Explaining Behavior 6: Paradigms
Does truth emerge more readily from error than from confusion?
Part 6 in a series. First part here, most recent part here.
The Explaining Behavior series is far from over, but this will be the last installment focusing on general philosophy of science. After this we’ll start covering particular examples of explanation. Each explanation we cover will illustrate a general strategy of explanation, or paradigm, as classified by sociologist Donald Black. But before we launch into that phase, let us stop to consider the role of paradigms in more detail.
In the last installment we mentioned historian of science Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between normal science and revolutionary science. In his view, the evolution of science involved long periods of slow accumulation and puzzle-solving — normal science — punctuated by brief periods of radical change — scientific revolutions.
During a scientific revolution, old assumptions go out the window and new theories with radically different views of reality come to the fore. Examples of revolution include the success of Einstein’s theory of relativity in physics and Darwin’s theory of natural selection in biology. Older theories and concepts were swept away, and afterward physicists and biologists concerned themselves with many problems that would have made no sense to their predecessors.
Kuhn characterizes a scientific revolution as a shift from one paradigm to another.
(If you’re old enough to remember when “paradigm shift” was a corporate buzzword, this is where it comes from.)
Kuhn uses the word paradigm in a lot of different ways, but for present purposes let’s just call it a shared view among scientists about how to do science. You might say its the culture of the field, at least as it pertains to guiding their work. It includes the categories they use to classify things, the theories they use to explain things, their standards for what makes something a good piece of science, and the great examples they model their own work after.
Just like we can speak of cultures and subcultures in the larger society, we might talk about the paradigm of the discipline as a whole, or the paradigm of some particular branch or specialty.
It’s worth pointing out that these paradigms aren’t always explicit — in fact, much of the time they’re not. A fish doesn’t know what it means to be wet, and people are often blind to elements of their own culture that seem so natural as to be unquestioned. The same goes for scientists.
In times of normal science most research has the quality of a skilled craft, and the normal workaday researcher in the lab doesn’t need to do much wrestling with the fundamental assumptions of their field. Sure, they have a mental picture of what good work looks like based on the examples they learned as students. But this doesn’t necessarily mean they can articulate what makes that it good.
Indeed, to an outsider interested in such things, it can be surprising how ignorant working scientists are of the history and philosophy of their own fields. But as long as the way of doing science is sufficiently institutionalized, the scientists themselves don’t need to be particularly knowledgeable about it. More important to know how to do science than to know a lot about science.
Perhaps sociologists, if they want to be more scientific, should be savvy about the history and philosophy of science — because such things aren’t so institutionalized in this field. Or, at least, what is institutionalized in the field isn’t so good at producing science.
Uniting the Tribes
Which brings us to another point about paradigms. Kuhn argued that having a shared paradigm was important for scientific progress.
Many fields developed a dominant paradigm when some particularly successful work inspired a critical mass of scientists to adopt its concepts and follow its example. These sorts of foundational works include things like Newton’s Principia and Opticks, Franklin’s Electricity, Lavoisier’s Chemistry, and Lyell’s Geology — “these and many other works served for a time implicitly to define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.”
Kuhn views these paradigm-founding works as something like the charismatic warlord who unites the fractious steppe tribes — a whole new world of possibilities opens up when peoples who are individually formidable cease their squabbles and focus on a common goal. The Mongols before Genghis Khan are a nuisance for neighboring civilizations, the Mongols under Genghis Khan conquer them.
Kuhn describes the nature of scientific specialties like optics or electricity before the advent of their unifying paradigms. While there were people studying each topic and reading one another’s work, they were less of a coherent discipline and more of a collection of competing schools and sub-schools, each with strikingly different approaches, assumptions, and definitions.
Regarding the study of optics:
“No period between remote antiquity and the end of the seventeenth century exhibited a single generally accepted view about the nature of light....One group took light to be particles emanating from material bodies; for another it was a modification of the medium that intervened between the body and the eye; still another explained light in terms of an interaction of the medium with an emanation from the eye; and there were other combinations and modifications besides.”
Likewise, in the study of electricity in the 18th century:
“There were almost as many views about the nature of electricity as there were important electrical experimenters…their theories had no more than a family resemblance.”
Kuhn argues that the men who worked in these schools, are at least the more creative ones were definitely scientists — but that “the net result of their activity was something less than science.”
Paradigms and Progress
So why did the success of a unifying paradigm help?
For one, consider the benefits of a shared foundation. When the field is divided into competing schools with fundamentally different assumptions, little could be taken for granted. Every major thinker, aware of all the different ways to go about things, felt the need to think through and justify his own approach:
“Being able to take no body of belief for granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field anew from its foundations…. the dialogue of the resulting books was often directed as much to members of other schools as it was to nature.”
Compare this to the situation in sociology now. It behooves the writer to define all his terms and concepts explicitly, because one can’t take it for granted the reader will have the same working definition. And just about every theoretical tool needs to be described and justified, because a reader or reviewer will likely have another approach they’d rather see employed.
