Progress
I see a challenge from that brief historical analysis in the previous section. Why, if ethics is based on social evolution, do societies sometimes devolve?
Evolution does not necessarily mean progress, just change. A society could degenerate as surely as it could progress.
In other words, the mechanisms for degeneration must be understood as well as those for progress.
Another thing forces a question for the fall of Rome. That the empire already lasted for a thousand years, clearly for most of which time being an indefinitely sustainable society. So what caused its ultimate degeneration? If the theory of ethics is based on social evolution, then how can it cope with the degeneration of societies? Do the societies' morals degenerate as much as the societies do themselves? If so, then one cannot really make any secure claim at any one time that our ethics must be superior to the ethics practised before, by our own values. Our ethics must be as good as the ethics practised during at least some periods of our history. The claim that it must be superior to all of them presupposes a clear direction of moral progress, which will have been proven false.
The notion of degeneration, if inevitable, rather takes a lot of the meaning from life. I do not live for reward in a heaven. But I find inspiring the notion that by the time I die, the world will have become, in at least some respects, a better place than it was when I was born. I think that it is important that life have a direction. One of the things that I find inspiring about history is that so often it too seems to have a direction. One of the great inspiring things about science is how much of a strong direction that it possesses. How it must inspire an academic to think that she will contribute to a body of knowledge that will live long after she is dead. Perhaps this is what I find so inspiring about progress. My opportunity to contribute to progress is the only guarantee that I have of immortality, a surrogate for the heaven denied me by my beliefs.
Society does not necessarily progress, but knowledge can. During a social regression, knowledge might lay dormant for a thousand years, but it will still progress when it is once returned to. All that is necessary here is that it be preserved somewhere for safekeeping. Not all the knowledge of antiquity was preserved during the Dark Ages. But enough remained to lessen greatly the amount of time necessary to enable our society to return to the state that it had attained before the fall. It is rather like the psychological principle of conservation of memory. You may forget what you learned a long time ago, but you still relearn it much more quickly than someone else can learn it for the first time.
The main requirement for the progress of knowledge is commensurability*. It is important, at every stage in the progress of knowledge, that the new stage be commensurable with the old stage. To say that knowledge progresses is to say that the new stage of knowledge is "better" than the old. This claim presupposes a common standard of "goodness" with which to measure both the stages.
This, I think, is the central contradiction in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. On one hand, Kuhn claims that science does progress (1996, p.160). On the other, he states repeatedly that the different paradigms of science are incommensurable with each other (e.g., p.103). But to claim that science progresses is to presuppose some unit of commensuration.
In fact, Kuhn himself provides several units of commensuration later in the book. The most important is the solved problem (p. 169). The basic way in which science progresses is that it keeps solving more and more problems. The ability to solve problems form two vitally necessary requirements for any new scientific paradigm that would replace an old one. First, it must actually solve at least some of the problems that provoked the crisis in the original paradigm. Second, it must preserve at least a large number of the original problems that were solved in the old paradigm. There are other criteria to meet, of course (p.206), but which take a lesser priority. Of secondary priority are accuracy of prediction, especially quantitative prediction, and the increasingly esoteric nature of the subject matter. Of tertiary priority are "simplicity, scope, and compatibility with other specialties". This list is not meant to be exhaustive. But it already does seem to provide a fairly strong basis for commensuration between one paradigm and other--in which case, the two paradigms cannot really be "incommensurable".
This is not to imply that the commensuration of different paradigms is not extremely difficult. Different paradigms not only change the meanings of terms, but also partly the rules of science itself. But some common standards for a good scientific theory must still remain. These are what the scientific community must use to arrive at the unanimous decision at which they always arrive. Without them, the scientific community would be as fragmented as the philosophical community has always been.
*By "commensurability", I here mean the dictionary definition of "commensurability". That is, "measurability by a common standard". However, this usage can still be understood as level 2 commensurability from my theory of commensurability.
Evolution does not necessarily mean progress, just change. A society could degenerate as surely as it could progress.
In other words, the mechanisms for degeneration must be understood as well as those for progress.
Another thing forces a question for the fall of Rome. That the empire already lasted for a thousand years, clearly for most of which time being an indefinitely sustainable society. So what caused its ultimate degeneration? If the theory of ethics is based on social evolution, then how can it cope with the degeneration of societies? Do the societies' morals degenerate as much as the societies do themselves? If so, then one cannot really make any secure claim at any one time that our ethics must be superior to the ethics practised before, by our own values. Our ethics must be as good as the ethics practised during at least some periods of our history. The claim that it must be superior to all of them presupposes a clear direction of moral progress, which will have been proven false.
The notion of degeneration, if inevitable, rather takes a lot of the meaning from life. I do not live for reward in a heaven. But I find inspiring the notion that by the time I die, the world will have become, in at least some respects, a better place than it was when I was born. I think that it is important that life have a direction. One of the things that I find inspiring about history is that so often it too seems to have a direction. One of the great inspiring things about science is how much of a strong direction that it possesses. How it must inspire an academic to think that she will contribute to a body of knowledge that will live long after she is dead. Perhaps this is what I find so inspiring about progress. My opportunity to contribute to progress is the only guarantee that I have of immortality, a surrogate for the heaven denied me by my beliefs.
Society does not necessarily progress, but knowledge can. During a social regression, knowledge might lay dormant for a thousand years, but it will still progress when it is once returned to. All that is necessary here is that it be preserved somewhere for safekeeping. Not all the knowledge of antiquity was preserved during the Dark Ages. But enough remained to lessen greatly the amount of time necessary to enable our society to return to the state that it had attained before the fall. It is rather like the psychological principle of conservation of memory. You may forget what you learned a long time ago, but you still relearn it much more quickly than someone else can learn it for the first time.
The main requirement for the progress of knowledge is commensurability*. It is important, at every stage in the progress of knowledge, that the new stage be commensurable with the old stage. To say that knowledge progresses is to say that the new stage of knowledge is "better" than the old. This claim presupposes a common standard of "goodness" with which to measure both the stages.
This, I think, is the central contradiction in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. On one hand, Kuhn claims that science does progress (1996, p.160). On the other, he states repeatedly that the different paradigms of science are incommensurable with each other (e.g., p.103). But to claim that science progresses is to presuppose some unit of commensuration.
In fact, Kuhn himself provides several units of commensuration later in the book. The most important is the solved problem (p. 169). The basic way in which science progresses is that it keeps solving more and more problems. The ability to solve problems form two vitally necessary requirements for any new scientific paradigm that would replace an old one. First, it must actually solve at least some of the problems that provoked the crisis in the original paradigm. Second, it must preserve at least a large number of the original problems that were solved in the old paradigm. There are other criteria to meet, of course (p.206), but which take a lesser priority. Of secondary priority are accuracy of prediction, especially quantitative prediction, and the increasingly esoteric nature of the subject matter. Of tertiary priority are "simplicity, scope, and compatibility with other specialties". This list is not meant to be exhaustive. But it already does seem to provide a fairly strong basis for commensuration between one paradigm and other--in which case, the two paradigms cannot really be "incommensurable".
This is not to imply that the commensuration of different paradigms is not extremely difficult. Different paradigms not only change the meanings of terms, but also partly the rules of science itself. But some common standards for a good scientific theory must still remain. These are what the scientific community must use to arrive at the unanimous decision at which they always arrive. Without them, the scientific community would be as fragmented as the philosophical community has always been.
*By "commensurability", I here mean the dictionary definition of "commensurability". That is, "measurability by a common standard". However, this usage can still be understood as level 2 commensurability from my theory of commensurability.
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