Originally Posted by shugh

I am a graduate film student at University of Southern California putting together a documentary film on alternative science theories and the response from the mainstream science community.

Originally Posted by shugh

I'm doing a part of my doc on the careers of Nikola Tesla and Immanuel Velikovsky. Science history seem to regard these men with a certain myth-making respect, radical scientists who were later vindicated, men ahead of their times.

::snip::

I would like to be as open in my film as possible to both sides of the argument, if there are even two sides of the argument on this case...

Originally Posted by shugh

I'm doing a part of my doc on the careers of Nikola Tesla and Immanuel Velikovsky. Science history seem to regard these men with a certain myth-making respect, radical scientists who were later vindicated, men ahead of their times.

Originally Posted by shugh

I am looking for well-informed, science oriented subjects who are either proponents or opponents of radical science.

Originally Posted by shugh

Your analogy of science as the supreme court is a good one.

Originally Posted by shugh

I'm doing a part of my doc on the careers of Nikola Tesla and Immanuel Velikovsky. Science history seem to regard these men with a certain myth-making respect, radical scientists who were later vindicated, men ahead of their times.

Originally Posted by shugh

I want to investigate whether it is possible to be ahead of the times in science...

Originally Posted by shugh

Does science always "rule" in favor of the "truth"

Originally Posted by shugh

...what does "winning theories" mean...

Originally Posted by shugh

I would like to be as open in my film as possible to both sides of the argument, if there are even two sides of the argument on this case...

Originally Posted by shugh

You're asking the exact same questions I'm interested in pursuing in my film. I don't come from a science background, but took some classes in my undergraduate years at Yale, specifically on fractals and astronomy. Although I am an amateur science buff, I've always been fascinated with the dissemination of information in the scientific community and how science history is written.

Originally Posted by Byrd

Ahhh, this tiptoes into MY field! I'm a graduate student in anthropology and am interested in the same thing (doing preliminary research on the spread of information in internet societies... will do a poster presentation on this at AIAA this spring in Dallas)... One difference between Europe and America is the culture of personality and the impact of personalities... it really depends on the culture that the information is inserted into.

Originally Posted by Scientific American's Chet Raymo, Stonehill College, Massachusetts

Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) is known best, and almost exclusively, for a slim volume published in 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The book is widely acclaimed to be the most influential academic work of the second half of the 20th century. It has sold nearly a million copies and has been translated into 20 languages. With undiminished regularity, it is cited by scholars in fields as diverse as political science and art history. Al Gore has mentioned Structure as his favorite book.

I read Structure in 1964, in its first paper edition, and like many of my scientific cohort I was much taken by Kuhn's analysis of science. To be sure, the sources of Kuhn's thought were in the air at the time: Piaget's work on how children acquire knowledge, Whorf's studies of language and worldviews, Gestalt psychology, Koyré's groundbreaking interpretations of the history of science, and so on. It was a heady time to be thinking about the history and philosophy of science, and Kuhn plugged into the prevailing culture with uncanny precision.

According to Kuhn, the authority of science resides in the community of scientists practicing what he called "normal science." Normal science is defined by a "paradigm," a kind of shared worldview, or, as Kuhn described it, "universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners." Within normal science, anomalies are generally ignored. Eventually, however, difficulties within a paradigm become unsustainable, and a revolution occurs. A new paradigm is established, incorporating social and cultural influences of the time, and work goes on.

What Kuhn had going for him (or against him) was a dazzlingly simple schematic (with that magic word "paradigm") embedded in an inchoate epistemic stew. This made him easy to latch onto by almost anyone, regardless of philosophical or political predilections. Indeed, Kuhn has been taken to heart by scholars espousing almost directly opposite views about the nature of science. Combatants on both sides of the infamous "science wars" between scientists and sociologist critics of science regularly use Kuhn to buttress their respective positions or whack each other over the head.

Now along comes Steve Fuller to put Kuhn into a historic and philosophical context and to excoriate Structure for its presumed baleful influence on the authority and practice of science. Fuller is an American sociologist, currently professor at the University of Warwick, formerly of the University of Durham. His prolonged British residence is evidenced in the scrappy, iconoclastic, take-on-all-comers spirit of his work (one can find Fuller giving and taking his licks in the Internet lists). Nothing here of the sometimes wearisome pomposity of American academics who inhabit that obfuscated discipline called science studies.

Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times is a heavily footnoted and almost impenetrably dense insider's account of 20th-century sociology of knowledge. Fuller marshals an astonishingly detailed grasp of recent intellectual history to argue that science as we know it has outlived its usefulness. [Well, science as Kuhn knew it, anyway.] The paradigms of normal science are not the ideal form of science, he says, but rather "an arrested social movement in which the natural spread of knowledge is captured by a community that gains relative advantage by forcing other communities to rely on its expertise to get what they want." [I don't know of any scientists with such an agenda.]

