What are such paradigm shifts in Philosophy? — SpinozaNietzsche

The linguistic turn might be an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn

One paradigm shift is likely The Gettier Problem. Knowledge was generally understood to be justified true belief. Then Gettier came in and scuttled all of that. I believe today knowledge is understood as a tool to grasp truth and reality, but does not necessarily grasp truth itself.

Alisdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Anscombe, and others would say that the words "moral", "virtue", "obligation", and similar ethical terms no longer describe what Plato and Aristotle meant, nor would they understand what we mean. The entire project of contemporary ethics would be as if "the notion 'criminal' were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten," in Anscombe's words. This idea of modern ethics as a degenerate, vestigial grasping at what the Greeks meant is even stronger in MacIntyre, and characterizes a lot of the resurgence of virtue ethics. An interesting question is whether it's possible to return to a previous paradigm.

...The Gettier Problem... — Philosophim

Few folk have ever held justified true belief to be both sufficient and necessary conditions for knowledge. Not even Socrates thought it adequate, and he is the fellow who developed it - describing it as a "wind-egg". Gettier just presented examples that undergraduates could understand.

The hard part, for those who need such things, has been working out what an "essence" of knowledge might be.

Perhaps; at least it would be if we were to consider philosophy as subject to Kuhnian development. The "linguistic turn" is a post-hoc compilation of various, divergent approaches to philosophy, arguably including much of the ethics points to.

But philosophy is not a science, and not necessarily subject to the sorts of historical analysis common to the sciences. Would you happily call pointillism a paradigm? Or Shinto? Seems a stretch.

Few folk have ever held justified true belief to be both sufficient and necessary conditions for knowledge. Not even Socrates thought it adequate, and he is the fellow who developed it - describing it as a "wind-egg". Gettier just presented examples that undergraduates could understand. — Banno

I appreciate the history lesson. I was taking a stab in the dark. I probably shouldn't have. :)

It's a common misapprehension. Many folk think Gettier "broke" a central idea in philosophy, but as so often, the situation was much more complicated. :wink:

But philosophy is not a science, and not necessarily subject to the sorts of historical analysis common to the sciences. Would you happily call pointillism a paradigm? Or Shinto? Seems a stretch. — Banno

Philosopher Lee Braver happily associates philosophies and metaphysical eras with paradigms. There is the Kantian paradigm, the Heideggerian paradigm, etc. He takes his lead from writers like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Heidegger.

It's a common misapprehension. Many folk think Gettier "broke" a central idea in philosophy, but as so often, the situation was much more complicated. — Banno

Yes - thank you.

It's a common misapprehension. Many folk think Gettier "broke" a central idea in philosophy, but as so often, the situation was much more complicated. :wink: — Banno

:ok:

An interesting question is whether it's possible to return to a previous paradigm. — J

Yes, for example a return to a paradigm* before Descartes proposed a separation between mind and body. A lot of philosophy has since then been obsessed with explaining away or trying to bridge the assumed gap between mind and body or other objects of knowledge.

But philosophy is not a science — Banno

Right, it's different in many respects, but it is also similar. Science, philosophy, and art are activities that challenge and sometimes increase understanding.

*edit

Behaviorism and eliminativism are on the outs. Panpsychism is making a comeback.

It's hard enough to track paradigms in the sciences, where they are supposedly at home. Philosophy and art are usually, and perhaps better traced in terms of traditions. Where paradigms are supposedly incommensurate, traditions trade items.

Well, I belevie that there should be "paradigm shifts or revolutions in philosophy".

Look at the advances in Neuroscince over the last five years, surely some of these must make us assess philosophicl thinking.

Sartre thought human conflict and constant struggle were just a normal part of our condition. Could the need for conflict be driven out of us by rewiring our brains? John Locke said, “Good and evil, reward, and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature”. Our motives could be altered by medically changing our brains.

We have neurological methods of fixing problems with the brain, such as in people with speech impediments. We can translate brain activity into words and sentences through speech synthesis. When speaking, we can correlate the pattern of electrical activity that happens in the brain to consonants and vowels. This has given light to the neural code of speech. Through an implant, brain activity can be translated into a machine speech synthesis, which might give speechless people their spoken words back.

These and the many other advances in neuroscience make me think that philosophy might have to change its mind.

'Being modern' or 'the modern worldview' is itself an over-arching paradigm, because it embodies many unspoken axioms or presumptions about 'the nature of things' or 'the way things are' that are themselves philosophical in nature. And it is, of course, constantly changing (hence, post-modernism, post-secular and other such descriptors.) But then the task of a critical philosophy is bringing these presuppositions to conscious awareness - which is difficult, as they are like the spectacles through which we view everything and it's hard to look at them, instead of through them.

These and the many other advances in neuroscience make me think that philosophy might have to change its mind — Rob J Kennedy

Philosophy changes its mind all the time, usually well before the sciences do. The kinds of neurological ’fixes’ you describe have little to do with the meaning of paradigm shifts as Thomas Kuhn meant them. Improvement in a technology need not require any global transformation in thinking.

It's a common misapprehension. Many folk think Gettier "broke" a central idea in philosophy, but as so often, the situation was much more complicated.
— Banno

Yes - thank you. — Leontiskos

Unpacking the complications of the situation requires a paradigmatic shift regarding what constitutes belief. A very large portion of the 'problem' Gettier showed involves the historical malpractice of treating belief as equivalent to propositions and/or propositional attitudes. When the right sort of light is shed upon that underlying issue, the 'problems' Gettier showed are dissolved.

