Thomas Kuhn & January 6

In 'The road since Structure' Thomas Kuhn wrote of 'the no-overlap principle' 

no two kind terms, no two terms with the kind label, may overlap in their referents unless they are related as species to genus. There are no dogs that are also cats,

We don't know that. There may be. There may not. It is possible that some day geneticists may transform your kitten into a puppy or vice versa. It may also be possible to upload the consciousness of your pet to the cloud and download it into different meat-suits. 

The fact is 'kind labels' are only protocol bound for a specific purpose. Suppose I leave all my money to my pet, Fido. My executor assumes Fido is a dog and creates a Doggie Trust. Actually, Fido is the name of my cat. Sadly, Ruritanian Law (which is where I am domiciled for tax reasons) has a notion of Doggie Trusts but not of Kitty Trusts. My executor has to get a judgment from the court that Fido the cat should be treated as a dog under Ruritanian Trust Law. 

no gold rings that are also silver rings,

we don't know that. There may be some higher dimensional object which is a gold ring at some times and a silver ring at others. Equally, they may be deemed to be one or the other for some legal or other purpose.  

and so on: that's what makes dogs, cats, silver, and gold each a kind.

Only according to defeasible protocols.  

Therefore, if the members of a language community encounter a dog that's also a cat (or, more realistically, a creature like the duck-billed platypus), they cannot just enrich the set of category terms but must instead redesign a part of the taxonomy.

Nope. They just need to say that there is an exception to the rule. They don't have to have a whole bunch of new rules.  

Pace the causal theorists of reference, 'water' did not always refer to H20 

It never does save in a specific protocol bound discourse. I don't drink H2O. I drink an impure liquid containing some salts and electrolytes.  

Notice now that a lexical taxonomy of some sort must be in place before description of the world can begin.

This simply isn't true. You may stipulate that this is how discourse should proceed- i.e. lay down a bunch of protocols- but I may stipulate that you eat dog turds.  

Shared taxonomic categories, at least in an area under discussion, are prerequisite to unproblematic communication,

Nope. Unproblematic communication is utilitarian communication. If the thing aint useful to us we should tell it to fuck off. One way to do this is to say 'well, I agree that you eat dog turds but I think you have shit for brains.'  

including the communication required for the evaluation of truth claims.

Tell me I'm smart, cute and that you owe me a hundred bucks which you proceed to hand over to me and I will have no problem evaluating your claims as Gospel Truth. Tell me I'm fat and ugly and that I owe you money and I'll call you a lying son of a bitch.  

If different speech communities have taxonomies that differ in some local area, then members of one of them can (and occasionally will) make statements that, though fully meaningful within that speech community, cannot in principle be articulated by members of the other.

What principle would that be? One which devours dog turds?  

To bridge the gap between communities would require adding to one lexicon a kind-term that overlaps, shares a referent, with one that is already in place. It is that situation which the no-overlap principle precludes.

Because it eats dog turds. 

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

But, where there is utility there will be commensurability if endowment and preference diversity meets a Goldilocks condition and communication is not too costly. Local arbitrage will get us to global  commensurability- if it is useful to do so.  

The differences which produce it are not any old differences, but ones that violate either the no-overlap condition, the kind-label condition, or else a restriction on hierarchical relations that I cannot spell out here.

Or any other shit you pull out of your arse. The fact is, if it is useful to communicate then communication will be useful and good enough for any specific purpose regardless of 'principles' and 'conditions' and 'restrictions on hierarchical relations'. The reverse is not the case. You can have all sorts of rules without anything useful being communicated. Epistemology is not informative. The 'philosophy of Science' is nonsense.  

Violations of those sorts do not bar intercommunity understanding. Members of one community can acquire the taxonomy employed by members of another,

or they can just point at things 

as the historian does in learning to understand old texts.

the dude may postulate a taxonomy so as to claim that he has understood an old text, but he may be completely wrong.  

But the process which permits understanding produces bilinguals, not translators,

Nonsense! Guys working on ancient cuneiform or whatever did not become bilingual though some did become translators. There are plenty of Professors of Tamil who can't speak Tamil but who can translate the Sillapadikaram. Equally, there were Japanese Professors of English who were experts on Beowulf but who could not converse in idiomatic English.  

and bilingualism has a cost, which will be particularly important to what follows. The bilingual must always remember within which community discourse is occurring.

