Friday, July 22, 2016


273. Philosophy, science, and literature

Science, or ‘normal science’, as Thomas Kuhn called it, takes certain primitive terms and basic premises for granted, often not even consciously, as the rock bottom to build theories on and conduct experiments. That is what makes it ‘hard’.

We might see it as the playing of a Wittgensteinian language game.

In his ‘theory of scientific research programmes’, Imre Lakatos proposed that a scientific theory consists of a fixed ‘core’ of basic notions and principles, with a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary assumptions that may be adapted to protect the core from falsification, accommodating misfits, thus ‘saving appearances’.

When contrary evidence becomes ‘excessive’ (Kuhn), and repair with auxiliary assumptions becomes too forced and contrived, there arises pressure for a more fundamental change of view, called a ‘paradigm switch’ by Kuhn, consisting of a breakdown and replacement of the core.

Here, I want to re-connect this with the ‘hermeneutic circle’, discussed in several earlier items in this blog (see e.g. item 252). Along the ‘paradigmatic axis’ words and concepts (‘paradigms’) are taken for granted, are inserted in sentences/propositions, in specific contexts of action, along the ‘syntagmatic axis’. Let me call that ‘the way down’. There, abstractions are enriched, infused, nourished to life from practical life. And then, in application, in the practical business of life, one sooner or later encounters misfits or novel opportunities, where concepts seem forced, and this occasions tentative  shifts or replacements of them, along the paradigmatic axis. Using words shifts their meaning. Let me call that ‘the way up’.

That is the business, in particular, of literature, in storytelling, where life is shown to be richer than theory. Conduct that according to norms of normality are irrational or immoral are swallowed in a ‘suspension of disbelief’.  Literature burrows into individual experience that bursts the seams of abstraction. The most telling case of meaning shifts is that of poetry.

Then, the difference between science and literature is that between applying paradigms in application, in normal science, and using experience to shift notions and meanings, in literature. Philosophy used to be seen as belonging to the first category: using concepts to clarify experience. 20th century philosophy rejected that and made philosophy more literary, narrative, going from experience, from action in the world, to shifts of concepts. No longer only the way down but also the way up.

Science is in crisis when it also needs to take the way up, to craft a paradigm shift. Established abstractions are unhinged. Then it becomes more like literature. Fundamental discovery is the poetry of science. It remains narrative until innovators have put novel abstractions in place, and normal scientists can again throng along the way down.

These days I am confronted with this as follows. I am participating in a large project to transform economic theory and teaching. The financial crises have woken up some economists to the inadequacies of their science. In a recent meeting, new principles were proposed. They were discarded by other economists as ‘mere story telling’, in betrayal of the established rigour and clarity of their science. There, in defending and maintaining its analytical strength science becomes a force of conservatism.

Elsewhere in this blog, I proposed a ‘cycle of invention’, with an alternation between fitting experience into existing theory, along the ‘way down’, in ‘assimilation’. In several stages this can lead to a break into new theory, along the ‘way up’, in ‘accommodation’, and I indicated the connection with the hermeneutic circle. The cycle of invention is one guise, or form, of the hermeneutic circle.

In earlier work I used the term ‘discovery’, but that literally means the removal of a cover from something that exists, lies there, ‘behind experience’, waiting to be dis-covered. The term ‘invention’ is better, with its connotation of ‘creating by thought’.

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