Paradigm shifts in philosophy
Are there paradigm shifts or revolutions in philosophy in the Kuhnian sense where concepts fundamentally change and those prior and posterior to the shift are speaking in different languages? E.g. in science you have the paradigm shifts associated with Newton (e.g. a new, mathematical way of doing physics or science), Darwin (a new framework to do biology, to view life and the Universe more generally), Einstein, etc. What are such paradigm shifts in Philosophy?
Comments (50)
The linguistic turn might be an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn
Few folk have ever held justified true belief to be both sufficient and necessary conditions for knowledge. Not even Socrates thought it adequate, and he is the fellow who developed it - describing it as a "wind-egg". Gettier just presented examples that undergraduates could understand.
The hard part, for those who need such things, has been working out what an "essence" of knowledge might be.
Perhaps; at least it would be if we were to consider philosophy as subject to Kuhnian development. The "linguistic turn" is a post-hoc compilation of various, divergent approaches to philosophy, arguably including much of the ethics points to.
But philosophy is not a science, and not necessarily subject to the sorts of historical analysis common to the sciences. Would you happily call pointillism a paradigm? Or Shinto? Seems a stretch.
I appreciate the history lesson. I was taking a stab in the dark. I probably shouldn't have. :)
Philosopher Lee Braver happily associates philosophies and metaphysical eras with paradigms. There is the Kantian paradigm, the Heideggerian paradigm, etc. He takes his lead from writers like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Heidegger.
Yes - thank you.
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Yes, for example a return to a paradigm* before Descartes proposed a separation between mind and body. A lot of philosophy has since then been obsessed with explaining away or trying to bridge the assumed gap between mind and body or other objects of knowledge.
Quoting Banno
Right, it's different in many respects, but it is also similar. Science, philosophy, and art are activities that challenge and sometimes increase understanding.
*edit
Behaviorism and eliminativism are on the outs. Panpsychism is making a comeback.
Look at the advances in Neuroscince over the last five years, surely some of these must make us assess philosophicl thinking.
Sartre thought human conflict and constant struggle were just a normal part of our condition. Could the need for conflict be driven out of us by rewiring our brains? John Locke said, Good and evil, reward, and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature. Our motives could be altered by medically changing our brains.
We have neurological methods of fixing problems with the brain, such as in people with speech impediments. We can translate brain activity into words and sentences through speech synthesis. When speaking, we can correlate the pattern of electrical activity that happens in the brain to consonants and vowels. This has given light to the neural code of speech. Through an implant, brain activity can be translated into a machine speech synthesis, which might give speechless people their spoken words back.
These and the many other advances in neuroscience make me think that philosophy might have to change its mind.
Quoting Rob J Kennedy
Philosophy changes its mind all the time, usually well before the sciences do. The kinds of neurological fixes you describe have little to do with the meaning of paradigm shifts as Thomas Kuhn meant them. Improvement in a technology need not require any global transformation in thinking.
Unpacking the complications of the situation requires a paradigmatic shift regarding what constitutes belief. A very large portion of the 'problem' Gettier showed involves the historical malpractice of treating belief as equivalent to propositions and/or propositional attitudes. When the right sort of light is shed upon that underlying issue, the 'problems' Gettier showed are dissolved.
Thales said to his buddy "See that tree over there?" And his buddy said "yeah, so what?" And Thales said, "It's not what you think it is. It's water." And we've been scratching our heads, asserting "paradigm shift" ever since.
When I look at the state of the world, we are urgently ineed of transformative thinking. And, it is only medical science that can change us. Human nature is fixed.
Rob
Maybe nothing more than who is still the more referenced, after the longer time.
I submit, under that criteria, there are but two: Aristotle with pure logic, Kant with pure reason. All others construct philosophies ultimately grounded in, or at least conditioned by, presuppositions of them.
According to that logic, most of what Kuhn considered to be paradigm shifts in the sciences would have to be ignored.
I dont get it. Paradigm shifts in science are not ignored, couldnt be by definition actually, so whats wrong with the logic of my submission, exactly?
Quoting Mww
You said Maybe nothing more than who is still the more referenced, after the longer time.
As overthrown scientific paradigms from earlier eras fade from memory, they will become referenced less and less. Just as in philosophy, Aristotle, Plato and Kant get all the attention , the first two as the founders of Western philosophy and the latter as the founder of modern philosophy, Aristotle, Euclid and Pythagoras get the attention for founding the logic-mathematical basis of science, and Galileo and Newton are credited with the grounding of modern science. But we no more ignore all the philosophical paradigms between the Greeks and Kant, or after Kant, than we do all of the scientific paradigms other than those associated with the Greeks and Newton. Is all modern philosophy just a footnote to Kant? No more so than Kant was just a footnote to Leibnitz, or Spinoza to Descartes, or Descartes to Aquinas.
Ehhhh .sorry, man, but I have such little interest in the soft sciences. That said, I cant claim enough knowledge to answer your question. With respect to Kant, though, Im confident social sciences would relate to him only as far as he treats of anthropology (from a pragmatic point of view), 1796. Not having studied that work, I cant say post-structuralism is a footnote to it.
All paradigm shifts are philosophical. All paradigm shits are rooted in the way we look at the nature of being of particular areas of study. And it just does not get any more ontological than that.
That's fine, I am just curious. So you don't see Derrida or Deluze, say, as philosophers. Maybe I should have said post-modernism.
Sure I do. But they havent seriously shifted any paradigms. Or, they havent shifted any serious paradigms. While they may have advanced this or that line of thought, they havent altered thought itself.
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Quoting Joshs
That criteria is low-level, I should think. There are certainly advances in science, but very few cancel their predecessors outright.
Fair enough. I wonder are there any generally agreed upon key indicters for when a paradigm has shifted? @Joshs?