Fuller is especially effective at reconstructing the debates between Ernst Mach and Max Planck about the nature of science at the beginning of the 20th century, which he takes as emblematic of all such debates since. In Fuller's dichotomous scheme, Mach championed an instrumentalist philosophy of science; Planck was a realist. Mach lodged science in everyday psychological experience; Planck reduced everyday experience to the ultimate constituents of physics. Mach exalted technology; Planck promoted abstract problem solving. Mach was the liberal democrat, intent on empowering "citizen scientists"; Planck was the state corporatist, who thought ordinary folks had no claim on "real" science.

Kuhn is squarely on the side of Planck, Fuller says. The paradigms of normal science, Fuller goes on to assert, confer a phony legitimacy and autonomy on scientific practice. Alternative versions of the "truth" are delegitimized, and establishment science (with its consumerist-military alliances) becomes the only game in town. Young scientists are acculturated within the paradigm and spend the rest of their careers tweaking theories. Dissent is frowned upon. The real problems of society are ignored in the pursuit of the next decimal place. [I think this rather overplays the point.]

Fuller, of course, comes down on the side of Mach, espousing a vaguely defined "citizen science." His democratizing instincts are admirable, but as he storms the Bastille of normal science he will find himself in the teeming company of those who believe in creationism, alien abductions, parapsychology and other nonparadigmatic citizen sciences. He does not seem to cringe at the prospect of postestablishment intellectual anarchy. [Oh, please! Raymo goes WAY over the edge here!]

Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers. [Not sure why Raymo lost it so bad here. (?)]

Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it. [So Raymo is FOR the military-industrial complex's complete hijacking of science?]

At the same time, it would behoove scientists to pay close attention to Steve Fuller's sprawling, brawling and gloriously provocative book. He is perhaps more friend than enemy, and by nipping at our heels he reminds us that science might in fact do a better job serving a socially and ecologically responsible agenda, empowering citizen science-kibitzers to live purposefully and with exalted spirit in the science-revealed world of galaxies and DNA. [Well, that's a little better. ;^)]

Originally Posted by Bryce Christensen, American Library Association

The resonance of the phrase "paradigm shift" amply testifies to the profound influence of Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). For Fuller, that influence cannot end soon enough. Fuller accuses Kuhn of succumbing to cold war ideology in constructing a myth of scientific autonomy that shielded American science from public scrutiny while cutting its practitioners loose from their historical moorings. Worse, the wide acceptance of Kuhn's misleading schema has caused scholars in all kinds of fields to distort their disciplines in order to imitate the paradigm-governed sciences enshrined in Structure. Kuhn's logic has also paralyzed philosophers, who have surrendered their traditional prerogative of evaluating the objectives and social effects of science, and has justified an ever-narrower specialization in which researchers do not even attempt to communicate with one another. The time has come, Fuller urges, to end this cultural pathology. Hearkening back to the views of Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, Fuller calls for a new "citizen science" in which science serves the dynamic and openly debated interests of democracy, not the recondite demands of a static paradigm. A brilliant analysis deserving as wide a readership as the acclaimed book it critiques.

Originally Posted by Book News

A critical examination of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that argues that Kuhn was blind to his own historicity and his account of the scientific method suffered thereby. After exploring the Cold War influences on Kuhn and his book's reception in academic circles, Fuller (sociology, U. of Warwick) reverses Kuhn's argument in suggesting that scientific paradigms should be seen not as the ideal form of scientific inquiry, but rather as an arrested social movement in which the natural spread of knowledge is captured by a community that gains relative advantage by forcing other communities to rely on its expertise to get what they want.

Originally Posted by Byrd

As to why some are popularized, it really depends on the culture that the information is inserted into. I remember when Velikovsky's books came out in the late 60's and early 70's, and because the climate was one of "expand the consciousness" and so forth, they gained wider acceptance than they would have if they'd come out in the 1950's.

They died back with the rise of the sciences in the 1970's... lately, with the milennium hysteria, the y2K hysterian, the religious hysteria and the denial of science (and problems in the education system) AND the rise of Internet and the changing of the Hero myth, we see these things resurface. I think it's because our Hero myth has gone astray. We would all like to be heroes but we don't recognize what it takes to be a hero. So many dream of the Earth gone awry and destruction all around and themselves emerging as the Champion of the People.

(at least, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it!)

Does science always "rule" in favor of the "truth" - what does "winning theories" mean.

Originally Posted by milli360

Another fine theory brought down by mundane facts! Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision was published in 1950. The (sympathetic) link says it was the number one bestseller in the nation.

Originally Posted by Byrd

Ah. Before my time. I remember the hoopla when it came out in the 70's... it seemed like most people read it and a lot believed it back then.