Thank you for your incredible work on KZitem. Your philosophy lectures are making a significant impact on the community, fostering critical thinking and a deeper understanding of life. Your dedication and ability to make complex ideas accessible are truly inspiring. Keep up the amazing work!
@VictorGijsbers
20 күн бұрын
@@minhdaongoc Thanks for the compliments!
@kerravon2527
Ай бұрын
Excellent - thanks Victor
@FuchsiaRiv
Ай бұрын
Thank you Sir!
@scotimages
Ай бұрын
What a beautifully simple, elegant, but nevertheless critical, introduction to Kuhnian paradigms and incommensurability. Well Done! Can you comment on the idea that semantic incommensurability might just be the idea that language, mathematics, or the theoretical construct cannot be meaningfully used to express another paradigm? It could be argued that this is the case if we compare general relativity and Newtonian characterisations of gravity.
@HamidSain
3 күн бұрын
paradigmatic thinking is also useful in historical Hermenuetics and cultural evaluation
@das.gegenmittel
Ай бұрын
thank you! :)
@jamesb46
Ай бұрын
Here is a way to compare an inch and a kilogram: you establish a metric for an inch relative to the “average” length of objects and one for a kilogram relative to the average weight of objects. So, you imagine a distribution of all (or all relevant) objects across varying lengths, and see how many are greater than an inch in length and how many are less than an inch in length. You then have a length-independent metric for an inch. You can do the same with a kilogram. So, a kilogram is “greater” than an inch if the ratio of massive objects that are greater than a kilogram to the ratio of objects less than a kilogram is greater than the ratio of objects that are longer than an inch to objects that are shorter than an inch.
@VictorGijsbers
Ай бұрын
@@jamesb46 You'll first have to solve all the philosophical problems about composition if you want to do that. 😂
@jamesb46
Ай бұрын
@@VictorGijsbers agreed, it’s not really possible. But with respect to scientific theories, there are at least two ways to get objectivity. One is to insist that there is one objective criteria that applied to all attempts at scientific theorizing, present or past. That is probably the most straightforward way to do it. The second is to say that a scientific theory is good insofar as it is succeeds relative to the standard at the time it was conceived. So, we could then compare the “relative successes” of two theories directly. Better yet, we could attach a sort of coefficient to each relative success that adjusts for the correctness of the standards. So, for example, if Aristotle’s physics is 80% accurate relative to the paradigm at that time, and Newton’s was 90% accurate relative to his time, and newton’s paradigm was 80% accurate as a paradigm, and Aristotle’s was only 50% accurate, then 0.5*0.8
@francescocerasuolo4064
Ай бұрын
Hello, wonderful video! do you have book suggestions to understand epistemology/metaphysics and authors like Kant, Foucault, Deleuze much better [for a university student(bachelor degree) in sociology]. Thanks for eventual responses, and thanks for this video.(they really keep me hooked.. the vids on Popper were the best).
@APaleDot
Ай бұрын
I don't see how this concept of incommensurability even gets off the ground. If our prime example of a paradigm shift is the shift from Newtonian mechanics to Relativity, then surely the fact that all the Newtonians became Relativists demonstrates that there really is a way to compare them. Clearly the physicists thought Relativity was better, even though they grew up in a Newtonian paradigm. I can see different fields being incommensurable with each other, but certainly not paradigms within the _same field._ We have historical evidence of those paradigms being compared successfully.
@VictorGijsbers
Ай бұрын
That's a very good question. I think Kuhn's best example is the shift from Aristotelian to modern science, where this idea of incommensurability makes a lot more sense. It's harder to see within the tradition coming from the 17th century. But there Kuhn suggests that if you look carefully at things like the shift from phlogiston to the caloric theory, of the chemical revolution of Lavoisier, it's rarely a case of the entire scientific community being convinced; and also rarely the case that the new theory is unproblematically better than the old one. Newton -> Einstein might actually be a fairly bad example of such a shift in standards, since the conversion of the community was relatively quick and painless. Obviously, this is not to say that Kuhn is right. I personally think incommensurability is at most a limited phenomenon, not a wholesale failure of comparability of two paradigms.
@JerehmiaBoaz
Ай бұрын
I think Kuhn confuses paradigm shifts with acceptance of new theories because they're demonstrably better (make more accurate predictions, describe a larger part of reality, or are simpler). We prefer Einstein's general relativity over Newton's laws because it's a more accurate description of a larger part of reality that does away with some of the inconsistenties in Newton's model (gravitational mass vs inertial mass and gravity as an unmediated force). The paradigm shift is our change in understanding of how (part of) the universe works by accepting the logical consequences of the new theory, by realizing what its predictive (mathematical) model implies about reality. A paradigm shift in science would mean another way of doing or thinking about science altogether (like Hume's empiricism caused).
@JonesNoahT
Ай бұрын
@@JerehmiaBoaz I agree. I think we might even have a domain of philosophy examining the nature of knowing (i.e., “Epistemology”) that may be able to facilitate our comparison of theories. Furthermore, in order for people to make a decision to convert to the new paradigm, the two paradigms must be commensurable because how else would they make a decision or even notice that there is such a decision to be made in the first place? The very process of the paradigm change itself assumes that the two paradigms must be compared, and this implies that the two paradigms are commensurable.
@simoneverodimarrow
Ай бұрын
❤
@JonesNoahT
Ай бұрын
I do not think that you need to assume ordinality of standards in order to resist Khun’s as those standards of scientific goodness could be not transitive and progress would still be made. With respect to your example of “mass,” well Plato has already told us that we struggle to understand the true nature of a form in the world and that its various properties may be revealed to us over time. As a thought experiment, let us extend the analogy of the blind men touching an elephant. It is usually not the case that the blind men begin to touch the elephant all at different spots at different times. One blind man may touch the trunk and then introduce another blind man to the trunk who then reaches over to touch the tusk. The latter and the former can still discuss the elephant. If a seeing man looks at the elephant, they can all still discuss the elephant.
@mattiesavage4905
Ай бұрын
hello! i am a 12 year old in china who is studying philosophy by my own. I just finished reading Sophie's World. do you have any more rcomendations or another philosophy-based book?
@VictorGijsbers
Ай бұрын
@@mattiesavage4905 Hi! Very nice to hear from you. :-) Sophie's World is a very nice book; I don't know of any others at the same level. Perhaps some of my other viewers have tips? One thing that comes to mind, which I read when I was a few years older but maybe is already interesting to you, is the book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter. It's not completely philosophy, but it is adjacent to philosophy. But I'm especially interested whether there are viewers with other ideas. :-)
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