TOWARDS A REVOLUTIONARY GESTALT
"Examining the record of past research from the vantage of contemporary historiography, the historian of science may be tempted to explain that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by new paradigms, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions scientists see different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before....
"It is as elementary prototypes for these transformations of the scientist's world that the familiar demonstration of a switch in visual gestalt prove so suggestive. What were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards... Only after a number of transformations of vision does the student become an inhabitant of the scientist's world, seeing what the scientist sees and responding as the scientist does. The world that the student then enters is not, however, fixed once and for all by the nature of the environment on the one hand, and of science, on the other. Rather, it is determined jointly by the environment and the particular scientific tradition that the student has been trained to pursue. Therefore at times of revolution, when the normal scientific tradition changes, the scientist's perception of his environment must be re-educated--in some familiar situation he must learn to see a new gestalt. After he has done so, the world of his research will seem, here and there, incommensurable with the one he had inhabited before."
p. 111-112, STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas S. Kuhn (1955, 2012)
Monday, August 8, 2016
TOWARDS A REVOLUTIONARY GESTALT
TOWARDS A REVOLUTIONARY GESTALT
"Examining the record of past research from the vantage of contemporary historiography, the historian of science may be tempted to explain that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by new paradigms, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions scientists see different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before....
"It is as elementary prototypes for these transformations of the scientist's world that the familiar demonstration of a switch in visual gestalt prove so suggestive. What were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards... Only after a number of transformations of vision does the student become an inhabitant of the scientist's world, seeing what the scientist sees and responding as the scientist does. The world that the student then enters is not, however, fixed once and for all by the nature of the environment on the one hand, and of science, on the other. Rather, it is determined jointly by the environment and the particular scientific tradition that the student has been trained to pursue. Therefore at times of revolution, when the normal scientific tradition changes, the scientist's perception of his environment must be re-educated--in some familiar situation he must learn to see a new gestalt. After he has done so, the world of his research will seem, here and there, incommensurable with the one he had inhabited before."
p. 111-112, STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas S. Kuhn (1955, 2012)
