On paradigm shifts
Sá þetta einhversstaðar. Það sem á við scientific paradigms á líka við um political paradigms einsog við höfum talað um. Hér má líka skipta út economic og setja in political.
“Anyone familiar with the science fiction of Isaac Asimov will know what is meant by a Seldon Crisis. According to Asimov’s stories, Hari Seldon was the supreme exponent of ‘psychohistory’ a fictitious mathematical branch social science (which bears more than a passing resemblance to mainstream economics) which allowed Hari Seldon to forecast social crises and revolutions with precision, hundreds of years into the future. In a sense Thomas Kuhn is the Hari Seldon of scientific theory.
In Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , he maps out in detail, how scientific crises begin, how they mature and how they are eventually resolved. Kuhn even spells out how the old guard will lash out against any new ideas in a final futile attempt to defend their own discredited theories. It is fascinating to look at the debate over Thomas Piketty’s work through the lens of Thomas Kuhn’s analysis. Just as Kuhn predicted, new data is unable to resolve disputes once a field has entered a state of pre-revolutionary crisis. On one side Piketty has provided enough evidence to persuade the pre-converted and on the other side Chris Giles, of the Financial Times, has now provided enough doubt to persuade the un-converted. According to Kuhn, this crisis phase will persist indefinitely, regardless of the emergence of new data, until a new way to think about economic theory emerges – this will be the paradigm shift which resolves the crisis. The various competing schools of thought will see in any new data what they want to see. They will use their individual interpretations to convince themselves that they and their theories are correct and their opponents are wrong. Confirmatory data will be embraced uncritically while any inconvenient challenging data will be doubted, ignored, discarded or belittled.” (George Cooper)
Lárus Ýmir Óskarsson
