"And then there’s Kuhn’s philosophical concept – the incommensurability of meaning - ...."

A claim in one of Eroll Morris's footnotes bugged me, specifically the bit I made my title.

Using Google Books, here are the things Kuhn calls "incommensurable" in "Structure" (with the page numbers in parentheses): ways of seeing the world (4), traditions (103), "the world of his research" (112), traditions (148), paradigms (150), solutions to problems (165), viewpoints (175), theories (not said in his own voice -- this is part of a view philosophers have attributed to him) (198). viewpoints (200). Here are things of whose "incommensurability" he speaks: traditions (148), standards (149), paradigms (150), paradigms (157).

Not in the book: "incommensurability of meaning".

In the collection "The Road Since Structure", we find the following called "incommensurable": theories (34) the hypotenuse and side of an isosceles right triangle (35), the circumference and radius of a circle (35), theories (36, twice), terms (36 -- he does mention "the meanings of incommensurable terms" here), "parts of an older scientific vocabulary" (53), portions of French and English vocabularies (56), points of view (124), theories (163), theories (164), theories (189), the hypotenuse and side of an isosceles right triangle (189), theories (204).

Not in the book: "incommensurable meanings".

"Incommensurability" shows up 50 times, says Google Books, and this doesn't count repeated hits on a single page. Often it's occurring without being clearly "of" anything in the immediately context, where it's something like a watchword for Kuhn's ideas about the history of science broadly. Where it does seem clear to me that the text allows for a citation of what "incommensurability" is of or between, I get these results, tabulated by page first now:

34: theories

36: theories, a local claim "about language, about meaning change" (this is introduced with "insofar as incommensurability was a claim about...").

49: natural languages

60: theories

97: theories

188: pairs of theories

189: theories

And here are some passages that seem especially relevant:

p. 34, footnote 2: "Both Feyerabend and I wrote of the impossibility of defining the terms of one theory on the basis of terms of the other. But he restricted incommensurability to language; I spoke also of differences in "methods, problem-field, and standards of solution" (Structure, 2nd end., p. 103), something I would no longer do except to the considerable extent that the latter differences are necessary consequences of the language-learning process." (He notes in footnote 1 on the previous page that Feyerabend and he had arrived at the metaphor independently at around the same time.)

p.36 : "'meaning' is not the rubric under which incommensurability is best discussed."

p. 93: "Incommensurability thus becomes a sort of untranslatability, localized to one or another area in which two lexical taxonomies differ."

p. 309 (the final interview): "...but it struck me very forcefully that all of them entirely dropped the problem of meaning when they made that [historicist] turn, and that they therefore dropped incommensurability...."

p. 237-8: "In Structure I spoke of meaning change as a characteristic feature of scientific revolutions; later, as I increasingly identified incommensurability with difference of meaning, I repeatedly referred to the difficulties of translation. But I was then torn, usually without quite realizing it, between my sense that translation between an old theory and a new one was possible and my competing sense that it was not.... I was wrong to speak of translation. What I described, I now realize, was language learning, a process that need not, and ordinarily does not, make full translation possible."

So, Kuhn usually speaks of the incommensurability of theories. He used the term more widely in "Structure", and never for anything narrowly linguistic. Post-"Structure" he does emphasize language more, but he realizes before too long that meaning is not the aspect of language that matters most for his purposes. That's not the way to frame the problem, if he's to make any progress.

But, Morris is no innovator, as Googling "incommensurability of meaning" easily shows. I did like that Reed & Sharrock put that phrase in the mouth of their "mainstream critic" of Kuhn. And it is still nice to see some real philosophy discussed in the NYT, and Morris is a fine writer. But what bugs me bugs me. And I'm not even touching the "relativism" rubbish. Or the straight-up depressing fourth part, where Morris misses that the thing about the two Kuhns is a joke. (Kuhn notes, immediately following the bit Morris quotes, that he "lacks the wit to further develop the fantasy" and so drops the gag. Morris's misreading is so striking that I suspect it's genuinely out of malice. I can't even bring myself to care about the absurd charge that Wittgenstein is a relativist, at the end of the piece, due to how sad that opening is.)

