm not quite sure what his view is, to be honest. And and I think that he wrote things that where he tried to like spell out his view and even had a book that was unfinished when he died.

[01:37:33] And I think it was the article that you shared with me that said, but but we shouldn't treat that as like actually like the definitive like we shouldn't treat just his last book and what his definitive. Like the deathbed.

[01:37:43] Exactly. I wish I had been a scientific realist more often. Yeah. Nobody ever said like when they died, I wish I had been more relativistic in my view. So this is on page one seventy and I want to know your thoughts about this

[01:37:59] because this is where I think this is in the last the problematic last chapter that you jumped. I'm I just tackled because if you're about to read what I think you're about to read, I have a note in the margin that will explain what I think. OK.

[01:38:16] He says it's now time to notice that until the very last few pages, the term truth has entered this essay only in quotation from Francis Bacon. The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings, a process whose successive stages are

[01:38:35] characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing has been said or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything. Inevitably, that lacuna will have disturbed many readers like David Pizarro.

[01:38:49] We are all deeply in custom to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goals set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal? Can we not account for both science, this is existence and its success

[01:39:05] in terms of evolution from the community state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement

[01:39:17] is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? If we can learn to substitute evolution from what we do know for evolution toward what we wish to know, a number of vexing problems may vanish in the

[01:39:30] process somewhere in this maze, for example, must lie the problem of induction. So I think that's the idea is that he's not saying that we don't evolve and that we don't get better and more refined and more successful as we evolve.

[01:39:45] But the only thing that he's resisting is this idea that nature and the universe has set this goal that we're trying to reach in advance. And that's the thing we're moving successively closer to with each scientific advancement. Rather, there's just new things that we want to know.

[01:40:04] New things that we want to know, new ways that we want to approach the universe. And that's the way of the evolution. And some of those things are set by something in nature, some of those things are set by just

[01:40:18] where we're under new things we want to understand. All of them are constrained in some parts by the fact that there were limited creatures and practicing using limited methods. Yeah, again, it's confusing epistemology and ontology in a weird way. But OK, I don't see anything ontological there.

[01:40:41] I think it's all epistemological. Well, what's there is that the very quote that doesn't really help to imagine that there's some one full objective true account of nature and that the proper like that's an ontological

[01:40:54] claim. No, no, no, but I thought that that's and that that's the thing that we're moving towards. Yeah, does it? He he doesn't think it helps to think that we're moving towards that. Right, right. So so don't think that we're moving towards that. That's not to him.

[01:41:09] We can abandon that and still have the same science. Right. But I don't think in abandoning it, we're denying that there is an objective reality. We're just abandoning our quest towards thinking our quixotic idea that we are just getting closer and closer to it.

[01:41:27] Yeah. So if you want to know what I think, I have three words written by that paragraph. Fuck you off the rails. It's literally what I wrote. Yeah. Can we not account for both science's existence and its success in terms of evolution? What success? Success about what?

[01:41:47] And then earlier he says, the developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings, a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature.

[01:42:01] Right. How is that not saying that we're understanding nature and that nature is a thing to be understood? No, but like again, the evolution analogy, right? But there's clearly a sense in which we are more refined and detailed creatures.

[01:42:14] We have evolved to be now we're not evolving towards some telos where we're becoming like, you know, like in 2001, the little baby at the end. That's not there's not just some straight line that we're evolving, but that doesn't mean that we're not getting more and more complex and

[01:42:29] interesting and refined. And he's not saying that science is getting more complex and interesting. He's saying he is actually starts in primitive beginnings and gets more refined and understanding of nature. It's a more refined understanding of nature. Right. So understanding of nature is that's

[01:42:51] something like, what are you understanding? That's a deep claim that he's then seeming to deny. Like, like there is something that in saying a refined that we're moving toward a refined understanding of nature, you are saying that there is a nature to be understood. Yes.

[01:43:04] I think he thinks that there is a nature out there. But I think like maybe this is the best way to understand we are moving toward understanding that nature that's out. There's not one kind of grand unified. I think maybe this is what falls on logical claim.

