Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Greg Ransom on Kuhn and Membership Selection

Greg Ransom wrote an interesting essay on Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms, attempting to explain the way paradigms emerge. In it he proposes what he called "membership selection", which he defines as follows:

"membership selection is a selective process which selects over individuals for a property of those individuals which either does or does not contribute to a group property, a property which cannot be exhibited alone by a single individual, but which can only be expressed as a group property. Through this process which selects over individuals and for a property these individuals either do or do not contribute to the group, there will be selection for the group property which selected individuals exhibit."

This is to be distinguished from group selection, where one engages in an action that may harm you, the individual, but benefits the group (which contain some of your genes -- in a Daqwkins "selfish gene" way). In group selection, an individual may give a warning call that protects most members of the group, but may draw attention to the individual giving the call. With membership selection, the individual is not harmed at all with the behavior. Ransom gives the example of musk ox keeping wolves at bay by constantly facing the threat and keeping the calves behind them -- this benefits the individual and, when with other musk ox, results in the famous circling behavior that is even more protective. Another example would be herding/schooling behavior.

While this is an excellent theory of biological evolution, there are, as usual, problems with metaphorically extending it to social behavior. Specifically, Ransom tries to say that new paradigms in science are created through membership selection as he describes it. He does so to try to explain that natural selection is insufficient as an explanation for why a particular paradigm will gain members to the exclusion of others. The problem with his metaphor is that people are capable of changing their minds (even if many do not), while genes change from generation to generation. With the emergence of a new paradigm, people are going to choose to accept it or not, for a variety of reasons. Is there a genetic predisposition for believing in Newtonian gravitation vs. Relativistic gravitation? Hardly. But clearly there is a genetic element to circling behavior in musk ox. This is where the metaphor fails. Where it works, however, is when, if I believe something, I am benefitted if others believe it as well. If we add in an ability to convince ourselves and others, the idea of membership selection works for paradigm acceptance. A new paradigm takes over as more members are added to the group that believe in the new paradigm.

But what makes us believe in the new paradigm? Ransom doesn't address this, but there may in fact be an element of natural selection at this level. Kuhn believes that new paradigms are accepted if they "bear fruit." Well, many theories can and do bear fruit, yet are not accepted as a dominant paradigm -- or such theories may be delayed for a while before being accepted. Perhaps it is those that bear the most fruit most quickly, thus demonstrating a selective advantage to those who accept the paradigm and join in with others in using it as a research model. This would explain the selection of a particular paradigm. As it demonstrates its usefulness, more people are convinced, and membership selection takes over. Perhaps if Ransom had added in the theory of memetics, he would have come to such conclusions himself. Catastrophe theory also provides a mathematical model that demonstrates how one moves from one paradigm to the next. He would have also benefitted from such a model.

Now, this works well for the hard sciences -- physics, chemistry, and even biology to an extent. But it hardly works for the soft sciences and the humanities, which do not demonstrate the dominance of a single paradigm, but rather demonstrate the dominance of several paradigms. Of course, this isn't exactly right, either, as the humanities are still dominated by blank slate theories since discarded by practically everyone else -- though there are different sub-paradigms within that theory that make up the majority of humanities scholarship. Anyone with any kind of foundationalism -- including evolution -- or belief in human universals have no place in most humanities programs. But the problem in the humanities and the soft science is that none of them can "bear fruit" in the same way. With the hard sciences, you have to have hard results. But in something like economics, you don't have to have a result that matches the real world for people to accept it. In fact, you can have the opposite result in the real world, and still have supporters (think of Keynesian economics, which was a demonstrable failure in the 70's, yet is making a comeback). The problem is that economics is not really an experimental science. You can observe what happens, and theorize from that, but you cannot conduct experiments to see if your ideas work. The result is and has been a proliferation of theories and models that may or may not have any relevance to the real world, and which may help or may harm. Scientism and mathematicism in economics has thus been quite harmful, because they give the appearance of hard science and precision where none can ever be achieved. Certainly mathematics forms the foundational paradigm of contemporary economics -- but it has been very much to the detriment of economics, as it gives the appearance of hard knowledge where there is none. This is what happens when something is used incorrectly in a field. There is a place for math in economics, of course, but not to the extent that it has been used, where it masks reality and results in false conclusions.

Of course, what I may simply be saying is that economics is really for a paradigm shift. If revolutionary science is when we get a "crisis due to the emergence of some intractable anomaly," then the current economic crisis shows that economics has certainly reached this point. Except in abstract model-building, math has reached its limits in economics. But I predict it will be harder to make the shift, and the transition will be longer, precisely because of the nature of economics as a science.

The humanities are in even worse shape, because the results are even less clear. Nobody is reading the works of humanities scholars anymore, and perhaps that is the expression of the crisis there. But how do the humanities "bear fruit"? Not merely be increased "interest," whatever that may mean. And people in the humanities who dominate are in protected positions in universities, so there are no real consequences for them to hold bad theories. They just keep producing more like them, hiring more like them, protecting those people, and thus perpetuating bad ideas. Membership selection in this case only perpetuates bad behavior and bad ideas. How, then, does one create a paradigm shift on the humanities? If revolutionary science arises because of bad consequences, how can there be revolutionary humanities if bad consequences are protected?

