Abstract
Revolutionary new views concerning science have recently been advanced by Feyerabend, Hanson, Kuhn, Toulmin, and others. The claim that there are pervasive presuppositions fundamental to scientific investigations seems to be essential to the views of these men. Each would further hold that transitions from one scientific tradition to another force radical changes (a) in what is observed, (b) in the meanings of the terms employed, and (c) in the metastandards involved. In this Chapter I will discuss and evaluate (a). In subsequent Chapters I will then focus on (b) and (c) with a final return to (a).
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Notes
Not only do Tycho and Kepler see different things, but laymen are compared to infants and idiots in that they are held to all be literally blind to what the physicist sees ([27], pp. 17,20,22).
Hanson implicitly claims “seeing X as Y” is the same as “seeing an object X”. Namely, seeing X as Y is to see that if A 1, … A n were done to X then B 1,… B n respectively would result (cf. [27], p. 21, where Hanson discusses Figure 1). This is, unfortunately, incompatible with Hanson’s explicit claim that he is not identifying seeing with seeing-as: “I do not mean to identify seeing with seeing as” ([27], p. 19). Since ‘sees that’ has the same sense in both claims, so would Hanson’s two types of “seeing”.
All of this, in effect, assumes that some of the intersections of some of the respective categories employed by different scientific schemes are non-empty. It is unfortunate that Schemer does not analyze Feyerabend’s denial of precisely this assumption [17]. We will try to remedy this in Chapter 2, Section IV and again in Chapter 4 when we return to the topic of observational invariance.
Toulmin notes this well, ([84], pp. 83–85) and interprets Kuhn as very recently emending his “normal-revolutionary” distinction to one in which theoretical micro-revolutions are going on continuously, [43]. Purtill is excellent on this point [62].
Cf. “After investigating the matter further, I now agree with you. I did not, as I had previously thought, see John commit the crime at all. As you say, John definitely was in Japan at the time. It was, after all, Charles whom I saw.”
It is my opinion that many of Kuhn’s claims in [42] are either false or else provide additional examples of what Professor Ryle has termed “systematically misleading expressions” in his now classic article, [69]. Cf.: “When an expression is of such a syntactical form that it is improper to the fact recorded, it is systematically misleading in that it naturally suggests to some people — though not to “ordinary” people — that the state of affairs recorded is quite a different sort of state of affairs from that which it in fact is.” ([69], p. 16)
They will be “efficient”, according to Feyerabend, if they fulfill in good measure the methodological aim of mutual criticism. (Cf. [15], pp. 7–8)
By suggesting the unification of terrestrial and celestial laws, the Copernican revolution made the projectile a legitimate source of information about planetary motions. (Cf. [41], p. 230)
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© 1971 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Kordig, C.R. (1971). The Theory—Ladenness of Observation. In: The Justification of Scientific Change. Synthese Library, vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1734-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1734-3_1
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