I’ve just finished reading Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He’s quite aware of the objective nature of reality but he speaks of major changes in understanding of the world leaving scientists (or others in different conversations) as if in a new world. Elsewhere he speaks a bit more reasonably of the scientist seeing the world with new eyes, but he’s short of the mark. What’s new when we gain deeper understanding of what lies about us is our mind. I think Kuhn is blocked from gaining this deeper insight by one of the paradigms he holds — using his own terminology. He holds a fairly standard modern understanding that I’ve often criticized: the mind is something existing with some significant independence of its experience, its responses to its environment, and the knowledge thus generated. In fact, knowledge seems to be assumed as something which is somehow loaded into this mental entity.
I think the sort of analysis he performed, while insightful, would be much improved by adopting a Thomistic framework in which the mind forms by active responses to its environments. The mind and its knowledge aren’t ultimately separable, both being aspects of an intentional encapsulation of the environments of the organism having a ‘mind’. We, the human race, have become aware of wider regions of the earth, the universe, even the world in the sense of the universe seen in light of God’s purposes. Our minds have grown accordingly.
I’ve covered these issues before and won’t repeat my discussions here. The interested reader can see this article, What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality?, for my review for a discussion of of ‘intentionality’ in Thomistic thought — the article is a review of How Brains Make Up Their Minds by the brain-scientist and philosopher Walter J. Freeman who is an advocate of Thomism as a framework for understanding modern science. This article, Shaping Our Minds to Reality, will give a short overview of my understanding of what the mind is and how it forms in light of our difficulties in understanding the apparent strangeness of quantum mechanics. This article, Active Responses are Necessary for Shaping the Human Mind gives the background for a claim I’ll now make:
The positive sciences work so well not only because of the empirical knowledge gained by disciplined observations of empirical reality and experiments within reality but also because the workers in those fields are forced to respond actively to do their jobs. However limited or biased some of the individual minds might be, the communal mind — in a loose way of speaking — of physics and mathematics and biology and other such fields is shaped to our best current knowledge of empirical reality. Many of those in the humanities and social sciences and certainly in theology and philosophy live inside worlds created by the active responses to reality made by men who died many years ago.
It’s not that positive sciences encompass the only sorts of knowledge which are ‘true’ or ‘verifiable’ but rather that what might be called the positive sciences demand from their practioners, during this age of man, some significant degree of active response to empirical reality. In too many other fields, only the self-motivated bother to respond actively to much of anything but their own dreams and illusions or — still worse — to the dreams and illusions pushed into their heads as they sat passively in many a classroom or sat passively in their parents’ living-room in front of a video screen of some sort.
The best thinkers in those other fields, such as the historian Jacques Barzun or the theologian Joseph Ratzinger or the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, have responded actively to empirical reality and have minds which are the equal in power and insight to those of the best scientists.