To a limited degree, this problem also exists in the soft sciences. The good news, though, is that as complexity theories and biology begin to dominate, fewer bad ideas can survive. The soft sciences need to be made more scientific through biology and systems science rather than made more like math and physics. That will be the real paradigm shift -- in the soft sciences as well as in the humanities. Unfortunately, it seems that those of us in the humanities who do not believe in postmodernism and rather use evolutionary and systems theories in our work will perhaps find ourselves more at home in social science departments. But those social science departments are going to have to be open to hiring us, which they currently are not -- primarily due to a wrong-headed, tribalist turf protection. If they could get over that and become more interdisciplinary, that would open things up for both the soft sciences and the humanities. Now that would be a major paradigm shift.

10 comments:

Unknown said...

Troy writes:

"But what makes us believe in the new paradigm? Ransom doesn't address this"

Actually, my account does address this, and comes straight out of Kuhn -- and goes further and provides a causal process accounting for how the desiderata of theory choice change over times.

And note well, I developed the idea of "membership selection" to explain social phenomena, and I don't claim the process works in the biological realm. The biological example of the musk oxen is for pedagogical purposes, and nothing more.

Unknown said...

Troy writes:

"this works well for the hard sciences -- physics, chemistry, and even biology to an extent. But it hardly works for the soft sciences and the humanities .. "

Exactly. Kuhn's work was an attempt to make sense of the hard sciences, and Kuhn makes no claims about the "soft" sciences.

Neither do I.

Unknown said...

I just want to emphasize again, I'm not drawing a metaphor.

My selective mechanism stands on its own, it does not require a DNA/RNA sub-stratum to function.

It's not an explanation by "metaphor". It's a causal mechanism.

The model doesn't depend on genetic predispositions, it depends on training and the mastery of paradigm problem solutions, etc.,
as explained in the paper.

"Is there a genetic predisposition for believing in Newtonian gravitation vs. Relativistic gravitation? Hardly. But clearly there is a genetic element to circling behavior in musk ox. This is where the metaphor fails."

Unknown said...

Note well that Kuhn's training / exemplary problem solution model is a rejection of the crude belief / desire picture of how we should go about explaining changes in our scientific understanding and changes in our desiderata for theory choice.

Troy Camplin said...

Other than "what works," it really isn't addressed. And, as I pointed out, there are many paradigms that have elements that "work." So why one over the other? This is what I addressed, arguing that natural selection of memes is in fact involved.

Now, reading the paper, I understood that you intended for the membership selection theory to be social, but if you look at your definition, it in fact is not. It works exceptionally well to explain collective action of herds and schools at the biological level. That was clearly not your intention, but that is what you managed to accomplish nonetheless. The result of that is that the theory is less accurate as a social evolutionary model. Unless your theory merely suggests the truism that "birds of a feather flock together," in which case there is less there than I saw in the paper. And I certainly don't think that that is the case. In truth, I think you accomplished much more than you intended. And for that reason, ironically, though you did not intend for your theory to be literal for biology and metaphorical for social evolution, it is. It's a strength, not a weakness. And also, something being a metaphor doesn't mean there's something wrong or weak about it. Quite the contrary. Metaphors means "to carry across," and if your theory doesn't carry across -- if it isn't a metaphor -- it's weak and does not work.

Now, as for my forays into the soft sciences and the humanities, I know that neither you nor Kuhn intended his theory for that. That was merely me trying to expand the theory to show some of the problems within the soft sciences and humanities. Kuyhn's paradigm theory, and your expansion of it, help to highlight where some of the problems lie in these disciplines. I decided to do that based on the discussion where you asked me to read your essay and comment.

Unknown said...

It looks like we disagree about the literature on metaphor. With metaphor, some elements "carry across" and some don't, and it isn't usually possibly to verbally articulate and limn fully what is carried over and what is not.

Troy writes:

"And also, something being a metaphor doesn't mean there's something wrong or weak about it. Quite the contrary. Metaphors means "to carry across," and if your theory doesn't carry across -- if it isn't a metaphor -- it's weak and does not work."

Unknown said...

The point about how Kuhn's picture of science and theory choice doesn't carry over well to the social sciences is a good one, and one that many others could learn from.

Troy Camplin said...

Metaphor is something I have spent a great deal of time studying. Of course there is something that is lost in the translation -- that is the nature of translation, and thus of metaphor. But there is no getting away from metaphor, either. When we talk about anything in two or more different fields, metaphor is inevitable. It is unfortunate that people focus on the weakness of something that is far more strong -indeed, powerful -- than it is weak. There is no real understanding or communication across the disciplines without it. For example, "membership" already means something, but you used it as a metaphor for a kind of selection in biology, then used it as another metaphor for a social process. The first step worked better than the second step. In fact, if you were merely talking about membership as in that of a fraternity, it would have worked better to have not gone anywhere near biology, or referred to the process as an evolutionary selection process.

Bro said...

In the recent Art Lies, I read an article about how metaphors are weak and artists should distrust them. There really needs to be a good defence paper of the metaphor.

Anonymous said...

Good day, sun shines!
There have were times of troubles when I didn't know about opportunities of getting high yields on investments. I was a dump and downright stupid person.
I have never imagined that there weren't any need in large starting capital.
Nowadays, I feel good, I begin take up real income.
It's all about how to select a proper companion who utilizes your money in a right way - that is incorporate it in real deals, and shares the profit with me.

You can get interested, if there are such firms? I have to tell the truth, YES, there are. Please be informed of one of them:
http://theinvestblog.com [url=http://theinvestblog.com]Online Investment Blog[/url]