Vertigo

Every book grants you the language you need to make contact  with something you had no idea even existed:

Exhibition in Old Silos

Napkin cabinet

“Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.”

"Like all great books, this is a work of passion and a passionate desire to get things right."

“In Structure, Kuhn developed a historical philosophy of science that comprises three major conceptual movements. The first is from pre-paradigmatic science, in which several paradigms compete for a scientific community’s allegiance, to normal science, in which a consensus paradigm guides scientific practice. Unfortunately, paradigms do not fit or match up perfectly with natural phenomena, and anomalies eventually arise between what a paradigm predicts and what is observed empirically. If the anomalies persist, a crisis generally ensues – leading to the second movement – and the community enters a state of extraordinary science in the hope of resolving it. If a new, competing paradigm resolves the crisis, then a paradigm shift or scientific revolution occurs – the third movement – and a new normal science is established. This cycle recurs with no clear end point as science advances.”

“Let us then assume that crises are a necessary precondition for the emergence of novel theories and ask next how scientists respond to their existence. Part of the answer, as obvious as it is important, can be discovered by noting first what scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies. Though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis. They do not, that is, treat anomalies as counter-instances, though in the vocabulary of philosophy of science that is what they are.”

“In 1949, a pair of Harvard psychologists recruited two dozen undergraduates for an experiment about perception. The experiment was simple: students were shown playing cards and asked to identify them as they flipped by. Most of the cards were perfectly ordinary, but a few had been doctored, so that the deck contained, among other oddities, a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. When the cards went by rapidly, the students tended to overlook the incongruities; they would, for example, assert that the red six of spades was a six of hearts, or call the black four of hearts a four of spades. When the cards went by more slowly, they struggled to make sense of that they were seeing. Confronted with a red spade, some said it looked ‘purple’ or ‘brown’ or ‘rusty black.’ Others were completely flummoxed. The symbols 'look reversed or something,’ one observed. 'I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is,’ another exclaimed. 'I dont’ know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!’ The psychologists wrote up their findings in a paper titled 'On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm.’ Among those who found this paper intriguing was Thomas Kuhn. To Kuhn, the twentieth century’s most influential historian of science, the experiment was indeed paradigmatic: it revealed how people process disruptive information. Their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework: hearts, spades, clubs. Signs of mismatch are disregarded for as long as possible –the red spade looks 'brown’ or 'rusty.’ At the point the anomaly becomes simply too glaring, a crisis ensues–what the psychologists dubbed the 'My God!’ reaction. This pattern was, Kuhn argued in his seminal work, 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,’ so basic that it shaped not only individual perceptions but entire fields of inquiry. Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible. The more contradictions accumulated, the more convoluted the rationalizations became. 'In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty,’ Kuhn wrote. But then, finally, someone came along who was willing to call a red spade a red spade. Crisis led to insight, and the old framework gave way to a new one. This is how great scientific discoveries or, to use the term Kuhn made so popular, 'paradigm shifts’ took place.”