"Metaphysics grounds an age," writes Martin Heidegger in his famous essay, "The Age of the World Picture". The metaphysics of the modern age is revealed, he continues, in its "essential phenomena": science, technology, art, culture and religion. Like us, Heidegger focuses his attention on the first of these. And like us, Heidegger is very interested in the materiality and historicity of science. "Within the complex machinery that is necessary to physics in order to carry out the smashing of the atom lies hidden the whole of physics up to now." Science, he tells us, is fundamentally characterised by its "ongoing activity", or Betrieb in German, which has also been translated as "hustle". We might conceive of science as "hustle and bustle", evoking its fragile, pulsating history, as Foucault does. But science does not lose itself in "random investigations" that "simply amass results" precisely because the hustle and bustle of modern research is disciplined by the "complex machinery" of its procedures.
This is why we can usefully read Chapter III of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions alongside Kuhn's comments in the postscript on "models" or "metaphysical paradigms". For in Chapter III, Kuhn is trying to show how science is normalized by the procedures it uses to "gather facts". The "nature of normal science" is its "metaphysics", its "ground". It is on this ground that the various abstract models that illustrate scientific theories stand out as figures, as meaningful diagrams of basic mechanisms at work in particular object spheres. "Again and again," says Kuhn, "complex special apparatus has been designed to [increase the precision of science], and the invention, construction, and deployment of that apparatus have demanded first-rate talent, much time, and considerable financial backing." With that precision, and at that expense, changes have been brought about in the models according to which the phenomena have been understood. Consider here the ways in which increased precision in the measurement of the position of planets brought us from a metaphysics of winged chariots (mythology), to shining balls mounted on spheres of crystal (Aristotle and Ptolemy), to orbits governed by the force of attraction (Newton) to the current orthodoxy of planets moving through curved space (Einstein). Indeed, the wheel has been a standing model in understanding the manifold of experience since antiquity, forming our understanding of "cycles" in all their variety.
The task here is to describe the role of scientific training (discipline) and equipment (apparatus) in avoiding what Kuhn later calls "a bloomin', buzzin' confusion," quoting William James in Chapter X. An orderly approach to experience is expressed in a "world view" (which can be usefully compared to Heidegger's "world picture"). And in Chapter X, Kuhn indeed understands changes of paradigm as reconfigurations of world-views, noting that these are correlated with changes in the "operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory". Such procedures produce "data", which is Latin for, "what is given", but which are more accurately understood as what has been "collected with great difficulty".
When describing the underlying models of scientific inquiry, keep in mind that these are, in a sense, sublimated expressions of "ways of looking at the world" (theories, Bourdieu reminds us, are "programmes of perception"), and that what is seen when we look at the world in this way are, only in this sense (of having been "sublimated"), brute facts. Metaphysical models are (extraordinarily) simple expressions of the complex perceptual dispositions that form the (ordinary) ongoing activity in which science is always already implicated. Models make science look easy, which is altogether part of their charm.
Monday, March 06, 2006
Models
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Søren draws attention to an important connection between "symbols" and "models" as we are using them here. Take his example of the periodic table. Here each element is denoted by a specific symbol--"H", "O", etc.--which names a particular atomic structure (that can be further analysed intocombination of electrons, positrons and neutrons). The symbolic generalisations of chemistry further allow us to represent compounds, like water, by symbols that represent the precisely their composition of out of elements, like "H2O".
The word "represent" here is very important. Symbols "stand for" or "take the place of" relations that obtain in the object sphere of a particular science. They allow scientists to refer unambiguously to objects and the relations that obtain between them.
The position of an element in the periodic table represents its atomic number, and in this sense the chart is itself a symbolic generalisation of the chemical paradigm. But the the chart, as Søren points out, also presents a "sweeping gesture" of chemistry, namely, the (metaphysical) idea that the world is a composition of simple substances. The periodic table, when abstracted from the specific information it provides about the elements it denotes, gives an aspect of a "world picture" or "world view" that is fundamental to chemistry and its methods of analysis.
Whenever chemistry is presented to us in the media by means of balls connected by pins in a variety of shapes, and where neither the elements (balls) nor their bonds (pins) are represented with specific symbols, we are provided with the chemical model. But when these symbols are provided, we face something that only specialists (chemists) can understand, and we are now dealing with a different aspect of paradigms.
Søren has been drawing attention also to the difference between social and natural science. It wouldn't be unfair to say that sociological paradigms often depend more on models than on symbolic generalisations (though there are highly generalised social sciences too). As Søren rightly notes, an important indication of whether a graphical presentation really is a symbolic generalisation (representation) is whether or not it indicates a "unit" of analysis according to which different positions in the chart or graph are distinguished from and related to each other. That is, whether the relative positions in the presentation also represent things in the world.
Also, as Kuhn points out, models are often not the property of individual paradigms or even sciences, but connect paradigms to much broader ways of thinking. That is why the models of scientific paradigms are so often a part of their popular image.
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