Paradigm Shift: How Expert Opinions Keep Changing on Life, the Universe and Everything

Paradigm Shift: How expert opinions keep changing on life, the universe and everything (Imprint Academic UK September 2015) is a book by the philosopher Martin Cohen.

Overview

Its core point is that scientific knowledge is less certain than it is usually portrayed. Cohen offers a number of examples to back up this claim, which he traces back to Thomas Kuhn, and the original theory of ‘paradigm shifts’ in 1962, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

In this key social science text, Kuhn claims that the progress of scientific knowledge is not the steady accumulation of pieces of a great jigsaw but rather a haphazard, political affair involving periodic paradigm shifts in which much of the old certainties are abandoned in order to open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before.

The idea behind Cohen’s book is to treat a broader sweep of issues than Kuhn does, from public health to climate change and high finance, as a series of ‘case studies’ which he argues illustrate both the radical insights Kuhn’s theory brings, and conversely the error of assuming that science and knowledge generally is ‘a very sensible and reassuringly solid sort of affair’.

In Cohen’s own words, he steps ‘through a wide swathe of modern life and conventional opinion in an effort to highlight the illogicality, the inconsistencies and the downright dishonesty of much of what we are repeatedly told is expert opinion, scholarly insight, settled fact’.

Reviews

The book was featured in the Danish broadsheet newspaper, Kristeligt Dagblad (Copenhagen) ^[1] which it sums up Cohen’s argument ironically as: “Science Men are always right. Even when they are in the middle of changing their opinions, they are always right. They are like foxes, which always have multiple ways in and out of their sets”.

and in the Irish Times (Dublin) ^[2] where it says

“plausible misinformation like this is regularly passed down to each generation as part of our efforts to explain everything. The humble giraffe’s neck illustrates an important truth, which is that the greatest error of them all is to confuse fact with theory, certainty with supposition”.

The Times Higher included the book amongst its ‘New and Notable’ books for November 26, 2015, saying that it was a good book to “Bestow on your favourite contrarian." ^[3]

One reviewer, Geoff Ward, sums up his core argument as that:

“Contemporary debates about the origins of life and the mechanism of natural selection, and about climate change, illustrate how interwoven science is with social values, and how scientists do not really proceed from the evidence to formulate a theory but rather seek the evidence to reinforce a prejudice.”

Adding:

“…maths, like any language, gives us only a way of putting things, those actual ‘things’ remaining ever elusive, and any theory ever only provisional, as in high-end quantum physics where maths is used to ‘prove’ the existence of non-observable entities which cannot be verified empirically, for example, the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy and hypothetical particles.” ^[4]

References