Comments on: Heidegger and Kuhn

By: Clark

Clark — Wed, 21 May 2008 01:57:57 +0000

Yeah, that's my view of Kuhn as well. As I recall he was rather influenced by the neo-Kantians so that probably explains a lot of that stance. And you're right, reading Kuhn's last works such as The Essential Tension is probably something everyone ought do immediately after reading Structure. If nothing else but to see that Kuhn recognizes the problems and equivocations within his use of "paradigm." The issue of internalism is interesting since I take Heidegger to be an externalist. I think some of Kuhn's issues are only issues given internalism.

By: Bryan Norwood

Bryan Norwood — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:52:35 +0000

Thanks for the comments!

I think you are right to draw the distinction between Heidegger and Kuhn on what the crisis period really is. For Kuhn, it is a time that scientists return to doing philosophy, but this is only in attempt to find a new paradigm to work from. Heidegger seems to want us to stay in the crisis period because it allows clearer access to Being.

I don’t think internalism or the social becomes a real problem for Kuhn unless we really expect a “world-out-there” to exist in specifics. It seems to me that the Kuhn of the “Structure” period wasn’t concerned with ontology in any more way than as a boundary-condition. The world beyond paradigms only functions to limit and bound paradigms (not in a bad way). Of course, he does take a lot of this back later on in his career.

By: Locklyn

Locklyn — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:29:57 +0000

This sounds a lot like Hegel and the way in which our experiences become universalized. In many of our experiences people become place holders and just become a universal. As a result we lose our experience with them as particular beings. I think that unfortunately this occurs within our familial relationships all too often. People lose the ability to see the particularity of their wife or husband, because they have universalized all of their characteristics and the mind becomes desensitized to the experience of ones spouse. However, I think that either through a crisis or through reflection one may once again experience the particularity of an individual, as the post argues,

“It’s only when something goes wrong that they notice it. Now of course some can think through these issues independent of a failure.”

Regardless or who these ideas are related to it seems the mind has an innate ability and desire to summarize and universalize objects in the world. However, as quickly as this universalization occurs, or they are reduced to some mathematical projection, we lose the ability to see these objects for what they are, and it seems that this ability is lost until a crisis occurs or a point of reflection. Meditation also is used as a tool to reverse this process of universalization. All of this discussion also reminds me of Shklovsky Ostrananie (or defamiliarization) were the author responsibility is to make the rocks rocky again.