Tuesday, June 19, 2012

My (chilled down) question would be, have you read Thomas Kuhn?  I don't mean you should have, but the comment you made about Kuhn -- and I'm sure that he has his critics -- has nothing to do with what I took from Thomas Kuhn, which was that we see reality through wholistic paradigms, knowledge systems have a certain tautological quality (paradigms) and have to filter out what conflicts with their assumptions.
 
His book was seen as undermining the idea of science as gradualistically progressive and cumulative, and totally different in nature from and superior to other knowledge systems.
 
He argues that we always have to have a system of selecting what counts as real, what questions can be asked, what methods can be used.  There is no such thing as working without reducing and keeping things out of your perceptual system.  Then he talks about how paradigms are defensive, and collapse when anomalies become unavoidable.  Kuhn is writing as much about psychology as anything else.
 
I'm not critcizing your comment, just saying I have no idea what it's referring to in terms of how Kuhn provided a way of seeing things to me.
 
I unsuccessfully tried to persuade Ted to read it. I'm not trying to say you should read it, but that I think it's to me it is a breakthrough kind of book that comes to mind for me over and over since I read it.

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