Evolution of Human Perception: From Shakespeare to Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn believed that science evolves, and that the way we practice science resembles evolution itself. Read Kuhn closely and you watch Kuhn evolve as he writes. His book is great partly because he made himself his own experiment.

Shakespeare did the same. He made himself the process, and his characters its manifestation. He did not only invent the modern stage character; he invented the language that character needed in order to exist. Read the two side by side and it is hard not to hear Kuhn already speaking in Shakespeare. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" is about as good a piece of Kuhnian shorthand as an Elizabethan poet could give us.

One set of assumptions, then another

Human knowledge, in the hard sciences and in philosophy alike, moves from one set of assumptions to the next. Each set is accepted for a time as the truth the academy subscribes to, and from the academy it spreads slowly to everyone else.

Kuhn noticed that each new set rejects the one before it. Earlier paradigms did not fail to use the scientific method. What changed was what the method was applied to: the things themselves, the relationships between them, the instruments of measurement, and what counted as worth measuring.

In the large shifts the whole world view changes, for scientists and for entire societies. Set the Copernican world beside the Ptolemaic one and you can watch human perception transform. The Earth, and humankind with it, moved from the center to the periphery. Kuhn called this incommensurability: perspective, thought and language all become something new, and the old words no longer measure the new world.

The Wonderland dialogue draws the line exactly. Kuhn would have enjoyed how Carroll changed the language before the hard science caught up. Great literature and art have a habit of arriving first, which suggests that a change in thought may come before the scientific shift.

Incomprehensible or incommensurable

This is the distinction that matters now. Incomprehensible means we can never know. Incommensurable means our thinking and our language must change before we can make the next leap. Hamlet's "seems" stands exactly on that line.

If Kuhn is right that science evolves, then evolution is not only physical. It proceeds on many levels at once. It needs no final destination, but the meaning we find, or fail to find, may well influence its course.

So where are we? Our science, our technology, our art and the quality of our thinking have evolved together. My answer is that we have already leapt ahead, and our philosophy and our inner and outer awareness are playing catch-up. Our quantum science is still incommensurable with the language we use to describe ourselves. What we do with that, whether we come to terms with our meaning or our lack of it, will shape the next stage. The why behind the why becomes the most fundamental problem.

Kuhn gave one reason for taking the leap into a new paradigm: faith. And faith can only refer to the meaning we have found, or failed to find, in what we understand.

What changed since Kuhn

Kuhn pointed us to the history of science as the record of how our thinking evolves. What has happened since he wrote? I believe he would say what most of us would: the revolution in computing, the stretch it offers our humanity. It has brought many new problems with it, and many of those problems can only be solved by finding the meaning.

We cannot reject it. History has not once shown us rejecting a technology we had made: stone tools, pottery, fire, the printing press, and onward. The lesson repeats.

"I know not seems"

Hamlet would say it here, "Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems'", and he would shout it across social media at all the latter-day Hamlets who now believe they can reject reality.

This territory is a no man's land full of logical fallacies and clever epistemology. The only sound logic in it says we already have the answer.

Shakespeare did not decry his age or retreat from it. He pointed to the places where meaning is found, and he let his characters embody the absence of meaning he saw around him.

What Kuhn left unsaid

Kuhn earned his place as a great scientist and a great human being by saying, all through his work, that he did not have all the answers. His respect for the scientists who came before him is everywhere, whether or not hindsight proves them right.

In the 1960s there was something he could not say, and not only because he lacked the science we have now. Newtonian certainty still ruled. Once he had named the paradigm, incommensurability and the evolution of science, he had climbed so far out on a fragile limb that it is remarkable he was read at all. He expected to be rejected, and in some ways he was: the rejection came dressed as acceptance. "Paradigm shift" became everyone's phrase, and the claim beneath it, that meaning changes when the paradigm changes, went largely unheard. He knew he had gone as far as it was possible to go, and he would not saw the limb off beneath himself.

That was his genius. He left the most important part unsaid, and so passed it to a later generation to find. It is there in the cadence of his words, in the way they proceed with epistemic care while refusing to speak before the time was right.

We have arrived at that time. Our science, our technology and our evolution have brought us to an impasse, and the impasse is where the unsaid can finally be spoken: we cannot keep evolving without finding the why behind the why — why we exist, why we do science, why we do anything at all.

The meaning is found in the experience itself, the experience of being, which belongs to every kind of intelligence. It is unalienable. It cannot be handed from one being to another, and it can be spoken only by the being who lives it.