Chapter 8 - Young Tom Confuses Epiphany with Empathy
Chapter 8 Young Tom confuses Epiphany with Empathy
Harvard President James Bryant Conant was an academic theoretical chemist at a time when the world was agog with the advances and achievements of science. So enamoured was he with science, that in 1947 Conant thought Harvard ought to start teaching science to the Humanities undergraduates, or at least help them familiarise themselves with these the disciplines of progress and the future. To this end, Conant sought a contribution from the young Physics Masters graduate Thomas Kuhn, whom he recalled was editing the Harvard undergraduate journal “Crimson” a few years before. Neither Conant nor Kuhn could have known what a “butterfly effect” phenomenon this assignment would turn out to be.
Kuhn was tasked with the responsibility of delivering a lecture to Harvard non-science undergraduates on the subject of the History of Science.
Naturally, Kuhn had to brush up on the subject. Doubtless he had been taught, or had read, something of a Cook’s Tour of the history of science over the preceding millennia. Doubtless he already knew names like Archimedes, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Halley, Newton, Faraday, Watt, Franklin, Davy, Tesla, Einstein, and so on. Doubtless he could name one or two discoveries of each. But Kuhn was nothing if not studious, and so he opened the archives to put some flesh on the bones of his existing understanding of the history of science.
What then happened? Kuhn had what he was to call an epiphany. A eureka moment. A thought he found so extraordinary that he would elaborate and expand and work by and with this thought for the rest of his life.
I quote from “NewWorldEncyclopedia.org”:
“Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle’s Physics and was astonished at how ‘wrong’ it was (when understood in Newtonian terms)…Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room…when suddenly Aristotle ‘made sense.’”
“Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Kuhn wrote, ‘How could Aristotle’s characteristic talents have deserted him so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine, rather than Aristotle’s, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine” (“The Road Since Structure”)”
“Kuhn reported that, in his window-gazing, “Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together.” As the Scientific American article put it, “Kuhn … realized that Aristotle’s views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton’s … Understood on its own terms, Aristotle’s Physics ‘wasn’t just bad Newton’, Kuhn says, it was just different.” This insight would go on to underlie most of his subsequent work in history and philosophy of science.”
In other words, Kuhn had had great difficulty understanding how an apparently intelligent Aristotle had had such idiotic ideas about physics.
It then dawned on Kuhn that Aristotle had been analysing the world around him with pre-Aristotlean assumptions and a pre-Aristotlean nomenclature for concepts such as “motion”.
In other words, he had been using the only perspective available to him at the time.
Now, what is perplexing for *us*, looking at this so-called “Eureka moment” today, is that the idea people see things and conceptualise from their own perspective is entirely pedestrian and unremarkable to anyone who has, say, learnt a second language, travelled, or spent any time on conversation with another person of different age, culture, or gender.
So *quite obviously* Aristotle wasn’t an idiot.
Quite obviously Aristotle used language not directly transliteratable into 20thcentury American English.
Why would Kuhn have not realized that in the first instance?
How could he have imagined such an ordinary idea an “epiphany”?
Rather than “epiphany”, it seems Kuhn sensed for the first time in his life “empathy”. A capacity to place himself in another’s shoes. An idea that there is another point of view outside his own. And from the writings we have from the pen of Kuhn over the rest of his life, it is possible this one moment of scientific empathy might have been the only such one he ever experienced.
This chapter could be a bit longer. I could expand it with anecdote or parallel references.
ReplyDeleteIt deservers a bit of attention because this is the start of Kuhn imagining he has something to say, something novel, about the history of science. This is Kuhn discovering he might be better at spinning yarns leveraging his status as a physicist *than* being an actual physicist.
Bully for him, of course.
But, really, all he has discovered is empathy.
No wonder he thought competing paradigms incommensurable if he had such trouble empathising with Aristotelean physics.
Again, any polyglot understands that *concepts* differ between languages, that values differ, all manner of ideas differ, and so it would have been far more remarkable had Aristotle's basic concepts in physics were *not* different to Newton's or Kuhn's. And despite his very expensive education, it suggests Kuhn's upbringing had been nonetheless *cloistered* if making a conceptual jump to Aristotelean seemed so unique.
Nor do I understand why anyone else thought his leap remarkable, or at least took his descriptions at face value.
There is also the flavour, reading "The Ashtray" by Errol Morris, that Kuhn was somewhere on "the spectrum". This fits a number of known aspects to his youth - failure with dating, anxiety, seeing a psychologist - and if this is so then maybe he had trouble with empathy.