I was watching [this video](https://youtu.be/euE7PP_RUfk) on YouTube about incommensurability, and I have some questions.
As I understood it, when a paradigm shift occurs, there is no way we can objectively compare these paradigms. Now this confused me a bit, and I have a couple of questions regarding this.
1. Does this apply to all sciences or just social sciences?
2. Aren’t the new paradigms there because they explain topics the previous paradigm couldn’t while also covering whatever the previous paradigm explains? If so, wouldn’t that mean the new one is better?
3. Why would we use the old standard? Isn’t thenew standard a result of a failure in the old standard?
4. It was also mentioned in the video itself that there are people who argue that the new paradigm is better because they address failures of the previous ones, which I understand. But for those who argue that there is no objective standard, why would we ever prefer the old standard? If the old paradigm was better, why was there ever a paradigm shift then?
I understand that the video might have oversimplified it for beginners, and I might have misunderstood the whole thing.
In: 8
Consider a paradigm like a blanket, and you switch to a new paradigm/blanket which is larger (handles edge cases the previous did not) or has a different thread count (more accurate at a different scale). Both blankets might keep you warm, assuming you stick to the middle, but you might want the new one for the edges or scale. Or the old one might be a simpler design and handles what your needs are just fine. So instead of throwing out the old one, you would just use whichever serves your purposes at the time. You might even have several equally valid paradigms/blankets and you use each as needed. But generally you would base your next one on the most recent, as you want to cover more and more edge cases. Improved accuracy might be enough on its own though.
Example: if you want to calculate the time it takes to get to your destination down the road, you generally don’t need to account for space-time stretching effects of general relativity or even the curvature of the earth. But when you do need those things, they are a lot more useful to have and use.
As for the blanket, sometimes you need to share with more people, or use a blanket that doesn’t trap all the heat, or both. But when it’s just you on a normal day, your favorite go-to works best.
1. It applies to all sciences, and even liberal arts. A paradigm is framework for thinking about things in a certain way so that you don’t have to prove everything from scratch. I.e. If I want to analyze Romeo and Juliet from a Marxist paradigm, I can take for granted that there is a stratification of social classes that are in conflict with one another, so all I have to do is categorize the characters into class groups and examine the dynamics between those groups.
2. A new paradigm is not necessarily better at all things than the old one. For example Boltzman’s statistical model of gasses is based on the probability of a single gas molecule to be in a particular location at a particular time, this is an expansion on the classical kinetic model of gasses which treats a gas as a uniform whole. Boltzman’s model is useful and necessary when you want to calculate things like entropy and enthalpy of the gas, and while you COULD use it to calculate pressure and volume the amount and complexity of calculations you’d have to do would be outrageous. If you’re just looking to calculate pressure, volume, or temperature the kinetic model (PV=nrT) only requires simple algebra to arrive at the exact same answer as Boltzman. Said another way you could find the slope of a straight line using either college level calculus or 7th grade algebra and arrive at the same answer, but that doesn’t mean algebra is no longer useful.
3. Same answer as above. Sometimes even if the old paradigm is technically wrong or not as correct, it is still useful for many purposes. While it is technically incorrect to say “There are 3 states of matter,” unless you are working in very specific field of chemistry or physics you will never have any need to know about phases of matter outside the main 3.
4. There will always be people that will argue that a new way is better. Usually those arguments happen within philosophy rather than actual practice. Using the gas example above, if a team of scientists/engineers need to calculate the pressure of a gas in a tank, one person could use PV=nrT and have the answer in 30 seconds while another could use Boltzman’s model and arrive at the same answer after 2 days. Nobody is going to say the second person was more correct or smart for using Boltzman, they’re going to say they were stupid for spending 2 days on a problem that could be solved in 30 seconds.
It’s also important to point out that Kuhn’s idea of incommensurability, that there is no objective standard to measure paradigms against, is just flatly wrong in a lot of cases particularly in physical sciences. We can absolutely compare, for example, the geocentric and heliocentric models of the solar system by by forecasting where objects in the night sky will be at some point in the future. And that’s exactly what we did in that case, medieval astronomers would take their theories and use them to publish star maps of the future and the strength of their theory was compared to others based on how far out they could make accurate predictions.
Modern scientists also wouldn’t say that the medieval astronomers were doing “bad science” by using a geocentric model, even though we know they were wrong. They were making observations (the position and movement of objects in the sky), creating a hypothesis (these objects are moving around the earth in a certain way), and testing that hypothesis (if my hypothesis is true, then at a specific future date the position of the planets will the thus). That’s literally the exact same scientific method we use today, they just had incorrect hypotheses which any scientist can tell you happens more often than not.
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