On Learning Physics

Science and Education

Volumn 9, Issue 1-2, 2000, Pages 11-19

  Kuhn, Thomas S ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 2142738689     PISSN: 09267220     EISSN: 15731901     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1008626101432     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. I discuss the transmission of a lexicon because it is a source of clues to what the individual's possession of a lexicon entails. Nothing, however, depends upon the lexicon's being acquired by transmission. The consequences would be the same if, for example, it were a consequence of genetics or else implanted by a skilled neurosurgeon. I shall, for example, shortly emphasize that transmitting a lexicon requires repeated recourse to concrete examples. Implanting the same lexicon surgically would, I am suggesting, have involved implanting the memory traces left by exposure to such examples.
2. In practice, the techniques for describing velocities and accelerations along trajectories are usually learned in the same courses that introduce the terms to which I turn next. But the first set can be acquired without the second, whereas the second cannot be acquired without the first.
3. The terms "ostension" and "ostensive" have two different uses, which for present purposes need to be distinguished. In one, these terms imply that nothing but the exhibit of a word's referent is needed to learn or to define it. In the other, they imply only that some exhibit is required during the acquisition process. I shall, of course, be using the second sense of the terms. The propriety of extending them to cases in which description in an antecedent vocabulary replaces an actual exhibit depends on recognizing that description does not supply a string of words equivalent to the statements containing the words to be learned. Rather it enables students to visualize the situation and apply to the visualization the same mental processes (whatever they may be) that would otherwise have been applied to the situation as perceived.
4. Newton's first law is a logical consequence of his second, and Newton's reason for stating them separately has long been a puzzle. The answer may well lie in pedagogic strategy. If Newton had permitted the second law to subsume the first, his readers would have had to sort out his use of 'force' and of 'mass' together, an intrinsically difficult task further complicated by the fact that the terms had previously been different not only in their individual use but in their interrelation. Separating them to the extent possible displayed the nature of the required changes more clearly.
5. Though my analysis diverges from theirs, many of the considerations that follow (as well as a few of those introduced above) were suggested by contemplation of the techniques developed by J.D. Sneed and Wolfgang Stegmüller for formalizing physical theories, especially by their manner of introducing theoretical terms. Note also that these remarks suggest a route to the solution of a central problem of their approach, how to distinguish the core of a theory from its expansions. For this problem see my paper, 'Theory Change as Structure Change: Comments on the Sneed Formalism', Erkenntnis, 10 (1976), 179-199.
6. All applications of Newtonian theory depend on understanding 'mass', but for many of them 'weight' is dispensable.
7. Twenty-five years ago the quotation was a standard part of what I now discover was a merely oral tradition. Though clearly 'Wittgensteinian', it is not to be found in any of Wittgenstein's published writings. I preserve it here because of its recurrent role in my own philosophical development and because I've found no published substitute that so clearly prohibits the response that the question might be answerable if only there were more information.
8. J. L. Austin: 1961, 'Other Minds', in Collected Philosophical Papers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 44-84. The quoted passage occurs on p. 56, and the italics are Austin's. For examples from literature of situations in which words fail us,
9. see James Boyd White, When Words Lose their Meaning, 1984, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. I have compared an example from the sciences with one from developmental psychology in 'A Function for Thought Experiments',
10. reprinted in The Essential Tension, 1977, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 240-265.
11. At this point I will seem to be reintroducing the previously banished notion of analyticity, and perhaps I am. Using the Newtonian lexicon, the statement 'Newton's second law and the law of gravity are both false' is itself false. Furthermore, it is false by virtue of the meanings of the Newtonian terms 'force' and 'mass'. But it is not - unlike the statement 'Some bachelors are married' - false by virtue of the definitions of those terms. The meanings of 'force' and 'mass' are not embodiable in definitions, but rather in their relation to the world. The necessity to which I here appeal is not so much analytic as synthetic a priori.
12. In fact, for the Newton-to-Einstein transition, the most significant lexical change is in the antecedent kinematic vocabulary for space and time, and it moves from there upward into the vocabulary of mechanics.
13. For a fuller and more nuanced discussion of this point see my 'Commensurability, Comparability. Communicability', in P.D. Asquith and T. Nickles (eds.), PSA 1982. vol. 2, 1983, Philosophy of Science Association, East Lansing, 669-688.
14. Like the Newtonian terms I have been examining, the terms in any color vocabulary form an interrelated set. One cannot alter one of them without making corresponding alterations in a number of the others as well. Note, however, the parallel I am drawing is incomplete. Because their differences do not affect the structure of the color vocabulary itself, one can translate between the projectable 'blue'/'green' vocabulary and the unprojectable vocabulary containing 'bleen'/'glue'.
15. Despite my critics, I do not think that the position developed here leads to relativism, but the threats to realism are real and require much discussion, which I expect to provide in another place. These problems have already emerged repeatedly in this paper: in transitions between object language and metalanguage, for example, or in constant substitution of talk about how the world used to be, for talk about how people thought it was. They will emerge again below in my implied refusal to suppose, with Putnam, that the need to make drastic changes in the set of objects to which a term once referred indicates that it did not, in fact, refer at all.