[01:43:17] What? That is not. No, I still think it's epistemological. I think he's like maybe the best we can evolve towards is one of many incommensurable, like best kinds of theories that will make as much sense of you know, this external reality as it's possible for us to make.

[01:43:42] There's no one single one that, you know, the others are approximate, like greater approximations to they don't reduce into each other. They're not explicable in terms of each other. There there are what's the what's the word for this?

[01:43:57] Like, I mean, maybe this is just what falls out of the incommensurability thesis, but there's not this one thing there might be like say 30 equally refined ways of understanding nature as best as we can. They'll all have trade offs. They won't be interpretable from one paradigm to another.

[01:44:21] And that's just like that. That's the best we can do. I don't know if I explained that well, but I'm saying that, like, you know, if you have a more pluralist understanding of this, it is your you're not

[01:44:33] going off the rails in terms of denying that there is this kind of progress just because you and you're not, you know, being incoherent or contradicting yourself when you say you have a better or more refined understanding of nature. I don't I don't know that I get it.

[01:44:51] I don't like if this is not an ontological sort of claim that there is no that there is no objective underlying reality. So if if we grant that he's saying there is one nature, there is one thing

[01:45:04] that's out there, I'm not sure what it means to have a more refined understanding of that nature, unless what you mean is we have, you know, like the blind man, the three blind men in the elephant kind

[01:45:18] of like claim where it's like you're describing a different part of that nature. But these theories compete with each other to explain the very same aspect of nature that we have access to. So the the rotation of the the motion of planets are, you know, one theory

[01:45:36] attempts to explain it. The other theory does a better job of predicting it. I think it's weird to say that that paradigm that replaced the the Ptolemaic paradigm isn't closer to the truth of how those planets move. That's what I'm not quite getting.

[01:45:51] But I think that's because you that you're still clinging to this idea that there's some independent way that the planets move, yes, that we can that we can like make sense of. No, OK, wait, hold on. So that there's two things.

[01:46:09] One is that there's an independent way that the planets move and two is that we can make sense of. Are you saying that there isn't an independent way that planet? I'm saying there's not a single way of understanding how the planets move that that that is accessible.

[01:46:23] But take the understanding out of it. Yes. You think there is a single way that the planets move? Well, that's a very hard thing to say in this context. Right. Like again, like not denying that there is an objective morality.

[01:46:33] But when we say there is a reality, independent reality, when we say that there is a single way that planets move, we have to. I think this is Coon's point. We are there's a lot of theoretical assumptions that are that that enter

[01:46:52] what we mean, what we even mean by that. And there's going to be paradigms that that understand that that statement one way and there's going to be paradigms that understand that statement another way. And we can't transcend that.

[01:47:09] So there is a reluctance, though, to just straight up say there is an objective independent reality, what I'm talking about is epistemology. In terms of being able to describe it, that's the that's the thing that that's or even understand that's fine.

[01:47:24] As long as that there is a belief, even with zero sort of actual knowledge about how the planets work, even somebody who doesn't knows nothing about the planet's work and has no hope of ever

[01:47:36] knowing how the planets work, the belief that there is a way that the planets work, even if we can never achieve true knowledge of it. That's like what what it's just unclear to me that he's just willing to to say, yes, there is an external objective reality.

[01:47:54] Now, the question of whether paradigms get us closer to that external reality is a separate one. I think paradigms are ways of understanding objective reality, but they're not there. It's not like there are ways of interpreting objective reality. There are ways of like he says, yeah,

[01:48:11] but there is that thing to be interpreted. Everyone agrees. But no, I think they just they don't agree about what exactly needs to be interpreted, what exactly calls out for explanation, what exactly is because they have different background assumptions

[01:48:25] and different conceptual frameworks in terms of how they approach the issues, even if they are saying the same word, even if they're using terms like the objective motion of the planets or the objective like, you know, truth about flogiston versus oxygen, like deflagist.