As I wrote in the first installment of this series, the fractured nature of the field is part of why so much of our so-called theory is actually metatheory — a discussion about theory rather than theory itself.
Another reason scientific progress is slow without a common paradigm is that observation and problem-solving are less focused. Karl Popper ridiculed the idea of pure and unbiased observation by noting a sensisble reaction to the command “observe!” is “observe what?” One needs to be able to select from the whole universe of possible details which are important to pay attention to. Similarly, Kuhn remarks that in the absence of some firm paradigm:
“All the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant. As a result, early fact-gathering is a far more nearly random activity than the one that subsequent scientific development makes familiar. Furthermore, in the absence of a reason for seeking some particular form of more recondite information, early fact-gathering is usually restricted to the wealth of data that life ready to hand.”
The result of this casual and undirected fact-gathering is a morass. The natural histories mix things later science will see as important with things it will find irrelevant or trivial. And it will often leave out vitally important things that could have been noted with the techniques of the time, if anyone had thought to.
The same goes for which problems occupy the theorists, or which measurements people strive to make more precise. Part of why a shared paradigm accelerates progress is it focuses collective attention certain problems widely seen as important: “both fact collection and theory articulation” become “highly directed activities.” By pointing more minds at the puzzles, the puzzles get solved more quickly. As Bacon said, “Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.”
Have a Little Faith, Baby
But it’s not just a matter of focusing attention on the puzzles. It’s also a matter of providing motivation to solve them — including the faith that they are even solvable. As we noted in the last installment, much normal science is a puzzle-solving activity. And the thing about puzzles is that you know they have a solution and are confident you’ll know it when you see it.
Successful theories like Newton’s found paradigms because they solve enough big problems to inspire faith that they’re correct, while leaving enough puzzles for succeeding generations to busy themselves with, confident that their paradigmatic theory will indeed be able to solve them.
Per Kuhn, a successful paradigm not only shuts off continual debate about the fundamentals but gives scientists enough confidence that they’re on the right track for them to “undertake more precise, esoteric, and consuming sorts of work.”
Consider something like Gravity Probe B. This was an experiment that tested two predictions from Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Only testing them wasn’t easy: it required launching a satellite into space, having it orbit over the poles, and having devices inside that could precisely measure changes in the spin of gyroscopes.
The experiment cost over $700 million. It relied on technology that had not even been invented when Einstein first proposed the theory back in 1915. It took decades of work from conception (the experiment was first outlined in 1959) to engineering the measurement tools (done through the 60s and 70s) to launch on a Delta II rocket (in 2004) to data analysis (first result confirmed in 2008). It required the cooperation of hundreds of highly skilled people. Some of the individuals involved spent their best years on the project.
Compare this to the attitude of a sociologist I met at a professional conference, who dismissed a theory as untestable because it couldn’t be tested with any existing set of survey or census data. Same planet, different worlds.
For Kuhn, the puzzling thing about science was that one finds these periodic revolutions where old paradigms are overturned, but most scientific work is not at all aimed at overturning paradigms. Rather, most research proceeds from a placid faith in the guiding paradigm. It’s just that this faith itself generates deep boring into reality that is good at producing discoveries, and discoveries in time provide ground for a new paradigm. As in Marx’s model of economic change, a successful paradigm sows the seeds of its own destruction.
At least, that was his model of physics and chemistry and maybe biology as well — fields that had all had major events classified as scientific revolutions.
Sociological Paradigms
Sociology, as Donald Black points out, is a field that has never had a revolution. No major achievement ever succeeded in establishing that first unified paradigm, let alone a succession of them. Sure, at any given time there are little branches of sociology that look like normal science, with its established problems and cumulative puzzle-solving. But the enterprise as a whole looks a lot more like how Kuhn described the physical sciences in their “pre-paradigm” days.
Only it is probably more useful to think of sociology not as lacking a paradigm, but as having many of them. There are various schools and approaches, some more or less self-conscious and widely recognized, others often implicit and unnamed. There are also eclectic mixes of them all, and as many different schemes for classifying these paradigms as there are paradigms themselves.
In his theory course at University of Virginia, Donald Black classified eight major sociological paradigms. As befitting his emphasis on sociological explanation (as his course was sometimes titled), he classified these paradigms by their strategy of explanation. His categories are:
Phenomenology — explaining with subjective experience
Motivational Theory—explaining with psychological impact of social forces
Rational Choice Theory—explaining as least costly means to a goal
Conflict Theory—explaining with a struggle for domination
NeoDarwinian Theory—explaining with selection by the environment
Systems Theory—explaining with contribution to the survival of society
Opportunity Theory—explaining with distribution of constraints
Pure Sociology—explaining with location and direction in social space
I think these categories quite useful and throughout the remainder of this series I’ll use them with only slight alterations.
From here on out, we cover different examples of explanatory theory in sociology and related fields. The explanations we cover will address many subjects, including violence, crime, revolution, religion, getting a job, and having ideas. I’ll organize the examples by Black’s paradigms and will use many of the same examples he used when he taught me, plus some others I’ve learned over the years.
In our next installment, we begin with the phenomenology of murder.