Weiye Loh's Library tagged Paradigm → View Popular, Search in Google

Apr

2012

Shift Happens - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Kuhn wanted to free us from the illusion that knowledge is independent of history and of the sociality that marks us as humans, but he did not think that all beliefs that our history and sociality put before us are equally worthy. Indeed, he quickly moved away from the "shift happens" conception of paradigms as bundles of beliefs, emphasizing instead that they're examples of good scientific practice that researchers apply in their daily work.

chronicle.com/...131580

- Preview

Paradigm Paradigm Shift Science Knowledge Philosophy

Ever since Newton, we in the West have thought movement changes an object's position in neutral space but does not change the object itself. For Aristotle, a change in position was a change in a quality of the object, and qualitative change tended toward an asymmetric actualization of potential: an acorn becomes an oak, but an oak never becomes an acorn. Motion likewise expressed a tendency for things to actualize their essence by moving to their proper place
From this, Kuhn learned several important lessons that surfaced in SSR 15 years later. First, scientific ideas occur within a context that enables them to make sense. Second, context is accepted for different sorts of reasons than are the hypotheses that emerge within it. Third, the idea of a new scientific context occurs roughly the way his own illumination of Aristotle's ideas did: all at once, an entire whole snapping into view the way a duck-rabbit illustration switches instantly from one view to another.
11 more annotation(s)...
- Kuhn got his doctorate in physics but increasingly turned to history and philosophy. In 1950 he met Sir Karl Popper, the pre-eminent philosopher of science, who steered him toward others who were challenging logical positivism, the dominant philosophy of science of the time. The positivists were strict parents. If a proposition could not be verified, it not only wasn't science, it was devoid of meaning. Popper had pulled much of the ground out from under the positivists by arguing that falsifiability was the real test: If a hypothesis doesn't come with ways to show it could be false, then it isn't a scientific hypothesis. Thus our best knowledge of the world isn't that which has been verified, but instead is characterized precisely by the fact that it can be decisively cast aside.
- The individual propositions within a science might be characterized by falsifiability, but how about the sort of gestalt that crystallized for Kuhn when at last and in an instant he understood Aristotle's idea of motion? That gestalt—which Kuhn of course called a paradigm—was of a different category than the propositions it enabled. Its acceptance may be rational in important ways, but Kuhn throughout his career could not bring himself to call paradigms "true."
- Considering that paradigms are central to SSR, it's surprising how ambiguous that work leaves the concept. At a conference in 1965, the late British philosopher Margaret Masterman listed 21 senses in which Kuhn used the term in that book. She clustered them into three groups: (1) a set of beliefs, (2) a "universally recognized scientific achievement" that serves as a defining example of how that science is done, and (3) the textbooks, instruments, and other physical artifacts by which scientists learn and practice their fields.
- In a postscript published in 1969, Kuhn emphasized the second view of paradigms, as exemplars that guide practic
- Kuhn focused on what he termed "normal science," the daily work of career scientists. He said they are not in the business of plotting revolutionary overthrows of existing paradigms, but are instead solving puzzles. Which puzzles are interesting, how to address them, and what counts as solutions all are determined by the paradigm—or, depending on which sense of paradigm one uses, those are the paradigm. Astronomers train telescopes into the sky looking for particular radio signatures because they work under a paradigm in which that activity is important. They have learned to do this from textbooks that codify the paradigm, and they are trained by other scientists in their community. Kuhn spent much of the rest of his career trying to direct the focus of historians and philosophers of science on normal science rather than on revolutionary paradigms, perhaps because his concept of a paradigm was so powerful that it not only overshadowed the quotidian work of science but also threatened to take on an all too solid life of its own. No, Kuhn insisted, take away the practices, instruments, and textbooks of a scientific community, and there is no paradigm left over.
- Karl Popper said, "In my view the 'normal' scientist, as Kuhn describes him, is a person one ought to be sorry for."
  
