Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [77]
Does the narrator in “Sad Sack” refute Kuhn’s claim that there’s no ultimate truth? Has Ron Howard, the brilliant actor, producer, and director managed to refute one of the greatest philosopher’s of science of the twentieth century? The Lord God Opie tells us that Tobias took a photograph of himself in the bathtub—and we see it. Is this trouble for Kuhn?
Not really. Kuhn acknowledges that we can determine (in retrospect) which theory is better suited to answering questions that interested and perplexed scientists at a particular time. We can determine which theory is better, in retrospect, when the epistemic crisis is solved and the military crisis is averted; even fighter pilots are able to confidently assert that they were “looking at balls.”
But if our paradigms determine what we can see, where do crises come from? As we’ve seen, all paradigms have anomalies. These are usually just dismissed (science will figure it out eventually, c’mon!), but every once in a great while, resolving the anomaly becomes all important. In this sense, it’s a good thing Barry is there to challenge Jarvis. “Those are balls!” is a challenge to a whole dominant regime. Barry’s sexual experimentation and consequent familiarity with how male genitals look “close up” helps us get outside of our theory-laden perspective.
How to Choose Between Bunkers and Balls
The “Sad Sack” scenario shows us how important it is to be able to decide between competing theories. To avoid the feedback loop in which the theory determines what one sees, and what one sees determines whether there is a problem with a theory, there must be something outside of a theory to determine whether it’s worth adopting or not.
Kuhn, in fact, recognized the necessity of external criteria for choosing a theory. In “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice,” Kuhn outlines “five standard criteria for evaluating the adequacy of a theory” and says that he agrees “entirely with the traditional view that they play a vital role when scientists choose between an established theory and an upstart competitor.”4 Kuhn’s five criteria are accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. As the word standard implies, these are hardly novel criteria, leading many of Kuhn’s critics to accuse him of turning away from what made his position interesting in the first place. Nevertheless, there is intuitive appeal to these criteria, and it’s worth considering whether the Jarvis Theory of Iraqi Thunder (JTIT) or the Zuckerkorn Testicular Closeup Theory (ZTCP) better meets these criteria.
Accuracy is mostly a predictive criterion; the theory that better predicts occurrences is the better theory. When we’re concerned with something that has already happened, like the bunker-ball quandary, this concept of accuracy isn’t a useful criterion. A more useful concept of accuracy, but one that Kuhn neglects, is based on correspondence. Which theory better matches the world? Where Barry has seen testicles and George Michael has seen Tobias’s testicles, ZTCP is the more accurate theory. To this day, no one has seen WMDs in Iraq. Both theories are internally consistent, but only ZTCP is consistent with things that we know to exist in the world. JTIT posits a previously unseen entity, the Iraqi WMD bunker, which is inconsistent with what we know exists in the world. On the other hand, the criterion of fruitfulness is defined by the ability to produce new phenomena for research. So the discovery of WMDs would make JTIT the more fruitful theory.
Without that discovery, though, both theories only account for one phenomenon, the existence of a photograph. Zuckerkorn’s theory has the advantage of being far simpler. “This close they always look like landscapes,” is a far simpler description than Jarvis’s multiple-sentence theory. And that’s not only because Zuckerkorn is a master of word economy who once summed up a whole plea by saying “it’s very long