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The Revolution That Didn't Happen
STEVEN WEINBERG
9
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How could [Aristotle's] characteristic talent have deserted him so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? ...Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place altogether. My jaw dropped with surprise, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I'd never dreamed possible.
I asked Kuhn what he had suddenly understood about Aristotle. He didn't answer my question, but wrote to me to tell me again how important this experience was to him:

What was altered by my own first reading of [Aristotle's writings on physics] was my understanding, not my evaluation, of what they achieved. And what made that change an epiphany was the transformation it immediately effected in my understanding (again, not my evaluation) of the nature of scientific achievement, most immediately the achievements of Galileo and Newton.
Later, I read Kuhn's explanation in a 1977 article that, without becoming an Aristotelian physicist, he had for a moment learned to think like one, to think of motion as a change in the quality of an object that is like many other changes in quality rather than a state that can be studied in isolation. This apparently showed Kuhn how it is possible to adopt the point of view of any scientist one studies. I suspect that because this moment in his life was so important to Kuhn, he took his idea of a paradigm shift from the shift from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics—the shift (which actually took many centuries) from Aristotle's attempt to give systematic qualitative descriptions of everything in nature to Newton's quantitative explanations of carefully selected phenomena, such as the motion of the planets around the sun.

Now, that really was a paradigm shift. For Kuhn it seems to have been the paradigm of paradigm shifts, which set a pattern into which he tried to shoehorn every other scientific revolution. It really does fit Kuhn's description of paradigm shifts: it is extraordinarily difficult for a modern scientist to get into the frame of mind of Aristotelian physics, and Kuhn's statement that all previous views of reality have proved false, though not true of Newtonian mechanics or Maxwellian electrodynamics, certainly does apply to Aristotelian physics.

Revolutions in science seem to fit Kuhn's description only to the extent that they mark a shift in understanding some aspect of nature from pre-science to modern science. The birth of Newtonian physics was a mega-paradigm shift, but nothing that has happened in our understanding of motion since then—not the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics, or from classical to quantum physics—fits Kuhn's description of a paradigm shift.



During the last few decades of his life Kuhn worked as a philosopher, worrying about the meaning of truth and reality, problems on which he had touched briefly decades earlier in Structure. After Kuhn's death Richard Rorty said that Kuhn was "the most influential philosopher to write in English since World War II." Kuhn's conclusions about philosophy show the same corrosive skepticism as his writings on history. In his Rothschild Lecture at Harvard in 1992, he remarked, "I am not suggesting, let me emphasize, that there is a reality which science fails to get at. My point is rather that no sense can be made of the notion of reality as it has ordinarily functioned in the philosophy of science."

It seems to me that pretty good sense had been made of the notion of reality over a century ago by the pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, but I am not equipped by taste or education to judge

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