That really isn't a very high cost. I don't find it difficult at all to switch to Hindi when I'm in Delhi or Tamil when in Chennai or Cockney English when I'm down the boozer.  

The use of one taxonomy to make statements to someone who uses the other places communication at risk. Let me formulate these points in one more way, and then make a last remark about them. Given a lexical taxonomy, or what I'll mostly now call simply a lexicon, there are all sorts of different statements that can be made, and all sorts of theories that can be developed. Standard techniques will lead to some of these being accepted as true, others rejected as false. But there are also statements which could be made, theories which could be developed, within some other taxonomy but which cannot be made with this one and vice versa. The first volume of Lyons' Semantics (1977, pp. 237-8) contains a wonderfully simple example, which some of you will know: the impossibility of translating the English statement, "the cat sat on the mat", into French, because of the incommensurability between the French and English taxonomies for floor coverings.

This simply isn't true. For any given type of commercially available mat the cat may sit on, a French term exists. It may be ponderous but a Frenchman in that line of business would be able to specify it well enough. 

In each particular case for which the English statement is true, one can find a co-referential French statement, some using 'tapis', others 'paillasson,' still others 'carpette,' and so on. But there is no single French statement which refers to all and only the situations in which the English statement is true. In that sense, the English statement cannot be made in French.

Only in so far as it can't be made in English either. When I say 'the cat sat on the mat', nothing you can say refers to all and only the situations in which my English statement is true. Indeed, this applies equally to me when I try to say exactly what I said in the last sentence. 

In a similar vein, I've elsewhere pointed out (Kuhn 1987, p. 8) that the content of the Copernican statement, "planets travel around the sun", cannot be expressed in a statement that invokes the celestial taxonomy of the Ptolemaic statement, "planets travel around the earth". 

But that's exactly what it does. Copernicus was right. Ptolemy was wrong.  

The difference between the two statements is not simply one of fact.

That's all it is. That's why we know those dudes names.  

The term 'planet' appears as a kind term in both, and the two kinds overlap in membership without either's containing all the celestial bodies contained in the other.

But the term 'planet' is a kind term for 'you eat dog shit'. An unkind term is ' fucking dog shit eating cunt.'  

All of which is to say that there are episodes in scientific development which involve fundamental change in some taxonomic categories and which therefore confront later observers with problems like those the ethnologist encounters when trying to break into another culture.

Fuck ethnologists. They have shit for brains. Science is useful. Philosophy isn't. Structural Causal Models matter because they may enable us to tinker with parameters to improve outcomes. There is no road from Structure save to devouring dog turds under the pretense of doing Fido-sophy. 

What happens if you take Kuhn's ideas seriously? Consider the following essay on Thomas Kuhn and the January 6 Hearings- 'Which reality is true reality' by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan in 3Quarks

As the January 6th hearings continue and Americans watch new, seemingly undeniable video evidence of insurrection and quibble about whether one could reach the steering wheel of the Presidential SUV from the back seat, the ideas of Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher and historian of science who coined the phrase “paradigm shift” to explain scientific revolutions remain prescient as ever, even as we approach his 100th birthday.

This is silly. There is video evidence of me taking of all my clothes and peeing in the punch bowl at the office party. HR interprets it in one way- I was drunk and committed all sorts of offenses and thus can be fired for cause. The truth is quite different. I was merely implementing best practice under relevant sections of the Corporate Health and Safety Code.

'Insurrection' implies intention. But intention is not something objective. It is not a physical datum. It is subjective. A Jury may apply a 'reasonable man' test to impute intention but equally they may give the defendant the benefit of doubt. In my case, I can point to my long history of interpreting Company policy as requiring me to get naked and pee all over the place. This does not imply habitual drunkenness or an intention to break my contract of employment or justify constructive dismissal. On the contrary, it suggests that I am qualified for a seat on the Board due to I iz bleck.  

According to Kuhn in his most famous work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientists generally think and work in a state of what he called normal science.

As opposed to weird science which is what happens when you create a beautiful, sexy, and magical girl friend for yourself. Given the choice, scientists would prefer this to 'normal science'.  

Under normal scientific conditions, all research occurs within a paradigm.

