26 January 2010

A Kuhn Quote

From "Dubbing and Redubbing":

Clearly, however, only a certain number of examples [used to introduce Newtonian mechanics to students] may be altered piecemeal in this way. If too many require adjustment, then it is no longer individual laws or generalizations that are at stake, but the very vocabulary in which they are stated. A threat to that vocabulary is, however, a threat also to the theory or laws essential to its acquisition and use. Could Newtonian mechanics withstand revision of the second law, of the third law, of Hooke's law, or the law of gravity? Could it withstand the revision of any two of these, of three, or of all four? These are not questions that individually have yes or no answers. Rather, like Wittgenstein's "Could one play chess without the queen?", they suggest the strains placed on a lexicon confronted by questions that its designer, whether God or cognitive evolution, did not anticipate its being required to answer. What should one have said when confronted by an egg-laying creature that suckles its young? Is it a mammal or is it not? These are the circumstances in which, as Austin put it, "We don't know what to say. Words literally fail us." Such circumstances, if they endure for long, call forth a locally different lexicon, one that permits an answer, but to a slightly altered question: "Yes, the creature is a mammal" (but to be a mammal is not what it was before). The new lexicon opens new possibilities, ones that could not have been stipulated by the use of the old.
And a footnote about that Wittgenstein quote, in case it didn't seem familiar:
Twenty-five years ago the quotation was a standard part of what I now discover was a merely oral tradition. Though clearly "Wittgensteinian," it is not to be found in any of Wittgenstein's published writings. I preserve it here because of its recurrent role in my own philosophical development and becuase I've found no published substitute that so clearly prohibits the reponse that the question might be answerable if only there were more information.
This amuses me in particular because of Haugeland's fondness for chess examples. He seems pretty firmly committed to answering Witt with a "No!" -- which makes it interesting that Kuhn [correctly] thinks that there not being an answer is the whole point, given that Haugeland is one of Kuhn's executors.

edit: I have begun to twitter


N. N. said...

It's clear that whether we say that a platypus is an mammal or not, we thereby alter the sense of 'mammal.'

It's also clear that if we say that chess can be played without the queen, we thereby alter the sense of 'chess.' But it's less clear that if we say that chess cannot be played without the queen that we thereby alter the meaning.

Suppose we put it like this: the platypus was conceptually difficult because giving birth and suckling young were each thought to be necessary and sufficient conditions for being a mammal (and for some reason, it was never imagined that an actual animal might split these up). Do we have a similar thought about chess, e.g., that having pawns and having queens are each necessery and sufficient conditions for being chess? Usually, when I think of chess, I think of having pawns and queens (etc.) as jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for being chess. Accordingly, I am inclined to say that 'chess' without the Queen just isn't chess. As Wittgenstein puts it in several places, to change a few of the rules of chess is to play another game.

Daniel Lindquist said...

Sorry it took me a bit to respond to this; life is hectic.

What's clear to me is that before the discovery of the platypus, people thought that all mammals gave birth to live young which they suckled. They thought that this was true of all mammals, including any that they hadn't encountered yet. And then they encounter the platypus, which lays eggs that hatch into babies which suck. Later on people regard all mammals as suckling their young, but as not always giving birth to live young. It's not clear to me that we have to say any one thing about what "mammal" meant during all of this, whether it's stayed the same or not. And I don't see what hinges on any such answer we might give.

Similarly, it's clear to me that we play chess with a queen. It's not clear to me that removing her would make it a different game. If you change enough of the pieces, alter the size of the board, make the rooks instead of the king the piece that gets checked etc., then it's true at some point that it stops looking like chess (though it still looks like it, in the way that checkers does). But I don't see that there's any firm line that separates "chess" from "non-chess" in between the extremes of "chess as we play it" and "something we agree would not be chess any longer".

Which is, I take it, Apocryphal Wittgenstein's point: it's a mistake to think that language lays out all of these limits in advance for us, and that when we "draw" them we're actually just making them explicit. Language isn't like that -- sometimes we don't know what to say, as Austin stressed, and this isn't because of ignorance of our practices.

People thought that all mammals suckled their young and that anything that suckled its young was a mammal, and that all mammals gave birth to live young and that anything that gave birth to live young was a mammal*. These are claims of necessity and sufficiency for being a mammal; they are projectible and support counterfactuals. I don't see why we shouldn't say that people kept using "mammal" the same way, but found out that the second set of conditionals was false when the platypus was discovered. (And again, I don't see that it matters if we say that they changed their mind about how to use "mammal" instead.) The connection between meaning and modality strikes me as looser than you seem to imply.

*I'm not sure about this last part, as an historical matter. Lots of snakes and such give birth to live young.