[01:48:42] I was about to bring that up. Yeah. But it's but even the people working in different paradigms where one says it's deflagisticated air and one says it's oxygen, those scientists are like, well, which one is this thing here? Right. Like it's not the incommensurability isn't that ontological level.

[01:49:02] It's just really usually about like what's the best description of this thing that we both agree is sitting here. I mean, I wonder if this is like, like I have no problem with thinking this is purely epistemological, maybe because I think epistemological

[01:49:17] problems are deeper than you think they are. And so like if like, I think maybe they're just not ontology. Well, no, but I think that like, tell me if this is true, that's implicit and sort of get your cases are the deepest you can get.

[01:49:31] Implicit in what you're saying is this idea that if it's an epistemological problem, then it's solvable, then it like with no. Well, then I think that it could be like there are things that I think humans will never know, but that exists. Right. Right. OK.

[01:49:48] So then I think that's all you need to concede for for this picture that Kuna is presenting to be compelling because he could just think that the epistemological problems of understanding reality are so deep that it's no longer useful

[01:50:05] to think that that's the thing that we're aiming for. Rather, we have to just accept our epistemic limitations and understand science in this different way. Yeah. What I do what I don't get what I can't get to is though some some view

[01:50:24] that these different claims about reality are sort of just arbitrary and determined by like fashion or something like that. Well, he doesn't say that. So that's the caricature. But he really flirts with it by saying, you know, like

[01:50:41] by saying there's no need to think for this to work. There's no need to think of there being an external reality. No, he doesn't say there's no need to think of there's an external reality. There's no need to think that that's what science is aiming towards.

[01:50:53] Yeah. Then so then what it what accounts for the greater success that better refined understanding of nature that one paradigm brings that the other one didn't have, if not a better description of that nature. I get so like think of the evolution analogy, right?

[01:51:14] Like there are some species that are more successful than other species in terms of how they handle say an environmental change, some kind of environmental change, you can say that and you can even understand it and account for it without thinking that having an Ares

[01:51:36] Tetylian view or some sort of teleological view of the direction of evolution as towards more and great, more and more perfect individuals or species, right? You can still say that these things are more successful or less successful. Yeah, but that's such a bad analogy.

[01:51:52] I mean, we have a really good understanding of what we mean by more or less successful because it's so tied to the environment in which that organism evolves. Like it's just I don't know what science because science is exactly not that. Science is exactly trying.

[01:52:07] It's not trying to say that like, oh, this theory helps us understand the planetary motion in Kansas in 1950, but not in India in 1493. Like it's not it's trying to understand a static fixed objective reality. Like it's the whole point of scientific description is to describe

[01:52:30] that motion of the motion of the planets or whether it's oxygen or not, right? Or the atomic theory like those. I don't I'm just I don't see the power of these the analogy to evolution. Like it's at best has a surface like similarity.

[01:52:44] So this is exactly where I like I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I don't think you're being contient enough. When you say there is this objective picture of the universe, that that's the thing that we're trying to get towards.

[01:52:57] Like I think you're underestimating the limitations and even that means something static, that that is a that that statement is something that can be divorced from just our conceptual your conceptual schema right now. Right? When you're saying that there's some sort of objective picture,

[01:53:20] static objective thing that we're just struggling to try to. It's like just what you think that thing is out there that you're trying to understand is going to be shaped in part inevitably by your categories. And so the new you want the new one up.

[01:53:38] Well, one time you turn Contian, you actually use it terribly. You want the new one up. That's what you think is out there. I think this is a completely over thought. So, you know, Galileo wants to know whether two objects fall at the same

[01:53:50] time, like regardless of their weight. There's an answer to that. There's just there just is an answer to that. Right? But that doesn't I don't think anything Kuna is saying is inconsistent with that.

[01:54:02] Well, it kind of is if the if the claim is that there's no need to believe that there is an objective reality for science to be science. Again, there does need to be an objective reality for science to be science because otherwise what the fuck are we doing?