But nobody can specify what that paradigm is. It has a 'no overlap principle' known only to God. 

Paradigms, he explained, do four interrelated things.

In the sense that my getting naked and peeing in the punch bowl does great things for the Company's bottom line.  

First, they define the terms that describe the universe, like atom or force.

These are 'Tarskian primitives'. They are undefined because otherwise you get an infinite regress of defining the elements in the definition. 

Second, they determine what counts as legitimate questions. (“What is the mass of the electron?” might be fair, for example, but not “Do electrons have polka-dots?”)

Do quarks have flavors?  Apparently. Electrons aren't made of quarks. Maybe they will turn out to be made of something else which could be described as polka dots. 

Third, they set limits on which tools you can use to answer those questions. (Reading a voltmeter is perfectly acceptable, but reading tea leaves is out.)

But some 'oracle' may be necessary to get from a deterministic process to a nondeterministic outcome. 

And fourth, they determine what counts as an acceptable answer to those questions. (Just to pick one: you don’t get to use negative lengths.)

But imaginary numbers or even negative probabilities are okay.  

Normal science is puzzle solving. The paradigm frames riddles and gives us the rules we need to follow in order to solve them.

This is applied science or engineering. Fundamental research is beyond paradigms.  

If you solve an approved riddle, you get to publish your answer, becoming a member of the community of normal scientists. The paradigm gives members of the scientific community their union cards, essentially, so the last thing they want to do is to question the rules of that paradigm.

But the people at the top who are doing the most interesting stuff break those rules all the time. School boys need to learn to observe grammatical paradigms in their essays to get into Collidge. But the great writers they will study there break those paradigms all the time.  

Sure, there might be other paradigms, but when normal scientific conditions prevail, we completely understand the world through the current paradigm. As a result, people who come from other paradigms sound like they’re speaking in gibberish.

Nonsense! We understand Glaswegian English or Trinidad English or American English perfectly well. Paradigms don't matter. Mummy understands baby even though baby doesn't have a clue about grammar.  

They don’t seem rational, because the paradigm you’re coming from defines what’s rational and what isn’t. It’s almost as if they live in a different universe.

The truth is, we can do business well enough with people from China or other countries which have a very different type of language. Paradigms don't matter.  

And here’s what’s really tricky: you can’t have any good reason to switch from one paradigm to another because good reason itself is determined by the paradigm you’re coming from.

We don't speak language. Language speaks us. But language was created by men! Men have dicks! Dicks cause Rape! Language is orally raping us! Help!  

So, why are some paradigms dominant and others marginalized? Kuhn’s answer is political, not rational.

Because he wasn't rational at all. Still back then politics had turned to shit and everybody on the faculty had either dropped acid or gone quietly mad in some other way. 

A paradigm becomes dominant because it gives the established scientists who come from it the power and resources to control the education, grants, jobs, and awards that new scientists want. Paradigms are self-policing, self-reinforcing social-political entities.

But men with dicks created paradigms. Dicks cause rape! Paradigms are skull-fucking us! Help! 

Somehow, though, there are revolutionary times when one paradigm replaces another.

By jamming its dick down our throat. Help! 

Paradigm shifts, as Kuhn called them, happen only rarely because they require a large group of scientists to abandon a well-established structure and give up the benefits it offers to embrace an upstart way of seeing the world.

So as to skull fuck the rest of us. Help! 

A scientist changing paradigms, Kuhn argued, was essentially a religious conversion.

And a religious conversion was essentially getting skull fucked. Help! 

What makes a scientist convert from the scientific “religion” in which they were educated to another?

Skull-fucking.  

Kuhn’s answer: anomalies. Whenever you ask a well-formed question and use the methods prescribed by your paradigm, then get an inappropriate answer, you have an anomaly.

The reason 'Scientific Method' died was because we asked the question as to what new scientific discovery it had motivated. The answer was 'none at all.' Thus the thing was shit.  

If the anomaly is big enough, or if you suddenly discover a lot of them, it can induce a state of crisis.

Once you see that a University Department is utterly shit no 'state of crisis' is induced. You get stupid kids to enroll in that shite and use the fees they pay to cross-subsidize useful stuff.  

If it happens to enough scientists, they start questioning the dominant paradigm… and some start looking at new ones.

