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Paradigms and Barriers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Howard Margolis
Howard Margolis*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Having for thirty years believed and taught the doctrine of phlogiston… I for a long time felt inimical to the new system, which represented as absurd that which I hitherto regarded as sound doctrine; but this enmity… springs only from force of habit… [Black to Lavoisier, 1791]

This paper is abstracted from a forthcoming book which defends a particular answer to the question of just what it is that shifts when a paradigm shifts. The claim is that what shifts are habits of mind. And in particular the claim is that the most striking cases of paradigm shift will characteristically turn on a shift in some single, uniquely critical, habit of mind: the barrier. An account of a radical discovery — discovery that prompts the Kuhnian symptoms of incommensurability, so that intuitions that seem irresistible to some seem perverse to their rivals — then characteristically turns on how some individual got past the barrier (escaped the critical habit of mind), while at least for a while others could not do so.

Type
Part XI. Implications of the Cognitive Sciences for Philosophy of Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 431 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1991

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Footnotes

1

Support from the Program in History and Philosophy of Science, National Science Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. I am indebted to Tom Nickles for providing the occasion to write this summary, and (without implying agreement with the result) I am indebted to Nickles, David Hull and Thomas Kuhn for valuable comments.

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