WHAT’S YOUR OPINION OF KUHNs SoSR? (from James Santagata) (copied for archival p

WHAT’S YOUR OPINION OF KUHNs SoSR?

(from James Santagata) (copied for archival purposes)

GREAT QUESTION!

I think that he tried to complete popper’s program (despite poppers usual nonsense objections).

Popper basically showed us that science is a MORAL process, and that it was a process of removing error, bias, (and deceit) from free associations. This eliminated the problem of induction by saying that no method of discovery of a candidate association conveys truth in and of itself, only survival (darwinian knowledge) from criticism.

That as a moral process, science is conducted SOCIALLY like other moral processes. I expanded this to say that we can create legal tests of information (due diligence) just as we have for all other criteria, that warrant information just as we do goods and services. this is in fact how science is largely conducted today – but it is not how political speech is conducted today – and it should be.

Kuhn simply addresses the issue of scale, and he illustrated the resistance to innovation of entrenched programs because of scale – a sort of punctuated equilibrium of discovery similar to Gould’s. IN other words, scientific knowledge progresses like all other normative, traditional, and legal knowledge.

He is a precursor to Taleb’s attempt to discover the amount of information necessary to predict outliers.

He is a precursor to my attempt to predict the unit of intelligence necessary to determine a relation given n units of information.

So my view is that he was making very general statements – moral statements – but he was not, like popper, able to, as did hayek, transform their observations of constant relations of the hard sciences to the inconstant relations of the social sciences: particularly philosophy, sociology, economics, politics, and law.

That was my job it seems.