[01:54:17] That's exactly what I'm saying. But there's still the gap between that and science needs to be understood as working towards this one true picture of objective reality. That's the thing that Koon rejects. I mean,

[01:54:34] look, there might not be one true picture of objective reality that we can ever achieve, but that doesn't mean that we're not sort of working toward describing more and more accurately. That's why like paradigms are achieving progress because they are approximating

[01:54:49] like the truth of the world that is external to us. Let me see if this is like rock like rock like gravity either exists or doesn't. No, just let me frame it this way. Right? There is one true picture of reality out there.

[01:55:04] Right. And maybe we'll get there. Maybe we won't. Maybe we definitely won't. But we'll get closer and closer to it. And all I'm saying is that what you understand, the meaning of one true objective reality, the things that you want to find out

[01:55:22] about gravity or about oxygen or about quarks or about whatever, that is going to be shaped like inevitably necessarily by your paradigm. And so this is why it's not maybe that helpful to think, oh, as we go from successive paradigms, from one paradigm to the successor paradigm,

[01:55:45] we are now just that much closer to the truth because even just how we understand the truth or reality has now changed in a way that is that is a part of that paradigm. Right. So just even understanding what the target is,

[01:56:01] I think this is just all he's saying is that the target changes depending on the paradigm. And so you're not even aiming. You're not aiming for the same thing from paradigm to paradigm. I think that would completely undermine what he's saying about

[01:56:16] paradigms, because the anomalies that need to be resolved for a new paradigm to be ushered in are the same questions like there is. They're not though. Yeah. But like when when enough anomalies exists that the paradigm can't

[01:56:32] explain it, the new one comes in and says, oh, here's a better theory of relativity rather than Newtonian mechanics. It's not arbitrary. It's actually like doing a better job of describing the target of explanation. But when you say a better job, right?

[01:56:48] And this is I think he would even agree that Einstein's theory does a better job than Newtonian mechanics, but it's just that he understands better job differently than you do. You have this assumption that it's doing a better job because this is closer to how reality actually is.

[01:57:08] How on your view, like how do you understand him to mean better job? It solves more problems than we that we currently want to solve. Like launching a rocket ship to outer space. Why is it better at solving those problems? Because what do you mean?

[01:57:24] Like, but like what makes a theory better at solving problems that we need to solve? I guess you want me to say objective realities. No, I just want you to say that that like that it learned something that the previous one didn't learn about the universe.

[01:57:39] The thing that Einstein did was give a completely just different understanding of like what space is and what matter is. Yeah. Right. So like now the target has shifted. OK, unless it's just some like no, no, I don't think the target has shifted.

[01:57:57] It's just we just we Newton thought it was this. But in fact, it was this. Like that's not a shifting target. That's not an accurate way of describing like it's not Newton thought matter was

[01:58:09] this, but it turned out to be this or like he thought mass was this. But mass turned out to be that you can't say that divorced from the paradigm that you're in. But this is what confuses me and perhaps we should stop it. Yeah.

[01:58:22] But what confuses me maybe just to get back to the book is that throughout that's exactly the way that Coon describes things. So like people used to think of light as corpuscles and then they understood it to be a wave.

[01:58:37] And then there was this question of whether a wave could be could travel without a medium. And it's all described as sort of this like, oh, and each step gets us to a better description, not for those.

[01:58:50] They're not trying to solve any problems other than what's the best way to account for the data that we have. And and we used to think it was flogist on. But now we have the knowledge that it's oxygen.

[01:59:01] I think he would say, yes, that that is a closer approximation to truth. No, he would not say that. I mean, you know, he wouldn't say that because he flat out rejects that. Like the thing that like the thing that he thought he

[01:59:15] did that his his kind of conversion experience was looking at Aristotelian metaphysics or astronomy and and and like at first, you know, being raised to think, oh, God, this is this is so stupid. This is so primitive.

[01:59:32] This is infused with all sorts of religious ideas or platonic ideas. And then realizing, holy shit, if you change your concepts, this actually works better than any subsequent paradigm until Newtonian mechanics. Right. And meanwhile, so like you really didn't get this closer and closer to the truth there.