  Kuhn did not see it that way. It's true that he did not talk about normal scientists as heroes ripping truth from the jaws of duplicitous Nature, but he saw scientific puzzle solving as a creative activity, not as the mere formulaic following of rules.
- Despite the scorn of heavyweights such as Popper and Kuhn's Berkeley colleague Paul Feyerabend, Kuhn's focus on normal science has found favor with many historians and sociologists, in part because it allows them to focus on the background. where institutional and social power is exerted implicitly, rather than on exalting the exceptional people in the foreground, which can give us a misleading idea of freedom and empowerment.
- Scientific revolutions, according to SSR, don't occur when an apple happens to find the head of a genius, or when enough facts have slowly painted a new picture. Rather, in yet another of Kuhn's inversions, new paradigms emerge to explain the accumulation of anomalies: findings that do not make sense within the current paradigm
- By far the most consistently attacked idea was what Kuhn referred to as incommensurability, a term taken from geometry, where it refers to the lack of a shared measurement. In SSR it means something like the inability to understand one paradigm from within another.
- The scientists hated incommensurability because it seemed to imply that science makes no real progress, the philosophers hated it because it seemed to imply that there is no truth, and the positivists hated it because it seemed to imply that science is based on nonrational decisions.
- if science exists within paradigms, and if those paradigms can't understand one another, and if there is no Archimedean platform from which to view them, then how can we tell if we're making progress? It was easier before Kuhn, when science looked like it was the gradual accumulation of knowledge over time. Yet Kuhn was certain that science does indeed progress. He would not have traded Newton's physics for Aristotle's, or Einstein's for Newton's. He struggled to explain progress for the next 30 years.

Aug

2011

The Maze of Moral Relativism - NYTimes.com

Relativism about morality has come to play an increasingly important role in contemporary culture. To many thoughtful people, and especially to those who are unwilling to derive their morality from a religion, it appears unavoidable. Where would absolute facts about right and wrong come from, they reason, if there is no supreme being to decree them? We should reject moral absolutes, even as we keep our moral convictions, allowing that there can be right and wrong relative to this or that moral code, but no right and wrong per se. (See, for example, Stanley Fish’s 2001 op-ed, “Condemnation Without Absolutes.”)[1]

...

A would-be relativist about morality needs to decide whether his view grants the existence of some absolute moral facts, or whether it is to be a pure relativism, free of any commitment to absolutes. The latter position, I have argued, is mere nihilism; whereas the former leads us straight out of relativism and back into the quest for the moral absolutes.
None of this is to deny that there are hard cases, where it is not easy to see what the correct answer to a moral question is. It is merely to emphasize that there appears to be no good alternative to thinking that, when we are in a muddle about what the answer to a hard moral question is, we are in a muddle about what the absolutely correct answer is.

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-maze-of-moral-relativism

- Preview

Relativism Ethics Morality Paradigm

, Einstein showed that while the world does not contain simultaneity as such, it does contain its relativistic cousin — simultaneity relative to a frame of reference — a property that plays something like the same sort of role as classical simultaneity did in our theory of the world.
Most moral relativists say that moral right and wrong are to be relativized to a community’s “moral code.” According to some such codes, eating beef is permissible; according to others, it is an abomination and must never be allowed. The relativist proposal is that we must never talk simply about what’s right or wrong, but only about what’s “right or wrong relative to a particular moral code.”
The trouble is that while “Eating beef is wrong” is clearly a normative statement, “Eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus” is just a descriptive remark that carries no normative import whatsoever. It’s just a way of characterizing what is claimed by a particular moral code, that of the Hindus. We can see this from the fact that anyone, regardless of their views about eating beef, can agree that eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus.
4 more annotation(s)...
- there are no relativistic cousins of “right” and “wrong.” Denial of moral absolutism leads not to relativism, but to nihilism.[2]
- The reason is that our relativism about etiquette does not actually dispense with all absolute moral facts. Rather, we are relativists about etiquette in the sense that, with respect to a restricted range of issues (such as table manners and greetings), we take the correct absolute norm to be “we ought not, other things being equal, offend our hosts.”
  This norm is absolute and applies to everyone and at all times. Its relativistic flavor comes from the fact that, with respect to that limited range of behaviors (table manners and greetings, but not, say, the abuse of children for fun), it advocates varying one’s behavior with local convention.
- the relativism of etiquette depends on the existence of absolute moral norms. Since etiquette does not dispense with absolute moral facts, one cannot hope to use it as a model for moral relativism.
- Another view with which moral relativism is sometimes conflated is the view that the right thing to do can depend on the circumstances. There is no question that the right thing to do can depend on the circumstances, even on an absolutist view. Whether you should help someone in need can depend on what your circumstances are, what their circumstances are, and so forth. What makes a view relativistic is its holding that the right thing to do depends not just on the circumstances, but on what the person (or his community) takes to be the right thing to do, on their moral code.

