Chris Hibbert writes
> mlorrey@datamann.com said:
> > If Newton had called it 'electromagnetic attraction', he would have
> > been wrong, and somebody else would have come up with the correct
> > theory of gravity. You seem to be suffering from a very Kuhnian
> > delusion that physical laws are created by people.
>
> I don't understand the attack on Kuhn. What is it in Kuhn (presumably "The
> Structure of Scientific Revolutions") that you connect to a "delusion that
> physical laws are created by people"? My reading of Kuhn was that it takes
> time for people (even scientists) to accept a fundamental change in our
> understanding of how reality works. I didn't think he had said that the
> world hadn't changed until the consensus had settled on the new view.
I agree with your "reading of Kuhn that it takes time for people
to accept...", but Kuhn minimalize the importance of physical
reality on our theories: Here is what Steven Weinberg says about
Kuhn in this context:
"In his celebrated book...Kuhn went a step further and argued that in scientific
revolutions the standards by which scientists judge theories change, so that the new
theories simply cannot be judged by the pre-Revolutionary standards. There is much in
Kuhn's book that fits my [Weinberg's] own experience in science. But in the last chapter
Kuhn tentatively attacked the view that science makes progress toward objective truths:
"We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that
changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to
the truth." Kuhn's book lately seems to have become read (or at least quoted) as a
manifesto for a general attack on the presumed objectivity of science."
I thought S.W. said more; but in any case, that explains where Mike
was coming from, because what Kuhn is saying, even if he didn't mean
to, is that the theories are changing just due to people and societies.
Lee
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