It Ain't Rocket Science

This blog supplemented a course I once taught at the Copenhagen Business School with Søren Buhl Hornskov. The basic idea was to read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge as manuals for producing "epistemological" descriptions. We were trying to put these theories into "reflexive practice" by using them as platforms to teach students how to understand their own disciplinarity.

The approach was simple. We asked each student to produce a short "statement" (in Foucault's sense) of something they "knew" in a sense warranted by the discipline that they were currently studying (a field within business adminstration understood in a broad sense). We then worked through the "doctrine of elements" posited by Kuhn and Foucault. That is, the students were to identify the ways in which their own statements or claims depended on the structure of a "disciplinary matrix" (invoking specific symbolic generalisations, models, values and exemplars) or the positivity of the "discursive formation" (invoking specific objects, enunciative modalities, concepts and strategies).

An important theme in the course was the sense in which "paradigms" and "discourses" replace "theories" as objects of epistemological analysis, once the historical contigencies of language are taken into account. And we offered some ideas about how to bring all these insights together using John Law's concept of "fractional coherence".

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein returns again and again to the proposition, "I have never been on the moon." He takes this as an exmple of the sort of the thing it is not possible to doubt. §286 is a good example:

What we believe depends on what we learn. We all believe that it isn't possible to get to the moon; but there might be people who believe that that is possible and that it sometimes happens. We say: these people do not know a lot that we know. And, let them be never so sure of their belief—they are wrong and we know it.

If we compare our system of knowledge with theirs then theirs is evidently the poorer one by far.

That was written in 1950. Suppose we said the following today:

What we believe depends on what we learn. We all believe that it is possible to get to the moon; but there might be people who believe that that it is not possible and that it never happened. We say: these people do not know a lot that we know. And, let them be never so sure of their belief—they are wrong and we know it.

If we compare our system of knowledge with theirs then theirs is evidently the poorer one by far.

In fact, there are people who believe that we have never been on the moon. These are the so-called "cranks" who think the Apollo program was a hoax. As I see it, they hold two beliefs: (a) it was indeed impossible to get to the moon in 1950, (b) an "official" assurance that something happened is no reason to believe that something in fact did happen. After that, of course, there is the discussion of the "anomalies" that reveal that the evidence NASA provides is faked, and so forth.

In any case, since these people do not believe that anyone has been to them moon, they do not know that we have been there. There have a different "system of knowledge", we might say.

Just a stray thought. (Maybe I'll start blogging here informally again just for kicks.)

During the course we proposed a somewhat simplistics but I think pretty accurate analogy: positivism is to Kuhn what structuralism is Foucault. The question is whether this analogy leads to others that are just as illuminating.

Maybe they do.

One way to look at positivism is as a doctrine (I hesitate to say theory) about what constitutes knowing a fact. So a positivists starts with a known fact and tries to figure out what it is that makes it known.

Structuralism (and I want to start with its application to anthropology, not linguistics) starts with "events". It provides an account of understanding an event; it tries to figure out what makes an event meaningful.

So we have fact/knowledge and event/meaning. The facts and what we know about them, events and the sense we make of them.

Like I say, just a stray thought. We'll see where it might go.

Disciplinary matrices (or paradigms) are a particular kind of order that may be discerned in some social structures. These social structures can be called scientific communities. We describe the relevant sense of order by describing the elements of the paradigm--symbolic generalisations, models, values and exemplars.

The values of science can be described at two levels, which apply to the internal cohesion of the community working under the paradigm and to its legitimacy in the broader community (society in general) respectively. The first, then, defines the value of good quality (worthwhile or valuable) research by an individual member within the specific community working under the paradigm. This will often involve standards of precision and thoroughness, writing style and, of course, the orthodox identification of "enemy positions", i.e., those "other" disciplines that do not share the relevant values.

The second, meanwhile, defines the value of the paradigm's research to concerns that go beyond the paradigm. This will also involve its share of "othering", though now in terms of broader social movements. More important, however, are ideas about the value of science in general and the value of the paradigm's research to society. Such values, in turn, come in different varieties. Thus, "strategy research" (a branch of management studies) often emphasises its commitment to "the bottom line", i.e., to making a contribution to the profitability of firms. Some economists subscribe to the same line, and others to a broader notion of "economic efficiency" at a national or international level. Still other economists are committed to "social justice", just as many sociologists pursue lines of research devoted to "cultural criticism". There are natural scientists who are devoted to improving the conditions of life on the planet, whether human, animal or vegetable. And there are natural scientists, philosophers and sociologists who are interested in what they call "knowledge for its own sake" or, simply, "truth". Paradigms may form around any combination of such values.

Values are one of the elements that distinguishes paradigms from each other and they are subject to change. They are often very much a part of what connects a paradigm to its broader social context, even as they mark their autonomy from it. Their description is an important part of the delineation of the order constituted by a disciplinary matrix.