Aug

2011

What Makes People Gay? - The Boston Globe

www.boston.com/...what_makes_people_gay

- Preview

Sexuality Homosexuality Nature Nurture Conceptualization Paradigm Genetic

What makes the case of Patrick and Thomas so fascinating is that it calls into question both of the dominant theories in the long-running debate over what makes people gay: nature or nurture, genes or learned behavior. As identical twins, Patrick and Thomas began as genetic clones. From the moment they came out of their mother's womb, their environment was about as close to identical as possible - being fed, changed, and plopped into their car seats the same way, having similar relationships with the same nurturing father and mother. Yet before either boy could talk, one showed highly feminine traits while the other appeared to be "all boy," as the moms at the playgrounds say with apologetic shrugs.
in 1991, a neuroscientist in San Diego named Simon LeVay told the world he had found a key difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men he studied. LeVay showed that a tiny clump of neurons of the anterior hypothalamus - which is believed to control sexual behavior - was, on average, more than twice the size in heterosexual men as in homosexual men. LeVay's findings did not speak directly to the nature-vs.-nurture debate - the clumps could, theoretically, have changed size because of homosexual behavior. But that seemed unlikely, and the study ended up jump-starting the effort to prove a biological basis for homosexuality.
15 more annotation(s)...
- Boston University psychiatrist Richard Pillard and Northwestern University psychologist J. Michael Bailey announced the results of their study of male twins. They found that, in identical twins, if one twin was gay, the other had about a 50 percent chance of also being gay. For fraternal twins, the rate was about 20 percent. Because identical twins share their entire genetic makeup while fraternal twins share about half, genes were believed to explain the difference. Most reputable studies find the rate of homosexuality in the general population to be 2 to 4 percent, rather than the popular "1 in 10" estimate.
- In 1993 came the biggest news: Dean Hamer's discovery of the "gay gene." In fact, Hamer, a Harvard-trained researcher at the National Cancer Institute, hadn't quite put it that boldly or imprecisely. He found that gay brothers shared a specific region of the X chromosome, called Xq28, at a higher rate than gay men shared with their straight brothers. Hamer and others suggested this finding would eventually transform our understanding of sexual orientation.
- Researchers at Northwestern University, outside Chicago, are doing this work as a follow-up to their studies of arousal using genital measurement tools. They found that while straight men were aroused by film clips of two women having sex, and gay men were aroused by clips of two men having sex, most of the men who identified themselves as bisexual showed gay arousal patterns. More surprising was just how different the story with women turned out to be. Most women, whether they identified as straight, lesbian, or bisexual, were significantly aroused by straight, gay, and lesbian sex. "I'm not suggesting that most women are bisexual," says Michael Bailey, the psychology professor whose lab conducted the studies. "I'm suggesting that whatever a woman's sexual arousal pattern is, it has little to do with her sexual orientation." That's fundamentally different from men. "In men, arousal is orientation. It's as simple as that. That's how gay men learn they are gay."
- researchers need a far deeper understanding of what sexual orientation is before they can determine where it comes from.
- Female sexual orientation is particularly foggy, he says, because there's been so little research done. As for male sexual orientation, he argues that there's now enough evidence to suggest it is "entirely in-born," though not nearly enough to establish how that happens.
- Bailey's 1991 twin study is still cited by other researchers as one of the pillars in the genetic argument for homosexuality. But his follow-up study using a comprehensive registry of twins in Australia found a much lower rate of similarity in sexual orientation between identical twins, about 20 percent, down from 50 percent.
- Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem has proposed an intriguing theory for how CGN might lead to homosexuality. According to this pathway, which he calls "the exotic becomes erotic," children are born with traits for temperament, such as aggression and activity level, that predispose them to male-typical or female-typical activities. They seek out playmates with the same interests. So a boy whose traits lead him to hopscotch and away from rough play will feel different from, and ostracized by, other boys. This leads to physiological arousal of fear and anger in their presence, arousal that eventually is transformed from exotic to erotic.
  