Not if they no longer get paid or if they discover that the grad students they are now saddled with can't tie their own shoe-laces or haven't been fully toilet trained. There is a wide difference between supervising academic research and wiping the bums of drooling idiots. The latter activity is better paid.  

For a scientific revolution to occur, a critical mass of scientists has to abandon the current paradigm and convert to a new one.

No. It is sufficient for one guy to do stuff which generates cool new tech or stuff which saves money, for that revolution to take off. Astrology didn't disappear when Astronomy took off and began helping the merchant marine to make lots more money.  

When that happens, they build a new political power structure. They establish a new regime with new truths, new rules, new power relationships, and new people in charge.

Nonsense! To build a new political power structure you need to beat or kill people. Science can generate more money but that money may be used to buy off the existing political structure.  

Scientific revolutions, Kuhn argued, are very much like political revolutions

This simply wasn't and isn't true. 

… which brings us to the insurrection of January 6th.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.

He was wrong. You are entitled to your own facts in the same way you are entitled to your own farts. When a Jury makes a determination of facts it is entitled to reach any conclusion provided certain procedural rules are followed. Thus, if the foreman sucks off other members of the Jury so as to get them to change their verdict, then an offense has been committed. 

We can have different values or commit to different policy proposals in order to realize our values, but we have to share a common foundation of facts.

No we don't. Determinations of fact may be required in certain 'buck stopped' judicial or administrative procedures. But these are exceptional circumstances. In general, we have a Hohfeldian immunity with respect to what 'facts' we choose to uphold.  

A Kuhnian would beg to differ, however, because people who come from different paradigms can, and do, believe in different realities.

But this is also the case if they are self-identical and have the same 'paradigm'. I am welcome to believe in an all-seeing God when my life is in danger while pretending God does not exist while having a crafty wank.  

For decades now, in fact, that Kuhnian notion has inspired a growing number of American conservatives to build a new political paradigm that’s radically different from our current democratic structure.

These cunts have a bizarre view of America's 'current democratic structure'.  

For decades, Democrats and Republicans agreed on the norms and procedures that grounded our political reality: every eligible citizen should be allowed to vote; race, gender, and religious belief shouldn’t make anyone ineligible to vote (although it did take different amounts of time to reach consensus about who was eligible); all votes should be counted; and whoever gets the most votes wins the election, except in the case of Presidential elections, which are governed by the more complex rules of the Electoral College. These rules were all part of the political paradigm that Americans once widely accepted.

No. There was plenty of gerrymandering and voter suppression in both Red and Blue states. The reality diverged sharply from the rhetoric.  

But things changed. In 1980, Paul Weyrich, founder of the Moral Majority, said “I don’t want everyone to vote…our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Carter, on taking office, had proposed electoral reforms to increase voter participation. The Left blames Reagan for mobilizing Republican opposition to this but the facts speak for themselves. Democratic machine politicians were even more adamant because they feared voter insurrection against rent-seeking political establishments.  

His declaration started a new wave of voter suppression efforts intended to make sure not everyone would get to vote and to challenge which votes would be counted. In 2000, there was ambiguity about whether Al Gore received more votes in Florida than George W. Bush. The Brooks Brothers revolution showed that if Republicans raised enough of a fuss, Democrats would protect the paradigm rather than their electoral victory. They were willing to sacrifice the power that would come with electoral victory to protect the structural stability of the entire election process.

Al Gore put up a fight. Some Democrats may not have been too keen on him for reasons that would soon become apparent. However, in the ultimate analysis, it was the Supreme Court which determined the outcome. Scalia is considered to have prevailed in this matter. It is difficult to see what more Gore could have done.  

Over time, conservatives began to establish an alternative paradigm, setting themselves apart from what an unnamed Bush aide called “the reality-based community” of people who believe that political solutions derive from a “judicious study of discernible reality.”

I think Carter was considered a 'process' President who didn't have a broader ideological vision and this was the reason he failed as a politician. Bush Snr. too was considered a detail oriented guy. Dubya was very much a 'big picture' president and did get a second term. 

The aide defined the new conservative paradigm both brazenly and clearly: “That’s not the way the world really works any more… [W]e create our own reality.”

The fact is White Americans didn't like the demographic reality of their country which they didn't feel they had created at all. It had snuck up on them probably because this is what suited Coastal elites. 