Also, the entire third part of Morris's series is ridiculous: Kuhn never says anything about getting his metaphor from the legend of Hippasus. He gets it from the boring mathematical fact: You can't say what the square root of two is if you're limited to expressing numbers as ratios of whole numbers. To talk about the square root of two, you need to learn a new way of thinking about numbers. And once you have, you still can't express the square root of two as a ratio of whole numbers. I don't see how he missed this. It's not a complex metaphor. But the imaginative fiction he weaves to suggest "that Kuhn’s entire theory of scientific change might be an imaginative fiction" does make for a more gripping yarn than something about irrational numbers.

A Kuhn Quote

From "Dubbing and Redubbing":

Clearly, however, only a certain number of examples [used to introduce Newtonian mechanics to students] may be altered piecemeal in this way. If too many require adjustment, then it is no longer individual laws or generalizations that are at stake, but the very vocabulary in which they are stated. A threat to that vocabulary is, however, a threat also to the theory or laws essential to its acquisition and use. Could Newtonian mechanics withstand revision of the second law, of the third law, of Hooke's law, or the law of gravity? Could it withstand the revision of any two of these, of three, or of all four? These are not questions that individually have yes or no answers. Rather, like Wittgenstein's "Could one play chess without the queen?", they suggest the strains placed on a lexicon confronted by questions that its designer, whether God or cognitive evolution, did not anticipate its being required to answer. What should one have said when confronted by an egg-laying creature that suckles its young? Is it a mammal or is it not? These are the circumstances in which, as Austin put it, "We don't know what to say. Words literally fail us." Such circumstances, if they endure for long, call forth a locally different lexicon, one that permits an answer, but to a slightly altered question: "Yes, the creature is a mammal" (but to be a mammal is not what it was before). The new lexicon opens new possibilities, ones that could not have been stipulated by the use of the old.

And a footnote about that Wittgenstein quote, in case it didn't seem familiar:

Twenty-five years ago the quotation was a standard part of what I now discover was a merely oral tradition. Though clearly "Wittgensteinian," it is not to be found in any of Wittgenstein's published writings. I preserve it here because of its recurrent role in my own philosophical development and becuase I've found no published substitute that so clearly prohibits the reponse that the question might be answerable if only there were more information.

This amuses me in particular because of Haugeland's fondness for chess examples. He seems pretty firmly committed to answering Witt with a "No!" -- which makes it interesting that Kuhn [correctly] thinks that there not being an answer is the whole point, given that Haugeland is one of Kuhn's executors.

edit: I have begun to twitter

Kuhn and Putnam/Kripke Essentialism

From Rupert Read & Wes Sharrock's "Thomas Kuhn's Misunderstood Relation to Kripke-Putnam Essentialism":

It is only given our post-Lavoisieric framework that we are forced to see water as largely H2O. Absent that framework, ‘water’-in-all-its-states is not necessarily viewed as a natural kind (as the quotes above from Kuhn make clear: liquidity was regarded as an essential property of water [in the 1750s]) – and still less is H2O. Kuhn is bringing talk of possible worlds, one might say (paraphrasing Wittgenstein), back from its metaphysical to a more everyday (i.e. everyday scientific) use. A taxonomy supplies a ‘set’ of possible worlds between which normal science goes on to choose. If something really threatens the taxonomy, we (imagining ourselves now into the position of scientists actually confronted by such an anomaly) cannot retreat to philosophers’ assurances about what all possible worlds must turn out to be like. Rather, sometimes, we must face the need to uproot fundamental assumptions about the set of possible worlds available to us and enabled for us by our taxonomy, our ‘ontology’, our thought-style.

Redubbing is then at least as important as dubbing; and, of course, in concert with Kuhn’s reasoned scepticism as to ‘Correspondencism’: progress through revolutions is not well-described as bringing us taxonomies which themselves come closer and closer to matching the universe’s ‘own’ taxonomy.

This sounds like a Kuhn much more to my taste than I found in "Structure"; I need to read Kuhn's later stuff some day. Though I'm not quite sure what a "taxonomy" is; it seems it can't just be a vocabulary if it carries with it "assumptions", but it's clearly supposed to be something more like a vocabulary than like a set of beliefs, or else the name (and all of the talk of "failures of translation") seems quite strange. Maybe the "assumptions" here are supposed to be analytic truths; but then it looks strange that they can need revising when things get rough. Though perhaps I'm wrong that Kuhn thinks they can need revising; perhaps it's just a fact that we do revise them. It's not that a taxonomy starts to look confused so much as that whatever taxonomy you use will end up looking shaggy after repeated use. So you get a new one, which isn't better, just new. Kuhn then ends up looking weirdly Carnapian. This seems like it can't be right.