[01:59:56] You had a paradigm that was pretty successful. And then Newtonian mechanics, you think, Kuhn doesn't think is better than Aristotelian? No, he does. But that's the first one. OK. Sure. But wait, what does that mean?

[02:00:11] I mean, it just means that it took us a long time to get there. No, it means that unlike the standard picture where you go Aristotle to Ptolemy to Copernicus to Kepler to and all of these are just getting

[02:00:24] better and better, building towards Newton, which is then building towards Einstein. It actually was no Aristotle had had for that schema. And there's a lot of different reasons why we had to reject the Aristotelian worldview, like, but he's that world was wrong.

[02:00:41] But you're so frustrating dealing with this. But like the other worldviews were less successful until you got to Newton. The other worldviews were less successful than Aristotle. It's all like so much of what we're trying to figure out is what successful means.

[02:01:02] And so I have a problem that human beings decide for various reasons that they want to solve and, for me, it's correspondence to the observation. Right, which are theory dependent and which are problems. But how are problems? I mean, I don't understand that just what they're not.

[02:01:20] There are some things that aren't theory dependent, like how long it takes the sun to travel across the sky. That's not something it's like, oh, I'm so stuck in my paradigm. I never thought to ask that question. Like that's there's just some observations about the natural world

[02:01:34] that some theories do better at explaining. I mean, for a long time when you said the sun, how long it takes from the sun to travel through the sky, that would mean very different things to somebody in a Ptolemaic paradigm versus somebody in a Newtonian paradigm.

[02:01:50] Right. And Copernicus would say the sun doesn't move at all. It's in the center of the universe. What are you talking about? You know what I mean, like even Egyptian gods have chariots that brought the sun across the sky.

[02:02:02] I simply mean how many hours of daylight there are. That's not paradigm dependent. There are just observations. They aren't so it's the human mind. Yes, that's true. Yeah, so. But wanting to know that and thinking that's important, that is human dependent.

[02:02:18] Sure. But now that we want to know it, there's a better answer than another one. It's not like Egyptians were like there is no such thing as the amount of time that there is light in the sky. Like that seems like I mean, I agree with you.

[02:02:31] I don't think like I don't get the point, I guess. Like yes, there is you can measure like sunrise to sunset in terms of hours without being steeped in the paradigm. Yes, exactly. And so some theories will do a better job of predicting how long that lasts

[02:02:49] throughout the year. Right. It's not the question isn't paradigm dependent, but the answer might be. Right. And those answers might be better than others. And when it becomes really better, a paradigm shifts. That's all I'm saying. You know, if you're just talking about here,

[02:03:03] the sun where the sun goes over that mountain, I want to know how many hours between that and the sun going over this mountain. That's very different than like because that is a practical problem that you want to sell.

[02:03:15] But OK, I have a proposal for you because I think that we have a deep a deeply different view of this stuff. And I think that you have sort of a pragmatic theory of truth. And I have this sort of correspondence theory.

[02:03:29] And I think we could actually do a scientific truth. Yeah. Yeah. I think we could do an episode just about that because we're certainly not going to arrive at we are talking past each other now. Exactly. We come from different paradigms.

[02:03:45] Mine is the better paradigm, but not the one that is closer approximation to objective. I mean, the real take home message from this episode is you're just pulling con out of your ass just whenever it's convenient to you, just like numina, just boom, numina phenomena.

[02:04:04] I think that like it's just an obvious truth that we need concepts and backgrounds, assumptions to even make sense of like what and what kinds of observations we're making or whether a prediction is successful or not. And when you change those background assumptions that will

[02:04:24] change, that's all that's all without these this conceptual experience and the training that we get from that in the background of that. The world is just a blue in William James's phrase, a bloomin' buzzen confusion. I agree about that epistemological plan. Oh, man. All right.

[02:04:53] It's so fun to frustrate you right now. It's let's go play some cornhole and that way I can frustrate you that way. Like that for those listeners not familiar, that is a game. It's a fun game that we play. All right, join us next time on Very Candice.