Maybe philosophy is paradigm recognition. The search for the paradigm.

Thales said to his buddy "See that tree over there?" And his buddy said "yeah, so what?" And Thales said, "It's not what you think it is. It's water." And we've been scratching our heads, asserting "paradigm shift" ever since.

Hi Josh,

When I look at the state of the world, we are urgently ineed of transformative thinking. And, it is only medical science that can change us. Human nature is fixed.

Rob

Medicine has specific areas of applicability, obviously a very important one, but not medicine is not applicable to everything.

What are such paradigm shifts in Philosophy? — SpinozaNietzsche

Maybe nothing more than who is still the more referenced, after the longer time.

I submit, under that criteria, there are but two: Aristotle with pure logic, Kant with pure reason. All others construct philosophies ultimately grounded in, or at least conditioned by, presuppositions of them.

What are such paradigm shifts in Philosophy?
— SpinozaNietzsche

Maybe nothing more than who is still the more referenced, after the longer time.

I submit, under that criteria, there are but two: Aristotle with pure logic, Kant with pure reason. All others construct philosophies ultimately grounded in, or at least conditioned by, presuppositions of them. — Mww

According to that logic, most of what Kuhn considered to be paradigm shifts in the sciences would have to be ignored.

I don’t get it. Paradigm shifts in science are not ignored, couldn’t be by definition actually, so what’s wrong with the logic of my submission, exactly?

Incidentally - where would you put post-structuralism in all this? Footnotes to Kant?

I don’t get it. Paradigm shifts in science are not ignored, couldn’t be by definition actually, so what’s wrong with the logic of my submission, exactly? — Mww

You said “ Maybe nothing more than who is still the more referenced, after the longer time.”

As overthrown scientific paradigms from earlier eras fade from memory, they will become referenced less and less. Just as in philosophy, Aristotle, Plato and Kant get all the attention , the first two as the founders of Western philosophy and the latter as the founder of modern philosophy, Aristotle, Euclid and Pythagoras get the attention for founding the logic-mathematical basis of science, and Galileo and Newton are credited with the grounding of modern science. But we no more ignore all the philosophical paradigms between the Greeks and Kant, or after Kant, than we do all of the scientific paradigms other than those associated with the Greeks and Newton. Is all modern philosophy just a footnote to Kant? No more so than Kant was just a footnote to Leibnitz, or Spinoza to Descartes, or Descartes to Aquinas.

Ehhhh….sorry, man, but I have such little interest in the soft sciences. That said, I can’t claim enough knowledge to answer your question. With respect to Kant, though, I’m confident social sciences would relate to him only as far as he treats of anthropology (from a pragmatic point of view), 1796. Not having studied that work, I can’t say post-structuralism is a footnote to it.

Descartes. And I reject the notion that what constitutes a paradigm shift in one area defines a paradigm shift for all areas. Philosophy of mind, ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics as well as the scientific method are deeply rooted in Cartesianism for better or worse.

All paradigm shifts are philosophical. All paradigm shits are rooted in the way we look at the nature of being of particular areas of study. And it just does not get any more ontological than that.

Ehhhh….sorry, man, but I have such little interest in the soft sciences. — Mww

That's fine, I am just curious. So you don't see Derrida or Deluze, say, as philosophers. Maybe I should have said post-modernism.

So you don't see Derrida or Deluze, say, as philosophers. — Tom Storm

Sure I do. But they haven’t seriously shifted any paradigms. Or, they haven’t shifted any serious paradigms. While they may have advanced this or that line of thought, they haven’t altered thought itself.
—————-

….overthrown scientific paradigms from earlier eras fade from memory…. — Joshs

That criteria is low-level, I should think. There are certainly advances in science, but very few cancel their predecessors outright.

Sure I do. But they haven’t seriously shifted any paradigms. Or, they haven’t shifted any serious paradigms. While they may have advanced this or that line of thought, they haven’t altered thought itself. — Mww

Fair enough. I wonder are there any generally agreed upon key indicters for when a paradigm has shifted? @Joshs?

How about the 1927 Solvay Conference in Physics as the mother of all paradigm shifts in modern science and philosophy? I say it marks the boundary between the Modern and Post-Modern periods. The subject was Electrons and Photons and the world's most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. The leading figures were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Seventeen of the 29 attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners, including Marie Curie who, alone among them, had won Nobel Prizes in two separate scientific disciplines. ... Essentially all of those names who had contributed to the recent development of the quantum theory were at this Solvay Conference and the essentials of the newly-devised quantum mechanics were presented and discussed. (wiki)

Not only did these advances make possible almost all the technological breakthroughs seen in the 20th century, it also undermined many previous assumptions about the nature of matter, not least the supposed mind-independence of the objects of physics. This in turn gave rise to the philosophical conundrums posed by wave-function collapse and entanglement, still the source of unresolved debates about the nature of reality and the mind's place in it.


Participants at the 1927 Solvay Conference: A. Piccard, E. Henriot, P. Ehrenfest, E. Herzen, Th. De Donder, E. Schrödinger, J.E. Verschaffelt, W. Pauli, W. Heisenberg, R.H. Fowler, L. Brillouin; P. Debye, M. Knudsen, W.L. Bragg, H.A. Kramers, P.A.M. Dirac, A.H. Compton, L. de Broglie, M. Born, N. Bohr; I. Langmuir, M. Planck, M. Curie, H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, P. Langevin, Ch. E. Guye, C.T.R. Wilson, O.W. Richardson