The picture seems to be that a "taxonomy" involves assumptions about how the world might be, and it's these assumptions (inter alia) which provide a set of possible worlds that normal science tries to whittle down to a singleton. And then when that inevitably falls apart, a different taxonomy is adopted. And I think Kuhn does hold it to be inevitable; this seems to be why he denies that change of paradigms is progressive. You cease to be bothered by certain anomalies in normal science; this is the progress made by changing paradigms. But there will always be more anomalies elsewhere which previous paradigms didn't have to worry about (because they didn't come up). (I may be misremembering "Structure" here; I can't remember if he allowed a sense in which revolutions meant progress. Skimming the last chapter suggests he didn't.) Maybe it is a sort of ersatz Carnapianism, then. Hmm. Have to read more about this.

Read's article is a good counter to the "'Water' is a rigid designator, so it was never an element" line that people seem to take as decisive against Kuhn, though. This other article of his is pretty decent, too; he wants to stump for a version of "incommensurability" which is "non-semantic", but involves something related; he opens with Wittgenstein's bit about someone who "believed in the Last Judgement" and how his disagreement with the believer "would not show up at all in any explanation of the meaning" of their words. Incidentally, Jason Bridges's paper "Wittgenstein and Contextualism" (which has very little about Wittgenstein) closes with this quote, to make the point that "meaning" and "point" (in the Charles Travis sense, that the meaning of an utterance is heavily tied to our particular point in making it) are not the same thing. Getting clear on what's at stake in saying that something is or is not a matter of meaning seems potentially fruitful. It seems to be something different for Bridges and for Read.

Brief notes on various things

I am pretty satisfied with this comment on my previous post.

Paul Redding's "Hegel and Piercean Abduction" (European Journal of Philosophy 22:3) hits a lot of interesting material. It's mostly about the German Idealists' conceptions of the logical structure of judgements and the intuition/concept distinction. Redding, following Brandom, claims that the Idealists adopted an inferentialist approach to conceptual content. Hegel's opposition to Kant's distinction between intuitions (as singular representations) and concepts (as general representations) is shown to flow from his commitment to the notion that empirical judgements have their conceptual content because of their inferential relations; this is related to Hegel's treatment of the syllogism as "the truth of judgement". Empirical judgements are shown to have "syllogistic" structures, with concepts figuring variously as singular, as particular, and as universal, rather than (as on the Kantian account) being combinations of concepts with non-conceptual intuitions. This is related to the Romantic emphases on the authority of "feeling" and of the natural as normative, and Hegel's rejection of both of these, by way of Hegel's treatment of aesthetic judgements as the paradigm of judgements in general. There's also an extended discussion of Pierce's appropriation of Aristotle's syllogistic logic, and a few other lines of thought, all in fourteen pages. It'd be nice to have a more extended treatment of pretty much everything Redding mentions, but what's here is quite nice.

John Divers's "Quinean Skepticism about de re Modality after David Lewis" (European Journal of Philosophy 15:1) is a very nice discussion of Quine's "Reference and Modality", Lewis's response to it, Lewis's use of "On What There Is" to motivate his modal realism, and possible motivations for continued "Quinean" skepticism about de re modalities after all of this is taken into consideration. In the audio interview with Burton Dreben, Quine claims that he rejects Lewisian defenses of de re modality because they are ontologically profligate; "possible worlds" are too high a price to pay to be able to make sense of modal operators. Divers does a good job of showing how this sort of response is in tension with Quine's mathematical platonism: Quine is already willing to allow for unaesthetic extensions to his "desert landscape" ontology to accommodate number-talk, so it's not clear why he can refuse to do the same with modal-talk. Divers ends up offering a suggestion as to how de re modal-talk might still be resisted: Insist that de re modal-talk hasn't been shown to serve any useful purpose, and so there's no immediate reason why we should bother trying to make accomodations for it, rather than just dropping it altogether. I suspect that at least a partial response to this demand might be made by way of the Brandomian-Sellarsian notion that "the language of modality is a transposed language of norms", but this sort of answer would show as unmotivated many "metaphysical" uses of de re modal-talk -- there's no need for a theory of counterparts if "A is necessarily p" and "B is possibly q" can be fully cached out in terms of what moves are and aren't allowed in a language-game.

