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From: msellers@mntgfx.MENTOR.COM (Mike Sellers)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: On Kuhn's fashionability
Message-ID: <683@mntgfx.MENTOR.COM>
Date: Sun, 24-May-87 03:43:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: mntgfx.683
Posted: Sun May 24 03:43:38 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 24-May-87 19:41:33 EDT
References: <3978@ihlpa.ATT.COM> <8705200312.AA02647@brahms.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: Mentor Graphics, Beaverton OR
Lines: 59

In article <8705200312.AA02647@brahms.Berkeley.EDU>, obnoxio@BRAHMS.BERKELEY.EDU (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) writes:
> Bravo!  I like these articles.
> In article <3978@ihlpa.ATT.COM>, lew@ihlpa (Lew Mammel, Jr.) writes:
>>			        Indeed, they may find general support
>>for this attitude in the now fashionable Kuhnian outlook on the
>>history of science, although I think they push this approach rather
>>too far!
> 
> "now fashionable"?  Hmm.  Fashionable to whom?
> 
> I've never been able to figure out why Kuhn is so "fashionable".  Is it
> because his book came out at the beginning of the sixties?  Was it the
> phrase "Gestalt switch"?

You might be surprised at how *few* people have actually read his stuff.  
Or even heard of him (sigh).  There was a book that came out recently 
(author and title conveniently forgotten...) that was basically Kuhn 
repackaged for the '80s.  It was a small book with big type and big 
margins (tell you anything?), and it went over *real* big with a lot of 
the execs at my former place of employment.  It was all about paradigm
shifting and (alledgedly) how to recognize it happening around you.  
(BTW, in my book "paradigm" is one of those excellent words in our 
language that is so cogent that it seems bound to be beaten to death
before most people figure out what it means... a lot like "parameter"
or "heuristic" or "Gestalt".)

> Now, I can understand why, *during* the sixties, that Kuhn would be so
> popular.  But why today?  It doesn't make sense.  I've gotten the im-
> pression from the net that his book is the only philosophy of science
> book that most literate people ever end up reading.  Why?

Well, some of us just plain like (some of) his ideas.  I had some of his
stuff crammed down my thoat years ago, for which I will be ever grateful.
Many practitioners and viewers of science have far too sterile a view 
of how things change and how they remain the same, in my mind.  The idea
that, for example, the information processing model of psychology was
gradually supplanting the behaviorist model at least partially because
most of the old behaviorists were dying off should give any good psych
student pause.  What does this mean about the validity of current ideas?
Are we losing good, solid theories simply because they atrophied in 
amongst a lot of (what we see as) deadwood?  How much better are our
explanations than the ones they replace, really?  None of this is really
earthshaking stuff once you are aware of it, but *so* many people aren't.
On some level, Kuhn's work struck me as perhaps a great-great-granddaddy
to Asimov's psychohistory.  Okay, so its a flight of fancy; the point is
that Kuhn drew together some threads in a way that few had done before,
and that many still argue with.  I don't know how "fashionable" Kuhn is
right now, though.  I guess I've been out of academia a bit too long :-].

> ucbvax!brahms!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720

Sorry if this rambles too much; it is faaarrr to late for me to be at 
a keyboard.

Mike Sellers
...!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!msellers

I always thought about, but never actually did, cite a bogus source in
a psych paper by an author like: Gestalt, Heinrich... :-)