Ah, this post brings back so many memories of studying philosophy of science in grad school. Great job summarizing Structure.
One book that I found very helpful in understanding Kuhn’s views in relations to philosophical questions like the objectivity vs mind-dependence of reality is Dynamics of Reason by Michael Friedman. Here Friedman relates Kuhn’s ideas both to Kant’s notion of categories of the understanding and to Rudolf Carnap’s ontological pragmatism.
The upshot of Friedman’s book is the idea of the constitutive a priori which roughly is the notion of a conceptual background understanding that makes certain empirical beliefs intelligible. Unlike Kant’s categories, Fridman’s constitutive a priori (which is supposed to capture both Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm and Carnap’s notion of a “language”) can change over time. This sounds like it might also have strong resonance for what Scott calls predictive coding. It would be interesting to explore those connections. However, there is a still a bit of mystery surrounding what happens when we shift, individually or collectively from one constellation of constitutive a priori to an different one (parralel to the question of how scientific communities can shift paradigms in a rational way). Fridman advances the idea of “discursive rationality” to account for how we can make this shift rationally. Basically, to shift between constitutive a prioris, we have to step out of empiricist modes of rationality and adopt a more hermeneutic/philosophical style. Again, this certainly has echoes in some things Kuhn says about paradigm shifts.
So in the end I don’t think Fridman really solves the problem, but his book does make it much clearer what the nature of the problem really is. It helps by relating Kuhn’s specific concepts like paradigm-shift, to the broader history of philosophy from Kant through to the logical positivists. It is pretty striking that the same type of problem emerged for positivists like Carnap, as for avowedly anti-positivists like Kuhn. To me this suggests that it isn’t a superficial issue limited to a specific thinker or school, but rather points to something quite deep.
Ah, this post brings back so many memories of studying philosophy of science in grad school. Great job summarizing Structure.
One book that I found very helpful in understanding Kuhn’s views in relations to philosophical questions like the objectivity vs mind-dependence of reality is Dynamics of Reason by Michael Friedman. Here Friedman relates Kuhn’s ideas both to Kant’s notion of categories of the understanding and to Rudolf Carnap’s ontological pragmatism.
The upshot of Friedman’s book is the idea of the constitutive a priori which roughly is the notion of a conceptual background understanding that makes certain empirical beliefs intelligible. Unlike Kant’s categories, Fridman’s constitutive a priori (which is supposed to capture both Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm and Carnap’s notion of a “language”) can change over time. This sounds like it might also have strong resonance for what Scott calls predictive coding. It would be interesting to explore those connections. However, there is a still a bit of mystery surrounding what happens when we shift, individually or collectively from one constellation of constitutive a priori to an different one (parralel to the question of how scientific communities can shift paradigms in a rational way). Fridman advances the idea of “discursive rationality” to account for how we can make this shift rationally. Basically, to shift between constitutive a prioris, we have to step out of empiricist modes of rationality and adopt a more hermeneutic/philosophical style. Again, this certainly has echoes in some things Kuhn says about paradigm shifts.
So in the end I don’t think Fridman really solves the problem, but his book does make it much clearer what the nature of the problem really is. It helps by relating Kuhn’s specific concepts like paradigm-shift, to the broader history of philosophy from Kant through to the logical positivists. It is pretty striking that the same type of problem emerged for positivists like Carnap, as for avowedly anti-positivists like Kuhn. To me this suggests that it isn’t a superficial issue limited to a specific thinker or school, but rather points to something quite deep.