The Street Finds Its Own Uses For Things

Finding Gibson's blog has been like running into a long-lost friend. His literary output is pretty slow, with three to four years between books. So, I've been busily reading the teasers of some work in progress that he posts on the blog.

And yes, I am aware that there is another, much more famous guy named Gibson who is making news just now. Here's the difference. Actor, Mel Gibson is a raving lunatic albeit with some talent as a film maker. Writer William Gibson is an introverted Canadian who reinvented a (at the time) torpid literary genre and invented many of the core concepts that we now associate with the Internet and information technology.

To wit: the expression, The street finds its own uses for things. The meaning should be self-explanatory. The World Wide Web, originally designed to help nuclear physicists link massive data sets together becomes a way to purchase almost any book every published and have it shipped to your home.

Gibson ponders the uses of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

Myself, I keep going back to my no doubt sloppy and imperfect understanding of Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. If the theory of "fourth generation war" is viewed as a new paradigm (and it seems to me to meet the criteria) then this is more than a failure of perception on the part of neoconservatives.

Consider the following, from the Wikipedia entry on SSR:

'According to Kuhn, the scientific paradigms before and after a paradigm shift are so different that their theories are incomparable. The paradigm shift does not just change a single theory, it changes the way that words are defined, the way that the scientists look at their subject and, perhaps most importantly, the questions that are considered valid and the rules used to determine the truth of a particular theory. Kuhn observes that they are incommensurable — literally, lacking comparison, untranslatable. New theories were not, as they had thought of before, simply extensions of old theories, but radically new worldviews. This incommensurability applies not just before and after a paradigm shift, but between conflicting paradigms. It is simply not possible, according to Kuhn, to construct an impartial language that can be used to perform a neutral comparison between conflicting paradigms, because the very terms used belong within the paradigm and are therefore different in different paradigms. Advocates of mutually exclusive paradigms are in an insidious position: "Though each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing science and its problems, neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proof." (SSR, p. 148).'

This would explain, it seems to me, the apparently literal impossibility of explaining the fundamentally counterproductive nature of the United State's invasion of Iraq, or of what's currently going on in Lebanon, to those who disagree. Or, literally, vice versa. If you're behind the curve on the paradigm shift, if I'm reading Kuhn at all correctly, you're literally incapable of getting it. Or vice versa. "It is simply not possible, according to Kuhn, to construct an impartial language that can be used to perform a neutral comparison between conflicting paradigms, because the very terms used belong within the paradigm and are therefore different in different paradigms."

The bad news is that the policy-makers of the United States and Israel apparently (still) don't get the new paradigm, and the bad news is that Hezbollah (et al, and by their very nature) do. Though that's only bad (or double-plus-ungood) if you accept, as I do, that the new paradigm allows for a more effective understanding of reality. So if you still like to pause to appreciate the action of phlogiston when you strike a match, you may well be okay with current events. So many, God help us, evidently are.

I've heard that Kuhn fiercely lamented the application of SSR to anything other than the structure of scientific revolutions, but that's how it usually is, when the street finds its own uses for things.

I've read about Kuhn before but never had it explained to me so succinctly, if imperfectly and sloppily. But thinking about current events in the Middle East in this light seems to explain pretty much everything. If we were all physicists, it would be as if American, Israeli and other governments are making policy using a four-dimensional, Newtownian paradigm, while Hezbullah, et. al. operating using rules of quantum mechanics and uncertainty. These two paradigms, while existing in the superset of what we call physics, operate under completely different -- at times mutually exclusive -- principles. In other words, Bush, Olmert, Blair, Rice and veryone quite literally don't get it with regards to what Hezbullah, Al Quaeda and their 4GW compatriots are trying to do.