Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars

Notes

NOTES 3. The “Conversion” of David Raup 1. The Alvarez team was not offering an explanation for all mass extinctions , only the one at the K/T boundary. The impact theorists’ claim has always been that bolide impacts were suf¤cient but not necessary for mass extinction. However,according to Frankel (1999),evidence is mounting for impact hypotheses accounting for other mass extinctions, including the Permian extinctions, the biggest of all. 2. This dichotomy between bolide and volcanic theories is too simple. As Glen notes, some scientists hold that both volcanic and impact events could have contributed to the K/T extinctions (Glen 1994, p. 73). The point is better expressed by saying that only the volcanic or impact theories, or some combination of the two, can possibly account for the shocked quartz, iridium layer, etc. 3. Like so much else in Kuhn’s work, his view of conversions is hard to understand clearly. Kuhn himself, and his more sympathetic commentators, have denied that anything irrational is implied by his talk about “conversions”or “gestalt switches.” For instance, Paul Hoyningen-Huene (1993, p. 258) argues that Kuhn uses the term “conversion” to emphasize that belief changes are involuntary , not that they are irrational. Hoyningen-Huene insists that for Kuhn revolutionary change is always explicable in terms of “identi¤able reasons.” It may therefore seem unfair that I have associated Kuhn with an antirationalist view of scienti¤c change. Yet I think it is undeniable that the overwhelming majority of those who have read and reacted to Kuhn, both foes and would-be friends, have taken him to say something radical about theory change. It may well be that those readings, as Hoyningen-Huene insists, are based on misunderstanding. However, when the misunderstanding has carried the day, we have no choice but to deal with it. Therefore, I would like readers to understand that when I attack “Kuhn”in this chapter,I am attacking a particular,widespread interpretation of his view. Perhaps I am attacking a straw man, but, if so, the straw man has grown so large that he eclipses the real one. Why has Kuhn been so widely misunderstood, if he has? Perhaps he is a victim of the famous Murphy’s Law that states “When you speak so clearly that nobody can misunderstand you, you will be misunderstood.” Actually, I think Kuhn’s own language about “conversions,” “world-changes,” “gestalt switches,” etc., naturally led to such (mis)interpretations. It is undeniable that many sociologists of knowledge saw Kuhn as taking the study of science away from philosophers , who insisted on interpreting theory change in terms of reasons, and handing it to sociologists, who gladly viewed scienti¤c change as an effect of social causes. Sociologist Barry Barnes, whom I quote in this chapter, af¤rms precisely this. Robert Klee summarizes the impact of Kuhn: 177 The demise of the positivist model of science and the rise of Kuhnian historicism ushered in a momentous change in philosophy of science. The previous consensus view that science,at least on occasion,discovered a preexisting objective reality gave way to alternative critical accounts of science that stripped it of any such achievement . These new critical accounts were invariably relativist in epistemology, and, for the most part, antirealist in ontology. . . . The new forms of relativism and antirealism were born within the nest of the social sciences. Many Kuhn-inspired critics of science took Kuhn’s ultimate point to be that the philosophy of science, as traditionally conceived since the time of Immanuel Kant, was dead. Its old job would be taken over by a successor discipline called variously the sociology of science , the sociology of knowledge, or science and technology studies. (Klee 1997, p. 157) 4. Harold Rollins points out (personal communication) that stratigraphers are aware of other “pencil-thin” marker horizons such as volcanic ash beds, so perhaps Glen is overstating his case here. However, Glen’s point is that other such markers, such ash beds, are with rare exceptions limited only to parts of single continents (Glen 1994, p. 78). Glen claims that the iridium layer is the ¤rst truly global such marker, and that this is what makes it so remarkable (p. 79). 5. The perfect gloss on the (mis)appropriation of Kuhn by sociologists and others is given by Robert Klee: The publication of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scienti¤c Revolutions constituted one of those rarest of events in philosophy:a philosophical work with an even larger impact...