On Monday, February 25, 2002 8:11 PM john hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I'm not so sure I understand what D. McCloskey's piece > is saying. When he remarks that, "The result of > reading 44 pages of hundreds of scientific results > from the front line of applied economics was mainly > that I believed surprisingly little of it," I am > reminded about the old saying that new paradigms arise > in science not because scientists become convinced, > but because the advocates of the old paradigms grow > old and die and are thus replaced by younger > practitioners of another school of thought.
I'be heard this bantered about a lot in philosophy of science circles, but, in one paradigmatic case, Lavoisier's oxygen hypothesis did eventually win over Priestly. In a more recent example, many doctors are now convinced that bacterial infection (by H. pylori) causes ulcers -- at least, a good portion of them. This was not the consensus a decade ago and around a decade before that, it was seen as outlandish -- except by a handful of researchers. (See Paul Thagard's 1999 book _How Scientists Explain Disease_ for an in depth examination of this particular case as well as some cogent thoughts on philosophy of science. I reviewed his earlier work _Conceptual Revolutions_ in 1996. That review is online at http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Concept.html) I think the claims of people going to their graves holding onto refuted ideas are a bit exaggerated. I'm sure one can find examples of such, but are there any decent studies of this? If it were true, change in any field would be at a crawl, since no one who has an established position would ever give way and only newcomers would ever come up with new positions. Prima facie, this is not what happens in most fields. In fact, it would seem the opposite is typically the case. People tend to change often -- and sometimes for, IMHO, faddish reasons. I bet the reason for the idea that people take their beliefs to the grave is probably more because of a few high profile cases, such as Einstein and his view of quantum physics. What probably happens is this. Most of us aren't part of debates outside our respective fields. I.e., we're laypeople with respect to them. So, we mostly see the high profile characters, especially the ones who make a splash -- like an Einstein or a Hawking. We don't have a context into which to put this. So, when someone sees Einstein going to his grave believing that quantum physics are fishy, it becomes easy to accept the view that people -- even geniuses -- wedded to outmoded theories. This doesn't refute the view, but it might explain should there be no confirming evidence. Cheers! Daniel Ust http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