Haugeland's "The Intentionality All-Stars" (Philosophical Perspectives, volume 4, 1990 pp.383-427) has the best meta-philosophy joke ever. I won't spoil it. The article is good apart from that joke, too.

Huwe Price's Metaphysics After Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks?" is, as the title suggests, a discussion of the queer fact that metaphysics is alive and well nowadays, after so many attempts to kill it. Price focuses on the role Quine's "On What There Is" has (purportedly) played in the rehabilitation of metaphysics, with an eye to reversing the trend. Price notes that appeal to a supposed Quine-Putnam "argument from indispensability" plays a central role in debates about "modal realism", and offers a rebuttal to it: Refusing to either give or deny an "ontological" ground for our mathematical practices is not "intellectually dishonest" in the way Quine claims. Ironically, Putnam himself opposes the argument attributed to him in a variety of places; he thinks the Quinean insistence on a univocal reading of the quantifier is absurd, and so is mathematical platonism.

Price's "One Cheer for Representationalism" is slated to appear in the "Library of Living [sic] Philosophers" volume on Rorty, which is currently in development. Rorty plays almost no role in the paper. It is mostly about Brandom and Blackburn's "quasi-realism", which Price expands to a "global expressivism", as he has previously urged in other places. (Link has powerpoint slides and audio, for maximal "I-don't-feel-like-reading-this"-ness!) Price seems to me to recoil too far away from representation-talk, just as Rorty did, so perhaps the essay is not as inappropriate as it initially seems. Price only wants to rehabilitate talk of "representations" in an expressivist manner, but I can't see any motivation for stopping there, beyond a "naturalism" which makes the causal world seem "sparse" rather than "rich". I don't know how Price reconciles a global expressivism with this scientism; if no language plays the role of "representing how things are", then why are we supposed to take "our best current science" as somehow giving us a picture of "the causal order"? Why are we supposed to think there's any sense to talking about "the" causal order at all?

I have read in various places that Wiggins was influential for both Davidson and McDowell, so I looked him up on JStor. So far all I've read is "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time", because it was only six pages long, and some book reviews. I can already sense why Wiggins might've been a cool dude. A quote from "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time", p.92:

If it is a materialistic thesis that T = W [where T=a tree, W=the cellulose molecules that compose the tree], then my denial that T = W is a form of denial of materialism. It is interesting how very uninteresting an obstacle these Leibnizian difficulties-real though they are-put in the way of the reduction of botany and all its primitive terms to organic chemistry or to physics. (If it does not follow from T != W that trees are something over and above their matter, how much the less can it follow that they are immanent or transcendent or supervenient or immaterial beings. This is obviously absurd for trees. A Leibnizian disproof of strict identity could never be enough to show something so intriguing or obscure.) I should expect there to be equally valid, and from the point of view of ontology almost equally unexciting, difficulties in the reduction of persons to flesh and bones, in psychophysical event-materialism, and in the materialisms which one might formulate in other categories (such as the Aristotelian categories property and state or the categories situation and fact). Over and above is one question, identity is another. But of course the only stuff there is is stuff.

That's a pretty elegant way to avoid a bunch of ontological claims that I want to avoid. Is there some particular piece of Wiggins's I need to hunt down ASAP?

I read Derrida's "Signature Event Context"at Barnes&Noble. It was collected along with "limited ink abc...", an afterword where Derrida responded to some criticisms of "limited ink abc...", and a summary of Searle's article; apparently he wouldn't agree to having it reprinted in between the Derrida articles. Derrida's style still strikes me as the opposite of pleasant, but 'd' in "limited ink abc..." was pretty funny. Somewhere partway through 'e' I skipped to the afterword, where (paraphrasing since I didn't buy the book) Derrida is asked if he doesn't assume that concepts must have "rigid" rules for application, such that something is always "A or not-A" (vague or not vague, communicable or not communicable, etc.; he runs through a big list of them). Derrida answers in the affirmative: He does think concepts must be "rigid" in this way, so that one must always say, with the tradition, that (and here he runs through a whole slew of "A or not-A" phrases that I want not to affirm). I am now confident that I'll be fine not reading anything else Derrida wrote. Rorty's "Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition" left me with the strong impression that Rorty only praised Derrida so highly because of his style, and I am now convinced that this is how it is. As a philosopher, Derrida does not seem to have much to recommend him -- he is too caught up with dead projects.

