Over at Per Caritatem, Cynthia Nielsen has begun an introduction to the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. For as many as I have read, Cynthia’s posts are perennially interesting and clearly conceived. Not surprisingly, this series’ beginning very much continues that pattern, and I am sure this series’ future posts will also be quite worthwhile reading.
Maturing Scientific Communities
As young scientists routinely obtain, through education, their introduction into mature, scientific communities, young scientific communities may require some time to mature and develop their communities’ paradigms (Kuhn 11). During this early phase, nascent scientific communities typically involve different schools of thought that seek “relevant” facts somewhat individualistically according to whatever paradigms they find most influential from other areas of thought (Kuhn 15–17). Typically, one of these “pre-paradigm schools” will triumph over the others at some point and usher in a community’s paradigmatic period (Kuhn 17–18). The precise point of transition from nascent to mature scientific community is seldom easily identifiable, but neither is this transition completely obscured because of the notable advances achieved in the move from the pre-paradigm period into the paradigm period. Instead, a general, historical period can typically be identified in which this transition occurred for any given, mature field (cf. Kuhn 21–22).
In this post:
 Thomas Kuhn |
Hermeneutics and “the Near”
Concerning interpreters’ obligation to look beyond themselves, Hans-Georg Gadamer observes the following:
We are always affected, in hope and fear, by what is nearest to us, and hence we approach the testimony of the past under its influence. Thus it is constantly necessary to guard against overhastily assimilating the past to our own expectations of meaning. Only then can we listen to tradition in a way that permits it to make its own meaning heard (Gadamer 304).
Thus, Gadamer advises interpreters always to seek to put themselves into the position of the other person(s) whom these interpreters wish to understand. For, by so doing, interpreters may begin, albeit imperfectly, to look beyond themselves “not in order to look away from [what is near] but to see it better, within a larger whole and in truer proportion” (Gadamer 304).
In this post:
 Hans Georg Gadamer |
Paradigms and Communities
In Thomas Kuhn’s analysis, new paradigms attract adherents from older alternatives by producing sufficiently unprecedented achievements, but these new paradigms still leave work to be done because of the new problems that they create or the new issues they suggest (Kuhn 10, 17–18, 80). Yet, the community that accepts a given paradigm implicitly judges the problems that the paradigm introduces to be less severe than those that it resolves (Kuhn 23).
Paradigms define specific, scientific communities, and young scientists gain entrance into a mature scientific community by learning to operate within that community’s paradigm (Kuhn 10–11). Conversely, those who refuse to accept a paradigm in ascendancy in a given field may be excluded from that field’s discourse (Kuhn 19, 104). Thus, a paradigm forms its adherents and their work into a relatively cohesive, identifiable tradition of “normal science” within which individuals rarely disagree over their paradigm’s fundamental attributes (Kuhn 11).
In this post:
Thomas Kuhn |
Kuhn and Popper
Thomas Kuhn acknowledges that Sir Karl Popper’s work earlier in the twentieth century somewhat anticipated his own view of science (Kuhn, Essential Tension 267). Nevertheless, Kuhn also identifies two meaningful distinctions that his work has vis-à-vis Popper’s (Worrall 66–71). First, Kuhn perceives favorably deep commitments to normal scientific traditions because these traditions (1) encourage substantive study of very specific issues and (2) prepare the way for scientific revolutions (Kuhn, Essential Tension 268; cf. Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions 28, 65). Second, Kuhn prefers to consider paradigmatic revolutions in terms of a process of competition rather than falsification as the newly accepted paradigm may itself also eventually be replaced (Kuhn, Essential Tension 268; Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions 2, 8, 12, 151–52).
In this post:
 Thomas Kuhn Thomas Kuhn  Thomas Nickles |
Kuhn and Kant
In the later half of the twentieth-century, Thomas Kuhn reappropriated and significantly adapted Immanuel Kant’s qualifications of empirical science (Kuhn, Essential Tension 336–37; Kuhn, Since Structure 103–104, 264). First published in 1962, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions replaced Kant’s transcendental truths of reason with theoretical ‘paradigms’ (cf. Kuhn, Since Structure 264). This understanding puts Kuhn in an interesting position from which to shed light on the hermeneutical dimensions of biblical studies. Naturally, there have been some recent qualifications and objections to this application that deserve attention.
From Kant’s occasional language about intellectual ‘revolutions’ (e.g., Kant 19–26), Kuhn certainly does appear to derive his application of the concept. Yet, for Kant these revolutions typically move interpretations of empirical observations into greater conformity with reason’s transcendent truths. By contrast, for Kuhn, these revolutions result in the adoption of a new paradigm, which may itself eventually be discarded when another paradigm comes to appear preferable (cf. Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions 2, 12, 151–52). In his later work, however, Kuhn has discarded this term ‘paradigm’ because other authors have appropriated it in such diverse manners that the term has become too difficult for him to use precisely (Kuhn, Since Structure 221).
In this post:
 Immanuel Kant Thomas Kuhn  Thomas Kuhn Thomas Kuhn |
Perspectives Old, New, and Pauline
Alan Bandy has been kind enough to carry this entry as a guest post over at Café Apocalypsis.
