A few commenters on this post have rightly scolded me about my reference to epicycles.
I agree with them. In fact, I've posted on this very point in the past (several other times too I think, but this one came up after a quick search). Ptolemaic physics is good science. Phlogiston is good science. Good science doesn't mean timeless science or science that is never superseded.
All I was getting at is that there is this sense of epicycles as making excuses for a model to stave off a better model. What I wanted to communicate is that actually New Keynesians were presenting realistic applications of a first approximation that probably few people took literally to begin with. That seems different from epicycles to me, which were patches on a system that people did take literally and kept finding problems with.
Of course, that does not mean that the patching is bad science. It is good science, and as a Kuhnian I definitely acknowledge that and thank the commenters for pointing it out. The real question for me is how to take the rational expectations revolution. I take it as a first approximation of an important insight, rather than a paradigm shift that gets epicycles built on top of it. It may just be semantics at this point, but I don't want to denigrate that Kuhnian depiction of the scientific process.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
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It is good science, and as a Kuhnian I definitely acknowledge that and thank the commenters for pointing it out.
ReplyDeleteYou mean you're a Polanyian. Kuhn plagiarized Polanyi (of whose lectures he previously attended, and sparred with), and effectively admitted as much in the 2nd edition of his SSR book.
Funniest line that is true:
"I am not a Kuhnian!" - Thomas Kuhn.
For a Kuhn smackdown:
http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae3_1_16.pdf
I must have missed the confession of plagiarism in the subsequent edition. Mind giving me a page number to go back and review.
DeleteI'd also be interested in the context of that quote. There are lots of instances of famous thinkers saying things like this. My expectation is that he's reacting to people that call him a relativist - i.e., if Kuhnian means relativist then I am not a Kuhnian. In that case I wouldn't be either.
In the 2nd edition, Kuhn writes:
Delete"Normal science can be determined in part by the direct inspection of paradigms, a process that is often aided by but does not depend upon the formulation of rules and assumptions. Indeed, the existence of a paradigm need not even imply that any full set of rules exists." - pg 44.
This is, I am sure you will agree, the meat of Kuhn's theory.
After the first edition came out, Polanyi's followers charged that Kuhn plagiarized him. Then lo and behold, in the 2nd edition, Kuhn gives a footnote reference mentioning Polanyi as having "brilliantly developed a very similar theme". This is, to me, an admission that Kuhn ripped Polanyi off.
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As for the context of the quote "I am not a Kuhnian!", it is rather well known that it was made against charges of relativism. I just posted it because it is a funny line. I mean, it's not something you hear people say everyday.
This is silly. Referees and people who review scholarly work do this all the time. I've made points before and had a referee bring to my attention that someone else has said something similar, and tell me I should cite it. And I do.
DeleteThis is not plagiarism, MF. That's not to say he couldn't have plagiarized. Maybe he did. But you need a little more than that. I don't think anybody thinks these sorts of things spring fully formed from a single individual's head. It doesn't strike me as problematic at all that citations get added between editions.
Remember there were all sorts of anti-positivist discussions going on in the first half of the twentieth century. Of course that broad critique informs Kuhn and lots of others. Are you going to say he plagiarized all of them?
DeleteThis is silly. Referees and people who review scholarly work do this all the time. I've made points before and had a referee bring to my attention that someone else has said something similar, and tell me I should cite it. And I do.
DeleteDid those instances involve the work of people whose lectures you attended in the distant past, whose ideas you were intimately familiar with, and who potentially may have influenced your current writing, but you did not bother to cite them the first time?
There is a difference between updating one's work because it just so happens that someone else independently developed similar points, and updating one's work to cite someone whose work you know about, who you even conversed with in the past, who developed similar ideas but you didn't cite them. Wouldn't you agree?
This is not plagiarism, MF. That's not to say he couldn't have plagiarized. Maybe he did. But you need a little more than that. I don't think anybody thinks these sorts of things spring fully formed from a single individual's head. It doesn't strike me as problematic at all that citations get added between editions.
My point is not so much that his ideas are so similar, but that his ideas are so similar AND he must have known of Polanyi's work prior.
Meh, this isn't that big a deal, because what's important are the ideas themselves and how they stack up to criticisms. You say it's not plagiarism, I say it is almost a certainty it is plagiarism. At the end of the day, both are dead.
I will however dispute that I "need more than that", because plagiarism is often very subtle and imperceptible. I don't need in your face obvious examples. For example, you know of the philosopher Nietzsche, right? You probably know of some of his work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and so on. Most who have some interest in philosophy are familiar. But how many are familiar with the philosopher Max Stirner? Are you? Very few, if any, know about him, and yet, Nietzsche plagiarized him, IMO. But it's not well known because it's not "in your face" obvious either.
Remember there were all sorts of anti-positivist discussions going on in the first half of the twentieth century. Of course that broad critique informs Kuhn and lots of others. Are you going to say he plagiarized all of them?
Of course not. Just Polanyi, for now. I am not as familiar with the interactions Kuhn had with other anti-positivists as informing Kuhn, as I am with Polanyi.
At any rate, regardless of whether you believe Kuhn did plagiarize him or not, it's still true that you are espousing a philosophy of science worldview that, as far as I can tell, originated with Polanyi, not Kuhn. That alone can be food for thought next time you say "I am a Kuhnian". Or maybe it will lead to you reading Polanyi, and maybe mentioning him to others, who then mention it to others again, and maybe, just maybe, the dead Polanyi will get the recognition he won't be around to deserving anyway.
"The relativistic impression is due to the fact that Kuhn and Feyerabend, typical of empiricists since Locke and Hume, ultimately misconceive of scientific theories as mere systems of verbal propositions and systematically ignore the foundation of these, or of any, propositions in a reality of action and interaction. Only if one regards observations and theories as being completely detached from action and cooperation, not only does any single theory become immunizable, but any two rival theories whose respective terms cannot be reduced to and defined in terms of each other must then appear completely incommensurable and no rational choice is possible. If statements are merely and exclusively verbal expressions hanging in midair, what reason could there be for any one statement to ever give way to another? Any one statement can perfectly well stand alongside any other one without ever being challenged—unless we simply decide otherwise for whatever arbitrary reason. It is this that Kuhn and Feyerabend demonstrate. But this does not affect the refutability of any one theory and the commensurability of rival theories on the entirely different level of applying these theories in the reality of action, of using them as instruments of action. On the level of mere words, theories may be irrefutable and incommensurable, but practically they can never be." - ibid, pg 190
ReplyDelete