Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [76]
Thus far, there are no set criteria for choosing between competing theories in a moment of crisis. Without the right theoretical lens through which to see the world, we’re stuck in a skeptical moment. We’re left wondering how to choose between competing theories. Kuhn’s answer is that our theory choices are largely determined by social and political factors, not by appeals to truth. Who we are and where we’ve been matters a great deal when it comes to choosing between theories. In the absence of clear criteria for choosing between competing theories, we often rely on social and political concerns to make a choice. In this case, the government’s desire to convict George Sr. (and, perhaps, the Bush administration’s desire to invade Iraq and defeat Saddam Hussein) makes Jarvis’s theory easy to accept.
But Jarvis’s theory doesn’t get to the truth of the matter. Jarvis’s theoretical commitments lead him to see bunkers that just aren’t there. Political concerns lead to accepting the wrong view in this case. Of course, Kuhn would point out that calling the interpretation wrong already depends on a scientific paradigm. Paradigms are inescapable—but that doesn’t mean every paradigm is as good as every other. If we don’t want to mistake balls for bunkers, or to be led erroneously to war, the Zuckerkorn paradigm is a pretty darn good one.
Q: War! What Is It Good For?! A: Well, Certainly Not Buster Bluth
Kuhn has often been charged with epistemic relativism, the faulty doctrine that knowledge is relative to (or determined by) one’s culture. When accompanied by a belief that no culture is superior to any other, a relativistic position can reduce conversation to a “Who’s to say?” argument. There are neither facts of the matter, nor superior theories. There are only local truths. But, as we’ve seen, some theories have better results than others, though determining which results are better will obviously depend on what we’re interested in, be it going to war, appreciating testicles, or something else.
While choosing Jarvis’s theory may have positive political consequences for the Bush administration, which can use the photographs to justify invading Iraq, it has a negative political impact on Buster Bluth, who must either fail his military training or be mobilized long before he’s ready. Given Buster’s inability to hold down any job or perform any tasks not designed for a specialist at a university (or arcade), it’s unlikely that he’d survive the war. Moreover, many other young Americans would surely die. Even though Jarvis’s theory is defeated, Buster still takes a punch from his motivational coach, Gob, as a result of his perceived need to climb a wall in order to finish military training before the new mobilization date. Letting the powerful people in a paradigm determine the limits of knowledge can have undesirable consequences, to say the least.
Kuhn denies that there are “facts of the matter” that allow us to choose theories, but he doesn’t hold an “all theories are created equal” view in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Rather, Kuhn uses an evolutionary metaphor to describe different criteria for determining when a dominant theory rules. According to Charles Darwin, the species that survive are those whose random mutations are best suited to their environment. And according to Kuhn, the theories that survive are those best suited to solve the problems they establish: “Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving problems in the often quite different environments to which they are applied.”1 But solving problems isn’t the same as moving closer to a theory that explains everything. It’s part of the nature of scientific theories to have anomalies (things that can’t be explained). Nevertheless, some paradigms are better at answering certain questions than others, even if we can’t say that they’re a “better representation of what nature is really like.”2 Kuhn doesn’t believe