An immersive classroom activity for teaching Kuhn’s concept of paradigms in Structure

This is a guest post by True Gibson, PhD student in Logic and Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine

This post is part of an ongoing series in the US on unusual, tried and tested teaching ideas. If you have an interesting way and unusual activity in the classroom, or other teaching idea, feel free to contact one of the blog's moderators (Marcus Arvan, Helen De Cruz) to propose it. 

Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is perhaps the most influential book on the philosophy of science ever written. As such, it is often taught to undergraduates in a wide variety of disciplines: philosophy, political science, sociology, etc. While Kuhn’s naturalistic description of the history of scientific change can be clearly understood just by reading it, there remains an important aspect of his broader philosophical theory that is difficult to grasp without first-hand experience: what it’s like to recognize that you’re inexorably in a paradigm, and further, what it’s like to experience a paradigm shift. Here I present an accessible and easy-to-set-up classroom activity that lets students feel what it’s like to occupy a paradigm without even knowing it, and subsequently, what it’s like to try to communicate across paradigms. The activity is as follows:

1. Split the class into groups of ~5 and give each group a deck of cards. In each group, one person will be designated as "Nature." This person will receive a sheet of paper which has the "laws of nature" – these are just rules for how the sequence of cards (the "observations") must be dealt. The laws can be designed to your liking, but I’ve included an example set of laws at the end of this blog entry for your convenience. Nature deals the cards according to the laws, but no one else can view the laws – only the sequence of cards, i.e., the observations.
2. As Nature deals out observations, everyone else in the group ("the scientists") works together, trying to figure out the laws. They may take a purely observational approach: just observing the sequence of cards that Nature deals and trying to figure out the pattern, or they may take a more experimental approach: forcing Nature to start with a particular card and asking Nature if some other card can follow it, or something like this. Generally, when a sequence is forced to halt or is halted early by the scientists (i.e., they abandon the experiment), the deck is shuffled, and a new sequence can be dealt.
3. You tell them that each group has a different set of laws, which they will naively believe. In reality, they all have the same set. After 20 minutes or so of “normal science,” you reveal to them that they've all been using the same laws this whole time: they occupy the same world. What they've done is construct paradigms without knowing it.
4. Now the groups must try to convince each other of the superiority of their paradigm over others. Come together and discuss between groups for 20 minutes or so. After the debate period, have them consider how they argued. Examples of discussion questions might be: What did you appeal to in your arguments? What did you think would convince adherents of other paradigms? What theoretical virtues were identified? How did you form your paradigm in the first place? What was that process like?

The activity is, of course, not perfectly analogous to the Kuhnian framework – for example, sharing the same set of laws undercuts Kuhn’s truth-relativism, which follows from his strong notion of incommensurability. Indeed, even having a “real” set of underlying laws to begin with denies Kuhn’s claim that science is not progressive – that it does not approach truth (Kuhn, 1962).

Regardless, it’s an immersive simulation that gets students to see how different groups working to understand the same phenomenon can develop radically different theoretical frameworks for doing so. Further, it allows them to see how theory choice and paradigm shifts, are in many ways arational: to convince adherents of a rival paradigm, it is often more persuasive to appeal to theoretical desiderata such as simplicity, fruitfulness, consistency, etc.… these theoretical virtues are not themselves scientifically determined, but instead due to psychological differences stemming from the idiosyncratic personalities of individual scientists (Kuhn, 1977). More than anything, though, the activity is just fun. It allows students to get invested in a low-stakes, faux-scientific debate with their peers, and the realizations they may have about Kuhn’s philosophy often “sneak up” on them, because they arrive at them through first-hand experience, instead of being “hand-fed” the correct interpretation by the instructor. In closing, I just want to thank Jonathan Kaplan for the inspiration for this idea: it is based loosely on an activity he had us do in an undergrad philosophy of science course at Oregon State University which aimed to demonstrate underdetermination. Every time I have done this classroom activity, it has been a rousing success. If you ever find yourself teaching Kuhn, I encourage you to try it.

Example set of laws

LAW #1. If the card is red, odd, and non-face, then the next card must be black and greater than the current card.

LAW #2. If the card is black and non-face, then the next card must be less than the current card, red and non-face.

LAW #3. If the card is red, even, and non-face, then the next card must also be red, even, and non-face). If no red, even, and non-face cards remain, then the next card must be black.

LAW #4. If the card is a face card, then the next card played must be a face card. If no face cards remain, the next card must be odd.

(Note: aces are 1s, and face cards are neither even nor odd)

Sources

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962.

Kuhn, Thomas. “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice”. In The Essential Tension. Chicago: CUP, 1977