  Critics of homosexuality have used Bem's theory, which stresses environment over biology, to argue that sexual orientation is not inborn and not fixed. But Bem says this pathway is triggered by biological traits, and he doesn't really see how the outcome of homosexuality can be changed.
- Males and females have a fundamental genetic difference - females have two X chromosomes, and males have an X and a Y. Still, right after conception, it's hard to tell male and female zygotes apart, except for that tucked-away chromosomal difference. Normally, the changes take shape at a key point of fetal development, when the male brain is masculinized by sex hormones. The female brain is the default. The brain will stay on the female path as long as it is protected from exposure to hormones. The hormonal theory of homosexuality holds that, just as exposure to circulating sex hormones determines whether a fetus will be male or female, such exposure must also influence sexual orientation.
- The cases of children born with disorders of "sexual differentiation" offer insight. William Reiner, a psychiatrist and urologist with the University of Oklahoma, has evaluated more than a hundred of these cases. For decades, the standard medical response to boys born with severely inadequate penises (or none at all) was to castrate the boy and have his parents raise him as a girl. But Reiner has found that nurture - even when it involves surgery soon after birth - cannot trump nature. Of the boys with inadequate penises who were raised as girls, he says, "I haven't found one who is sexually attracted to males." The majority of them have transitioned back to being males and report being attracted to females.
- During fetal development, sexual identity is set before the sexual organs are formed, Reiner says. Perhaps it's the same for sexual orientation. In his research, of all the babies with X and Y chromosomes who were raised as girls, the only ones he has found who report having female identities and being attracted to males are those who did not have "receptors" to let the male sex hormones do their masculinizing in the womb.
- "Exposure to male hormones in utero dramatically raises the chances of being sexually attracted to females," Reiner says. "We can infer that the absence of male hormone exposure may have something to do with attraction to males."
- New York University researcher Lynn S. Hall, who has studied traits determined in the womb, speculates that Patrick was somehow prenatally stressed, probably during the first trimester, when the brain is really developing, particularly the structures like the hypothalamus that influence sexual behavior. This stress might have been based on his position in the womb or the blood flow to him or any of a number of other factors not in his mother's control. Yet more evidence that identical twins have womb experiences far from identical can be found in their often differing birth weights. Patrick was born a pound lighter than Thomas.
- the research suggests that early on in the womb, as the fetus's brain develops in either the male or female direction, something fundamental to sexual orientation is happening. Nobody's sure what's causing it. But here's where genes may be involved, perhaps by regulating hormone exposure or by dictating the size of that key clump of neurons in the hypothalamus. Before researchers can sort that out, they'll need to return to the question of whether, in fact, there is a "gay gene."
- There is, however, a towering question that Sanders's study will probably not be able to answer. That has to do with evolution. If a prime motivation of all species is to pass genes on to future generations, and gay men are estimated to produce 80 percent fewer offspring than straight men, why would a gay gene not have been wiped out by the forces of natural selection? This evolutionary disadvantage is what led former Amherst College biologist Paul Ewald to argue that homosexuality might be caused by a virus - a pathogen most likely working in utero. That argument caused a stir when he and a colleague proposed it six years ago, but with no research done to test it, it remains just another theory. Other scientists have offered fascinating but unpersuasive explanations, most of them focusing on some kind of compensatory benefit, in the same way that the gene responsible for sickle cell anemia also protects against malaria. A study last year by researchers in Italy showed that female relatives of gay men tended to be more fertile, though, as critics point out, not nearly fertile enough to make up for the gay man's lack of offspring.
- Those same genes would work one way in heterosexual women and another way in homosexual men. The UCLA lab is examining how these genes might be turned "up" or "down." It's not a question of what genes you have, but rather which ones you use, says Bocklandt. "I have the genes in my body to make a vagina and carry a baby, but I don't use them, because I am a man." In studying the genes of gay sheep, for example, he's found some that are turned "way up" compared with the straight rams.

