“Looking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, the cartographer, a picture of a terrain. Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events. Only after a number of such 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 then student 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 by the particular normal-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 reeducated, in some familiar situations 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.,,,
“An experimental subject who puts on goggles fitted with inverting lenses initially sees the entire world upside down. But after the subject has learned to deal with his new world, his entire vision field flips over.... Thereafter, objects are again seen as before the goggles were put on.”
p. 112, “Revolutions as changes of world views,” THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas S. Kuhn (2012)
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
INVERSION
“Looking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, the cartographer, a picture of a terrain. Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events. Only after a number of such 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 then student 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 by the particular normal-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 reeducated, in some familiar situations 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.,,,
“An experimental subject who puts on goggles fitted with inverting lenses initially sees the entire world upside down. But after the subject has learned to deal with his new world, his entire vision field flips over.... Thereafter, objects are again seen as before the goggles were put on.”
p. 112, “Revolutions as changes of world views,” THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas S. Kuhn (2012)
