Re: BHA: Emergence

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mervyn Hartwig wrote:
>
>  Bhaskar's paradigm case seems to be that of scientific
> revolutions, e.g. the emergence of Einsteinian physics from Newtonian.
>

I guess Kuhn is responsible for this originally, but since the idea was
introduced it has been endlessly confusing.

There has been only _one_ scientific "revolution," and it lasted three
or four hundred years and was a long and messy process through which
what we now call science came to be called science.

It is plain silly to call the switch from Newton to Einstein
"revolutionary." It was _not_ silly to call the whole process, of which
Harvey, Galileo, etc were early progenitors a revolution: it introduced
a quite new way of looking at the physical world. Nothing but pure
confusion and babble can come from calling Einsteinian physics a
"revolution" or a "new paradigm." Actually, we probably haven't come
close yet to completing the paradigm building that galileo kicked off.
Physical science three centuries from now will be astoundingly different
from the physical science we know now, but it will not have introduced a
new paradigm.

Carrol


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