Cavell would be easier to get into if he wasn't so damned erudite. Stop tying your philosophical points in to plays I haven't seen and novels I haven't read, dagnabit!

McDowell has an essay linked here which I can't recall anyone having linked to: "Why Is It Called "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"?", which is a reading of Sellars as an empiricist, contra Brandom. I still haven't read Brandom's "study guide", and I'm now inclined to keep putting it off; McDowell's reading of Sellars strikes me as so obviously correct that I don't know how Brandom could read it otherwise. (I am of course aware that it is uncharitable to think Brandom is ever writing on something other than his own project. But Brandom's claim to be a Sellarsian is rather more forceful than his claim to be a Hegelian or Kantian, so a misreading here is more irksome.)

I'm slowly getting through "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The end of Chapter X left me still wondering why Kuhn thinks it's worthwhile to talk of scientists as "operating in different worlds" rather than just "doing different things" or "seeing things differently". Why the "swinging stone" could not have been seen as the same thing by both Aristotelians and Galileans is unclear to me -- the Aristotelians cannot see it as a pendulum, and the Galileans cannot see it as an object which by nature moves "down", but why can't both see it as a swinging stone? Doesn't Kuhn's presentation of the matter actually require this? Doesn't this leave "different worlds"-talk looking too strong? (A more detailed discussion of Kuhn's account would be needed to flesh this out, I realize.)

I suspect that this is tied to a passage that struck me as bizarre: speaking of the duckrabbit picture beloved of gestalt psychology (and the second part of Philosophical Investigations), Kuhn notes that a subject might eventually come to see the picture as neither duck nor rabbit, but as "lines on paper", "and he may then say (what he could not have legitimately said earlier) that it is these lines which he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit." (p.114 in the third edition) -- Isn't it just as legitimate for him to say that he sees the picture of a duck (or of a rabbit) as "mere lines"? I don't get what "really sees" means here. Surely he sees the ink on the paper (or pixels on a screen) as lines; then it is really the ink (or the pixels) that he sees! But both of these strike me as absurd -- the duckrabbit isn't "really" ink or lines or a duck or a rabbit, though it can be seen as all of these. There isn't anything it "really" is, behind all the aspects that one can perceive. The aspects one sees are what it "really is", in the only sense in which it "really is" anything at all. It's not as if the duck-aspect disappears when we don't see it; if someone (at first) can only see the rabbit, or can't see either picture (as happens with some of the worse gestalt images), then it isn't the case that the aspects have yet to come into being (after all, other people might be able to see them already). The fellow simply hasn't noticed them yet. So "perspectival aspects" seem as real as anything has claim to be.

Kuhn claims that the absence of an "external standard" in duckrabbit-like cases distinguishes simple gestalt shifts from scientific revolutions. If the "seeing lines as such-and-such" approach was supposed to be this "external standard", then scientific revolutions seem to revert to "simple" gestalt phenomena if that line was unintelligible. I want to say: One could view phenomena as they were conceived under an obsolete paradigm, it's simply (exceedingly) inconvenient scientifically, and suicidal professionally, for any given scientist to do so. In fact, it's not clear to me why one can't always go back to "pre-paradigm science" talk, if one doesn't mind giving up huge amounts of utility -- one can always talk in terms of "that thingy over there" and "that other thingy", if nothing else. It's liable to be confusing and there's no reason anyone would ever want to do this, but I don't see that it would somehow fail to "get a grip" on the world discussed by our best paradigm-enabled science. There's an awful lot you won't be able to discuss profitably, but what you can talk about, you can talk about. Similarly, I don't see why anything other than psychological limitations prohibit a scientist from working with multiple incompatible paradigms, at different points in time, and suspect that there have been such individuals. Which seems to sap Kuhn of some of his philosophical interest.

Kuhn seems so focused on the theory-ladenness of observation (not his term) that he ignores how much conflicting paradigms can have in common. For instance, both the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems (and our modern systems of astronomy) agree that there are visible stars at some distance from us. There are many other theoretical commitments which incompatible paradigms do not share in common, but they aren't entirely exclusive of one another. There's no "core" of observational data that all theories share among themselves, nor any definite set of observation sentences which are independent of all paradigms. And perhaps there are not sentences shared by all paradigms, since the "is common to these two paradigms" relation needn't be transitive. But I don't see why one can't grant all of this, which seems to be what Kuhn is actually interested in convincing us of, without going to some of the rhetorical extremes that Kuhn does.