In 2017, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway embraced the new paradigm by referring to the administration’s falsehoods as “alternative facts.” For adherents to that new paradigm, those alternative facts are absolutely real.

What was 'absolutely real' was demographic change. You didn't have to be a genius to figure out what Trump was actually saying.  

The new paradigm explains why it’s so much more difficult to have political conversations across party lines than it once was.

But Biden is finding it equally difficult to have political conversations with Manchin and Sinema who voted against his Voting Rights bill.  

Those of us who are members of the “reality-based community” rely on double-blind testing and statistics to determine whether certain facts, like the efficacy of masks and COVID vaccines, are rational to believe.

Not really. We'd be dead if we waited that long to plump for one option or another. Mimetic effects drive behavior. I vividly recall my own decision to wear a mask. My reasoning was that East Asians developed a mask wearing culture and this virus came from there. It would be sensible to imitate them because they have the relevant experience.'  

Those who are members of the “alternative facts” paradigm have removed the scientific method from that role, replacing it with declarations made by powerful political and media voices. Between those two paradigms, we no longer agree on which facts constitute reality.

This is not a fact. It is some shite Thomas Kuhn- who wasn't a scientist- pulled out of his ass.  

The “alternative fact” that widespread voter fraud influenced the outcome of the 2020 election—the big lie told by the Trump administration—was meant to achieve two things.

No. It was meant to achieve one thing- viz. help Trump retain power and influence.  

First, it signaled the existence of a new paradigm that voters could choose to inhabit.

Coz what keeps Trump awake at nights is stuff to do with paradigms- thinks nobody at all.  

Second, by creating the appearance of electoral anomalies, it induced a state of crisis.

No it didn't. At the time most people thought Trump had lost his marbles. Then we realized that Trump's aim was to keep control of the Republican party by creating a tool to harass those who wanted to turn the page on him thus leaving him more open to criminal or other proceedings.  

The Eastman memos

Eastman has some crazy theories- e.g Kamala Harris is not a 'naturally born' citizen. Apparently this is what brought him to the attention of Trump's kooky crew. Pence got proper advise from Gregory Jacob and rejected Eastman's urgings.

outlining the so-called “Green Bay Sweep” made the Republican election strategy crystal clear. They intended to undermine the credibility of the 2020 election results by fabricating anomalies: fake voting irregularities.

Navarro was so stupid that he published a book incriminating himself. He will go to prison while Trump pushes all blame onto him and Bannon. What he should have done is say 'I hate the Koch brothers. In my opinion what happened was such and such. My job was to discover if there had been any electoral fraud. I believed there had been for such and such reason. But the Koch brothers prevented Pence from acting in a proper manner. That is my opinion'. This is freedom of expression. There is no 'executive privilege' to subvert the constitution.  

By loudly claiming voter fraud, conservatives

Pence is plenty conservative. Trump was once a member of the Democratic party.  

tried to create a big enough crisis to justify ignoring ballots and relying on the partisan whim of statehouses to determine the outcome of the election. If they had succeeded, the “alternative facts” paradigm would have become dominant,

No. Eastman's crazy theory about the Veep's super powers would have been endorsed by the Bench. The law would have changed. Facts would not.  

creating a new political system, with new rules and power structures. That Kuhnian revolution, which many conservatives referred to as “1776,” is precisely what they’ve been trying to bring about for more than four decades.

So, Nixon was on the side of the angels. Things only turned to shit when Reagan was elected. 

Many Republicans no longer accept the paradigm in which everyone gets to vote, all votes are counted, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Most Democrats still do.

I suspect that Machnin and Sinema have plenty of secret support. That's why Biden can't strong-arm them.  

We are living in a state of crisis, even though the supposed anomalies aren’t real. Through these hearings, as a nation, we are deciding which reality we will live in, which “truths” will be facts, and which rules and values will govern our lives.

No. These hearings are likely to be counterproductive. Rather than burying Trump, they keep his legend alive. As the economy worsens, people may forget his response to Covid and choose to remember the economic prosperity which preceded pandemic. The Dems understand that if they come across as too shrill and continue to pretend that Trump was Hitler and January 6 was a putsch, they will appear to disconnected from the harsh reality of rising inflation and a deteriorating geopolitical position.