Not only did these advances make possible almost all the technological breakthroughs seen in the 20th century, it also undermined many previous assumptions about the nature of matter, not least the supposed mind-independence of the objects of physics. This in turn gave rise to the philosophical conundrums posed by wave-function collapse and entanglement, still the source of unresolved debates about the nature of reality and the mind's place in it.
Participants at the 1927 Solvay Conference: A. Piccard, E. Henriot, P. Ehrenfest, E. Herzen, Th. De Donder, E. Schrödinger, J.E. Verschaffelt, W. Pauli, W. Heisenberg, R.H. Fowler, L. Brillouin; P. Debye, M. Knudsen, W.L. Bragg, H.A. Kramers, P.A.M. Dirac, A.H. Compton, L. de Broglie, M. Born, N. Bohr; I. Langmuir, M. Planck, M. Curie, H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, P. Langevin, Ch. E. Guye, C.T.R. Wilson, O.W. Richardson
There is something to be said affirming that choice. I personally didnt consider him, for his adhesion to religion, however much the times forced him into it. I mean, you cant really shift many paradigms if youre still beholden to organized gods for whatever grace or indeed, disgrace ..you receive for your work.
I see both as being merely openings up of new areas of study due to advances in technology, and of course new areas of study are going to involve new ways of understanding.
There were many competing explanations for what "naturally" formed societies, but he emphasized the idea that something was lost rather than apologize on the basis of some view of success.
Maybe this thing sucks.
Newtonian mechanics never purported to deal with the microphysical, so they are not really bets understood as different paradigms, but as different areas of investigation.
The so-called Copernican Revolution came about as a result of more accurate observations made possible by the invention of the telescope and advances in telescope technology.
Sure, you can call these different paradigms, but I think the terminology is a bit overblown and potentially misleading.
not the point. Newtonian mechanics ushered in the 'scientific revolution' which was another paradigm shift. It was far more than just 'accurate observations' as it involved the collapse of an entire cosmology and the ushering in of a wholly new worldlview.
Your remark reminds me of a famous anecdote, that on the day after the sinking of the Titanic, an Aberdeen newspaper was headlined 'Aberdeen Man Lost at Sea' ;-)
Quoting Wayfarer
Darwins work made possible American Pragmatism, psychoanalysis and Piagets genetic epistemology, among other innovations. These ways of thinking are grounded in the understanding of unidirectional time as a fundamental organizing principle. Physicists in 1927 still tended to see time as irrelevant to physics ( and many still do). This was because their thinking was more consistent with Kant than with Hegel. Physics is just now catching up with post-Darwinian thinking. Then of course theres Nietzsche, who wrote this 40 years before the Solvey conference:
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Hey how could you not love that face? Radiates warmth and humanity.
An intriguing passage, but even if atoms are not the supposed ultimate indivisible particles of atomism, they are also something more than a subjective fiction.
'IBM in atoms' was a demonstration by IBM scientists in 1989 of a technology capable of manipulating individual atoms. A scanning tunneling microscope was used to arrange 35 individual xenon atoms on a substrate of chilled crystal of nickel to spell out the three letter company initials using single atoms. It was the first time that individual atoms had been precisely positioned on a flat surface (wiki).
On a side-note, do you think Nietzche's 'will to power' can be traced back to Schopenhauer?
Good description, and you're right, there is no analogous method in philosophy. However, there are analogous shifts.
For example, philosophy used to be the general name for various sciences, but when these sciences specialized there was a shift in philosophy towards questions that didn't concern the sciences, such as ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and some left-over questions from psychology. Then with the linguistic turn there was a shift towards the nature of language.
Analogous shifts occur also in the arts (not to be confused with traditions or fashions). For example, before the invention of photography most of all graphic and sculptural art were more or less used in a scientific manner for depicting the natural world. When photographs became useful for that, there was a shift in the arts towards symbolization of whatever couldn't be photographed, i.e. invisible phenomena, mental or abstract objects etc. later a lot of art became conceptual.
Yes, science has been gradually annexing philosophical territory as it figures out a way to check an idea against the world in a publicly repeatable way. I'd less characterise these as paradigm shifts (which represent progress and no loss of territory) and more as straightforward redrawing of the boundaries of philosophy.
The linguistic turn is an interesting case. I think of it more as a fashion, but perhaps for some it really is a paradigm shift because, if successful, it renders large quantities of philosophy confused and obsolete. I just don't think it's successful.
IBM in atoms, 1989;
Theres Plenty of Room at the Bottom, Feynman, 1959.
Quoting Wayfarer
What Nietzsche means by fiction is a bit tricky. He cant mean false as opposed to what is truly real, given his assertion that nothing lies behind appearance. What he means by fiction is the claim of scientific facts to some sort of status that transcends their condition of possibility in contingency. What makes this thinking of atoms a fiction, then, is not that it isnt a useful construct, but that it conceals from itself that as a construct, it is historically contingent, and subject to wholesale transformation of its sense via the movement of paradigmatic change.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nietzsches concept of will to power is a critique of Schopenhauers notion of will.
It occurs to me that the word 'progress' is used in related but different senses in science, philosophy, and art.
In all three there is a shift in the use of available methods, or in the understanding of the subject matter, that it is significant enough to influence many or most practitioners in their forthcoming work.
What is different is that progress in science is understood in terms of utility, i.e. the most recent science is typically more useful, efficient, advanced etc. than previous science. In philosophy progress is, for example, clarification of concepts (e.g. sense and reference), which may result in new ways to work with and understand philosophical questions. But it's debatable whether it is useful (a philosophical question). In the arts utility can be the opposite of progress, e.g. beauty being disinterested pleasure even. But it can be useful too, for example, the shift that occurred when artists learned how to construct perspective pictures.
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