Methods, Writing and Paradigms
January 17, 2023•835 words
I thought I would re-up an old post of mine that I had un-published for some reason. It's old! And not very deep. Regardless I feel bad for taking it down for no good reason, it might as well be up again.
[The following essay is an edited version of a series of comments I made in a Discord server I am in, presented for convenience. The discussion of Galileo is indebted to P. Feyerabend's discussion of it in Against Method, hastily summarized for my argument—interested readers should refer to it.]
Writing and explaining, getting across something that appears possibly inexpressible to someone else. To get across what I'm trying to get across, I'm going to take a few detours.
There's this very "basic" understanding of how there's a progression of thought, so it's like a very A -> B -> C -> ... It's the basic set-up of the scientific paper—Hypothesis/Methods/Results/Conclusion. 1 The issue is that there's a minimal extent to which you can "make" sense because there is a very restricted field of sense you can work on.
I mention this—and also re: the Copernican Revolution—that for a long time, if we are to take the "strict", "rational" rules of science, there was no "rational" way to decide, back then, without the benefit of hindsight that Copernicus was right. Even within the apparently unified tradition of empirical science, there is no meta-paradigm that we can find ourselves appealing to decide between two paradigms.
People dunk on the Church philosophers not wanting to look through Galileo's telescope—they forget why they didn't want to do so (they had very reasonable worries that there was no good reason to expect that a device that worked for objects on the Earth would work for heavenly objects, and actually it's easy to get confused by visual artefacts in telescopes, there was no good theory of optics to explain why we should expect the telescope to be reliable, many couldn't replicate Galileo's observations with his telescope, and apparently Galileo makes very odd astronomical observations that make no sense at all. Oh, and by the way, Koyré thinks that Galileo might have faked his data instead of actually doing experiments.)
It's a digression, but it's to show that to break out of one way of making sense to another, you need a way to be able to appreciate a plurality, a multiplicity of sense-making. So if you were in Galileo's time, being "rational" and "empirical" wouldn't just suit it, you have to be perfectly willing to, within limits, accept nonsense—maybe not accept nonsense, but enter its conceptual frame.
But the problem, when you're trying to do this, is that the person you are communicating it to should be able to trust why it is so. Why does this Galileo fellow talk about motion that cannot be seen? That's the definition of motion, isn't it?
Let's back up a little. There's an issue when you're trying to not just explain or get a risk facts, but a paradigm—which means the other person has to partially revise or at least temporarily suspend their standard evaluative frameworks. There's a difficulty in recognising that other frameworks might actually have sense on a plane of their own. I get this a lot when I try to get psychoanalysis/continental philosophy/left wing theory across—content whose mastery I don't feel 100% secure in, and then I end up getting snippy reactions.
And then I have to try to go, "No, that's not what I meant, you're going off against something". It's not necessarily a matter of not understanding, it's a refusal to grant you any space of sense making.
And they get snippy at me, and i get snippy back because your five second objections have like, treated well already in the literature, and it's like, could you trust me on this?
It would be better if it was in a space of "You are coming from a different place than me, so while I'm not going to necessarily accept your ideas, I'm going to try to see where you're coming from, and that there's a particular way in which you are making sense."
The problem here is that now it is less a problem of explaining or telling, but more like showing or grasping. (MBTI nerds might compare it to Ti vs Ni). You communicate what seems complicated to explain by 1) trying to get the reader's trust, and 2) trying to get details, and impressions, not in a manner to win an argument, because you cannot, but rather to get them to build up intuition as for why what you're talking about can subjectively make sense. After that, you can add all the arguments as you wish, but it's not strictly necessary.
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Which not very co-incidentally might be the reason "ideas are getting harder to find" because scientists are working harder to express their ideas in Science-ese, than they are at actually expressing ideas, and then it becomes a status game, and after that... ↩