Abstract
Incommensurability was Kuhn’s worst mistake. If it is to be found anywhere in science, it would be in physics. But revolutions in theoretical physics all embody theoretical unification. Far from obliterating the idea that there is a persisting theoretical idea in physics, revolutions do just the opposite: they all actually exemplify the persisting idea of underlying unity. Furthermore, persistent acceptance of unifying theories in physics when empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted means that physics makes a persistent implicit assumption concerning unity. To put it in Kuhnian terms, underlying unity is a paradigm for paradigms. We need a conception of science which represents problematic assumptions concerning the physical comprehensibility and knowability of the universe in the form of a hierarchy, these assumptions becoming less and less substantial and more and more such that their truth is required for science, or the pursuit of knowledge, to be possible at all, as one goes up the hierarchy. This hierarchical conception of science has important Kuhnian features, but also differs dramatically from the view Kuhn expounds in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this paper, I compare and contrast these two views in a much more detailed way than has been done hitherto. I show how the hierarchical view can be construed to emerge from Kuhn’s view as it is modified to overcome objections. I argue that the hierarchical conception of science is to be preferred to Kuhn’s view.
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Notes
See Williams (1965, 257–269).
In his work after Structure on incommensurability, Kuhn continued to ignore Faraday’s solution to the problem: see Kuhn (2000). In what follows I concentrate on what Kuhn says in Structure, because this seems to me to be so much more striking, important and influential than his later work on incommensurability.
An assessment may, of course, be objective without being decisive.
Kuhn (1970, 170). We can take it that Kuhn is not concerned, here, with the problem of verisimilitude—the problem of what it means to say of two false theories that one is closer to the truth than the other. His concern, rather, is that we cannot ever know of two paradigms that one is closer to the truth than the other—as the context makes clear.
This is because physics is the fundamental natural science. A revolution in any other science—astronomy, chemistry, or geology—can exploit theoretical knowledge from a more fundamental science that persists throughout the revolution.
Maxwell (1998, 181).
See Feynman et al. (1965, ch. 25, 10–11).
Strategies for concocting empirically more successful disunified rivals to accepted theories are discussed in Maxwell (1974, 1998, 47–54, 2004a, 10–11, 2013). These empirically more successful theories are disunified in the two or three most drastic of the eight kinds of disunity indicated in the previous section.
Many imprecise disunified theories will be true even in a universe that is perfectly physically comprehensible, in that the true physical “theory of everything”, T, is unified. In such a universe, T implies any number of distinct, imprecise theories applicable to restricted ranges of phenomena. True disunified (but imprecise) theories can be arrived at by conjoining two or more such true distinct theories.
Throughout, by “metaphysical” I mean “empirically untestable”.
In terms of the account of theoretical unity of the previous section, we require that the true “theory of everything” is unified in all eight ways, with N = 1 in each case.
This asserts that the universe is such that the true “theory of everything” can be formulated in terms of a unified Lagrangian (or Lagrangian density), with a single physical interpretation, and with a group structure which is such that it is not the product of sub-groups: see Maxwell (1998, 88–89).
Maxwell (1998, 21–23, 2002, section 6). Others have argued that metaphysical presuppositions of science need to be acknowledged in order to solve the problem of induction: see, for example, Russell (1948, part VI) and Burks (1977, ch. 10). But these authors fail to stress, as AOE does, that precisely because these presuppositions are substantial, influential, and purely conjectural, they need to be subjected to sustained criticism and attempted improvement, a new methodology being required to do this.
For details, see works referred to in note 15.
See Maxwell (2004a, 34–51).
Granted standard empiricism, physics advancing from one false theory to another poses a serious threat to the view that physics makes theoretical progress across revolutions. That physics does seem to advance in this way has even been dubbed “the pessimistic induction”: see Newton-Smith (1981, 41). Granted AOE, however, this is precisely the way theoretical physics must advance if it is to make progress, step by step, towards capturing physicalism in a true, unified, testable physical “theory of everything”: see Maxwell (2007, ch. 14, section 5); see also Maxwell (1998, 211–212).
Misunderstood because it was not appreciated that the three of these four rules that concern simplicity or unity make metaphysical presuppositions—as Newton himself made clear: see Newton (1962, 398–400).
Maxwell (1993a, 275–305).
For an excellent non-technical account of superstring theory see Greene (1999).
For some reservations concerning the claim that superstring theory puts AOE into practice, see Maxwell (2004a, 36–37 and 197–198).
Many physicists object to superstring theory on the grounds that it has made no successful empirical predictions and thus is not science at all—thereby revealing their allegiance to standard empiricism. For criticisms of superstring theory for its lack of empirical success, and on other grounds, see Greene (1999, ch. 9) and Smolin (2000, 159–162).
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Maxwell, N. Unification and Revolution: A Paradigm for Paradigms. J Gen Philos Sci 45, 133–149 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-013-9225-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-013-9225-5