In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn't matter. The first Kafka of "Betrachtung" is less a precursor of the Kafka of the gloomy myths and terrifying institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.

J. L. Borges

"Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations," Kuhn tells us (SSR, X, p. 126). "Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined." As an example, Kuhn offers Galileo's experiments with pendulums. His most controversial contention here, as he himself notes, is that Galileo was able to see a pendulum, where others--the Aristoteleans--simply were not. What they saw was the "constrained fall" of a stone on a string.

This difference can be understood in many ways that we have already looked at. In terms of symbolic generalisations, the Aristolean would describe the phenomenon by reference to "the weight of the stone, the vertical height to which it had been raised, and the time required for it to achieve rest," (p. 123) while Galileo "measured only weight, radius, angular displacement, and time per swing." In terms of models, Aristotle noted a "change of state rather than a process" and took the stone to be "impelled by its nature to reach its final resting point," i.e., the ground, (p. 122) while Galileo saw "the [pendulum's] motion as symmetrical and enduring; and . . . circular," its impetus deriving not from its tendency toward something, but rather from its distance from it," namely, the fixed point (p. 123-25). Finally, in terms of disciplinary values, Artistoteleans were likely to discuss these issues rather than observe actual pendulums. That is, Galileo valued empirical experiments, while Aristoteleans valued logical argument.

Our focus here is on exemplars. Kuhn emphasises that the paradigm that allowed Galileo's "individual genius" to see a pendulum where Aristotelean science could see only a constrained fall was not of his own making but was part of his scholastic heritage. Thus, Buridan's description of vibrating strings (p. 120) and especially Oresme's description of a swinging stone (which, Kuhn notes, "now appears as the first discussion of pendulums") are precursors of the paradigm shift marked by Galileo's studies. The "view of things" that Galileo had, was part of "the scholastic impetus paradigm for motion", a paradigm whose importance is of course very clear to us today.

The Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges once pointed out that works of literature have a tendency to create their own precursors. Thus, with the work of Kafka, certain connections between hitherto unrelated authors begin to emerge. A tradition is formed that seemed to herald the work of Kafka, but from which we could not have predicted in any detail the character of Kafka's work. The same can be said of landmarks in the history of science. A great many developments within the scholastic tradition become apparent as a drive toward the discoveries of Galileo, allowing us to see pendulums where, in the past, Aristoteleans had been able to see only stones swinging on the end of strings.

In keeping with the spirit of Borges, it may be useful to point out that it is not the person of, say, Sir Isaac Newton, but some of his work that has come to be "paradigmatic" (in the sense of "exemplary") of modern science. Newton also dabbled in alchemy, though neither he nor his colleagues would have called it "dabbling" (they took it very seriously). His studies of planetary motion have served as examples for countless studies since then; his studies of how to turn lead into gold are examplary of quite another set of pursuits. Note also that examplars may be found from a time before a paradigm is fully formed, as the scholastic exemplars for Galileo's work shows.

While exemplars generally have an origin, or at least a set of early applications that have defined their content, it is important to keep in mind also that Kuhn means the actual operations that define the experiment or study, not the historical event of its early attempts. Thus, the pendulum along with a specific kind of analysis (one which in fact defines it as a pendulum) is an examplar of mechanics even today. It is the therefore not just the sort of thing you read about in history books, but the sort of thing you can have hands-on experience with.

Kuhn himself emphasises the importance of exemplars and devotes a good deal of space to them in his postscript (pp. 186-204). There is good reason to heed his emphasis here. One of the most useful ways of getting clear about the formative processes behind a field of research, including your own, is to make explicit what counts as "good work". It is one thing to explicate abstract criteria or norms (i.e., values) of good research; it is another to identify examples of work that meets them. It is also much easier to learn from concrete examples of quality research than to imagine a correspondence between ones own work and a set of formal rules. Good researchers should be aware of their precursors: they should be able to point out what the major successes in their field are.

When describing a disciplinary matrix in terms of its exemplars, the following information should be provided wherever possible. First, the name of the scientist who first carried out the exemplary study. Second, the date of the experiment. Third, the place it was first published, and the places the example may be found today (such as in textbooks). Fourth, a description of the experiment that emphasises the parts of the study that have contributed to forming the "immediate experience" of the paradigm. Paradigms will of course contain many exemplars of good research, so part of the task here is to identify those which are particularily influential.

In all cases, keep in mind that exemplar is always an instance of a successful pairing of problems that are recognized by the field and solutions that are valued by it. Identifying an examplar means identifying work that has been valuable to the formation of the researcher's competences and remains a benchmark in a significant way. This is why a field's progress "creates its own precursors", as Borges puts it. Progress may sometimes make previous exemplars less significant, and may indicate new examplars of what can be an older vintage.