Thinking about Thinking
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I have recently started to become very conscious of the written media I consume. Infamous popularizations like Sapiens, Life 3.0, and others while being engaging seem to have subtly given me a false sense of knowledge accumulation. Outside of a few perspective shifts, there wasn’t much struggle involved while reading these books. Real knowledge accumulation, be that by reading or doing, must involve struggle. This may look like re-reading the same paragraphs, questioning foundational assumptions, or metacognition. Previously, if a chapter was uninteresting or was getting too confusing, I would zone out and read it anyway till I got to a part of the book that was easier to understand. Now, I choose to sit with it, re-read, and question it till I understand. This month, I decided to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn in a conscious effort to consume better literature.
Since much of the book looked at science through a historian’s lens, I was able to pick up patterns of a typical scientific revolution. Normal science allows people to work within the confines of an established paradigm (eg: Newtonian Mechanics, Darwinian Evolution), allowing an anomaly or two. When too many anomalies accumulate, it gives rise to a crisis in that field. What results is debates of opposing theories and questioning foundational assumptions. An interesting byproduct of this cycle is incommensurability. In 1774, Joseph Priestly, a student of the Phlogiston school of thought, managed to isolate a gas and name it “dephlogisticated air”, since it lacked phlogiston (fire like element) and could absorb it better from burning materials. Since Phlogiston was the theory that all combustible materials release phlogiston upon burning, Priestly’s discovery fit well into the framework. Around two months later, Antoine Lavoisier, who was already skeptical of Phlogiston for a while and found that burning a substance in air increased its mass rather than decrease it, replicated Priestly’s experiment. In four years, he would publish a paper about this same gas but within a completely different paradigm. He named this gas oxygen. The key difference was that even though Lavoisier was familiar with (and even worked with) the phlogiston theory, he didn’t regard it as the absolute truth. Dismissing the framework he was accustomed to, he decided to challenge principle assumptions. One of the key characteristics of struggle is discomfort that leads you to such decisions.
It is important, however, not to deem Lavoisier as some kind of a hero that brought order to the unruly world of chemistry that had thus far been dominated by the chaotic likes of Priestly. Kuhn specifically warns against textbooks being written to give off such an impression. Even though it is convenient to make such a deduction given the manner of narration, we must understand how the evolution of science has always been the result of struggle between such conflicts.
This also suggests that science cannot be progressing towards a pre-existing goal. If it is, it would mean that all our old theories across scientific disciplines, most of which have been replaced, were roughly accurate and moving in the same direction. Moreover, our current theories would conserve most of what came before. However, this is hardly the case. As with evolution, we instinctively think of it as synonymous with progress. When stripped to its core, evolution is just organisms adapting to their surroundings which in itself does not suggest a positive change or growth. Similarly, science has simply been building on what came before it, irrespective of the specific domain, without moving toward any fixed truth. This makes the struggle slightly harder and all the more meaningful!
