I rarely indulge in the rich heady stuff these days. Too much work to do.
Accidentally, you know how it goes, I followed a link from Fred Stutzman’s blog and found this gem, perfectly on the topic of my last post (just 3 miles deeper.)
If I can summarize briefly, in my language, Positivists were believers in the scientific method, aggregated over the long haul into theory. Thomas Kuhn, in the 60’s and 70’s pushed back with a return to theory dominance – that theory framed observation.
If Kuhn is right – then different subcultures (scientific in this case, but I’d like to stretch it for personal relevance), have a major problem:
. . . if it’s true that subcultures parse the world differently, does the Kuhnian disjunction (the revolution in theoretical perspective) make it impossible for scientific subcultures to interact with one another? Kuhn seems to suggest that it should be – if science moves in terms of revolutions, scientists on different sides of that revolution might literally be speaking different languages, Newtonian and Einsteinian, as different as French and German.
What if society moves in revolutions? What of generations – are they more distinct subcultures? What if the screw is “revolving” faster than before?
If you want to dive in, the solution has to do with intermediary languages, as well as, perhaps, intermediary players and entire fields.
It’s my orchestration post with impressive intellectual and historical roots. Cultivating roots like that is a beautiful thing. It’s very noble.
I completely understand the attraction of academia. It’s a very inviting rabbit hole – lovely, dark and deep . . . but I have promises to keep.
And a plane out of LaGuardia way too early.