But, like I said in an earlier post, I should probably finish the book before thinking about it too much.

And finally, because I do not think I have posted enough random pictures recently: Cirno.

She is the strongest!

On the very idea of blegging for a paper

Forster has a paper titled "On the Very Idea of Denying the Existence of Radically Different Conceptual Schemes" (Inquiry, Volume 41, Issue 2 June 1998 , pages 133 – 185). I would like to read it, but my UT library account is unable to hook me up with a copy; this isn't the first time something's been published in Inquiry which I should like to read, but am not able to.

It has occurred to me that talk of "different conceptual schemes" can be harmless, if sundered from the scheme-content dualism. If two different people (or groups, or cultures) act differently enough, then there's no reason to deny that they get around in the world in different ways, that they conceive of things differently -- that they have different concepts. Rejection of the scheme-content dualism in no way prohibits this; the problem lies not in "conceptual schemes" but in the way these schemes were supposed to "latch on" to the world; the dualism, and not either pole, was the problem.

I do think there are certain families of concepts which anyone who has the ability to communicate must possess -- notions of self, other, belief, truth, etc. -- for basically Davidsonian reasons. But these needn't be identical concepts for all speakers; so long as something in a speaker's practices is able to play the role of distinguishing truth from (mere) belief, the way things are from the way so-and-so holds them to be, all is in good order. And this is a general enough sort of demand that I should imagine very different sorts of practices might suffice to satisfy it. The Davidsonian demand is an externalist one, not an internalist one -- to be a speaker, one must be able to do certain sorts of things, but one needn't necessarily recognize that what one is doing is (e.g.) distinguishing truth from belief. There is no stock of "pure" concepts which all conceptual schemes must have in common, which anyone must possess to be able to think; practices can vary widely, and concepts will vary along with them. And yet all conceptual schemes will have certain family resemblances -- they will all be concepts used by speakers, thinkers, willing agents who act to make things more agreeable to themselves etc. (I am honestly not satisfied with anything I say about "pure" concepts; I cannot seem to find the right words for what I want to say about them, and this leads me to suspect I'm not sure what I want to say about them in the first place.)

I think that incommensurability-talk can be salvaged to an extent; two speakers might be unable to understand one another, despite both being understood by a third speaker. This would be a relative sort of incommensurability, as opposed to an absolute one; it looks to the conceptual repertoire of a particular speaker at a particular moment, rather than something broader. Without learning to cope with one another differently, the two will be unable to understand one another. If the necessary change in coping seems sufficiently difficult, if the mutual incomprehension seems sufficiently resilient to attempts to dissolve it, then talk of "incommensurable conceptual schemes" starts to seem attractive. Of course they might still come to understand one another; there is nothing prohibiting the dropping of old concepts and the taking up of new, or the revision of old concepts in light of new circumstances. The only thing that can bring the hermeneutical circle to a stop is the death of the hermeneut(s). This is all in keeping with Davidson; he has no objection to schemes which can be "calibrated", sentences which are in principle translatable, though they are presently impenetrable. I take this to be the truth of his claim towards the end of "On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" that we ought not to "announce the glorious news that all mankind -- all speakers of language, at least -- share a common scheme and ontology." Understanding does not come this easily; but, contra certain sorts of incommensurability-talk, neither is it impossible.

An aside: I am reading Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" for the first time; I'm fifty pages in now. So far, no surprises. One thing that I am keeping an eye open for is how Kuhn demarcates paradigms; as entities, they seem fishy to me. Kuhn's "normal science" is too smooth; it seems idealized. I suspect that a "paradigm" is just an idealization, too -- as it were, the tutelary angel of a normal-scientific practice. Revolutions might then be the same sorts of disputes which occurs in normal science, only they are more intense; they are disputes sufficient to make an idealized picture cease to seem applicable (the fall of a paradigm), whereas normal disputes are able to go on without the general picture appearing to shift. (These are all very speculative thoughts, obviously, and I ought to finish the book before I worry too much about these big-picture notions in it. But "normal science" just seems too sanguine to be human.)