Jul

2011

Rationally Speaking: Economics should not be divorced from morality

Last week, our friend Massimo Pigliucci published an essay here in which he argued for an idea I have long thought to be true: that economic considerations cannot be divorced from moral ones. Here is the appropriate passage from Massimo’s article:
“I simply do not buy the fundamentalist (yes, I’m using the term on purpose) libertarian idea that economics is all there is or that should count in pretty much all human transactions and social problems. The hallmark of a just society is precisely that it does consider issues of intrinsic rights — not just to life and property, as the libertarians would have it — but also to health, education, housing and jobs. The whole point of living in a structured society, as opposed to Hobbes’ war of all against all, is so that our lives are not going to be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ Which means that what [Larry] Summers dismisses as ‘social concerns’ really ought to be central to the way we structure our societies. Economic systems ought to be the servants of human flourishing, not its masters.”

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...ould-not-be-divorced-from.html

- Preview

Paradigm Data Economics Reality Morality

people in several political camps, namely libertarianism and neoliberalism, disagree that economics is so closely linked with morality. They believe economics is a discussion about business and bottom-lines, not ethics. This divide is also present in political news coverage. Take this quote from Mark Caleb Smith, director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville University: “Economic issues always dwarf social issues. … [The 2012 election] is shaping up to be an economically driven election with a possibility of foreign affairs entering the discussion as well.” This is precisely how most news outlets and polling organizations frame pre-election public sentiments. How many times have you heard that “people are voting on the economy, not social issues, this election cycle"?
Yet, while economic issues are in some way different than social ones — in the same way that, say, economics and philosophy are two different fields — they are also undoubtedly intertwined at many levels. At the interpersonal level, business transactions hinge on a basic sense of morality. When you purchase something, you trust that your source of information (sales person, gas attendant, waiter/waitress, Amazon.com review) is being honest about the quality of the goods offered. You also expect a certain degree of performance from the product you are buying.
4 more annotation(s)...
- Morality is also present in larger economic debates. Consider the question “how can we create jobs?” At face value, there might be little in this question that concerns morality. It is simply about increasing the number of jobs available to human beings. But what if I answered that the way to create jobs is to eliminate the minimum wage? Or to loosen restrictions on workday hours and factory conditions? Or to lower the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy? Or to repeal last year’s health insurance reform package? These questions all contain a moral aspect as well. Would it be right to allow companies to pay their employees however little they can get away with? Would it be right to rescind worker safety laws? Would it be right to increase the tax burdens on the middle and lower classes and allow further disparity? Would it be right to repeal legislation that increases the availability of health care?
- at bottom, the question of “what is best for the economy” is really a question of “what should we want the economy to do or accomplish?” And that is a question not of pure mathematical reasoning, but of ethical contemplation.
- Michael, several of your contentions are ill formulated.
  First, there is no substantial difference between "economic" and "social": all economic facts are social facts, and economics is a social science.
  Second, there is no equivalence between "social" and "moral" issues. There are moral issues in all fields of knowledge, such as economics, medicine, genetics, and many more.
  Third, economics has moral issues, as have other disciplines, inasmuch as it is used to guide action. It is NOT about morals inasmuch as it remains in the realm of POSITIVE (as distinct from NORMATIVE) statements.
- That bioengineering knows the way to clone a human being (a positive piece of knowledge) just as it knows how to clone a sheep, does not mean that it is morally advisable to clone humans. Likewise, the positive acknowledgement that balancing the books in Greece requires curtailing its public spending by half in the coming three months and remain there thereafter for about 20 years (a positive statement) does not mean that it is morally advisable to proceed in such a way (political and not only moral considerations may advise otherwise).