Paradigm Understanding

[coberst]

Paradigm & Understanding

I think it might be appropriate to say that the ‘eureka’ moment is the moment of understanding and this moment might also, in some cases, be the moment of birth for the paradigm. I remember reading a book about Darwin’s adventures and how they led him to his discovery of the paradigm of ‘natural selection’. I do not remember, however, if in that book they spoke about the ‘eureka’ moment when he ‘grasped’ the answer. I suspect that moment happened in early morning while still half asleep. It seems that great intellectual stuff happens while we sleep.

“The history of science, by its nature as part of the history of ideas, has got to be a discipline which helps actual scientists to get a deeper insight into the real nature of their science…So, if we retreat from all consideration of Kuhn’s ‘new image’ of science, we run the risk of totally disconnecting the new- style realistic history of science from its old-style philosophy: a disaster.”

Like many words ‘science’ has more than one meaning and this can be misleading. We commonly use the word to mean—systemized study of technology and its associated phenomena. The word has a more general meaning—systematized study of any domain of knowledge. I think that this distinction needs to be kept in mind.

Kuhn’s new image of science—the paradigm—is an artifact (a human achievement), a way of seeing, and is a set of scientific problem solving habits. Normal science means research based upon one or more past achievements ‘that some particular community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice…and these achievements are sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group pf adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity’ furthermore they are sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to solve’. Such achievements Kuhn defines as paradigm.

Does anyone remember reading about the moment of Darwin’s understanding—the eureka moment?

Quotes from--

Margaret Masterman has written the essay “The Nature of a Paradigm” for inclusion in the book “Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge”.

[coberst]

I have been reading about mythology written by Joseph Campbell. In his attempt to make it possibly for the reader to comprehend how myth works he speaks about the human ability to ‘make-believe’.

He speaks of the universality of childhood make-believe and of how this same characteristic is exhibited in human rituals. For example he uses the Catholic Church practice of mass when the priest changes the wine and bread into the body and blood of Christ. In other words it seems to be inherent in humans to make-believe and in the process to truly believe and in truly believing experiences a form of ecstasy.

Such is probably our experience of understanding. In the process of trying to understand I create a model and then somewhere in this process of creating and modifying my model I pass to the point of believing the truth of my model thus the feeling of ecstasy.