Israel Through European Eyes
Every few months, Israel is publicly pilloried in the international media and on university campuses around the world for some alleged violation of human rights, real or imagined.
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But whatever the ostensible subject, and regardless of whether Israel's political leaders and soldiers and spokesmen do their work as they should, we know for certain that the consequence of this future incident, a few months from now, will be another campaign of vilification in the media and on the campuses and in the corridors of power-a smear campaign of a kind that no other nation on earth is subjected to on a regular basis.
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To put this in slightly different terms, it's not the maintenance of a security zone in South Lebanon, or Israeli control of the Gaza Strip, or a raid on a Turkish blockade runner's boat that is reponsible for what is happening to Israel's position on the world stage. These specific instances of Israeli policy are, for our opponents, nothing but symbols of something deeper and more hateful that they see revealed time and again when they look upon the state of Israel and its deeds. And until we understand what this deeper issue with Israel is, I believe we'll remain powerless to understand the progressive growth of the hatred toward us-and powerless to fight it.
The rest of this letter will be devoted to trying to get at what that underlying objection to Israel is.
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In 1962, a Berkeley professor named Thomas Kuhn published a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which went on to become the most influential academic book of the last half century
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scientists are trained to see the world in terms of a certain framework of interrelated concepts, which Kuhn calls a paradigm
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Those facts that can't be made to conform to the reigning paradigm are overlooked entirely or dismissed as unimportant.
Kuhn was famous, of course, for pointing out that things don't go on like this forever. The history of science is punctuated by shifts in the dominant paradigm
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As Kuhn points out, even a mountain of facts will not change the mind of a scientist
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How, then, do scientists come to change their minds? Kuhn says that in many cases, they never change their minds-and that an entire generation has to pass before the scientific community enters a new paradigm:
Every few months, Israel is publicly pilloried in the international media and on university campuses around the world for some alleged violation of human rights, real or imagined.
...
But whatever the ostensible subject, and regardless of whether Israel's political leaders and soldiers and spokesmen do their work as they should, we know for certain that the consequence of this future incident, a few months from now, will be another campaign of vilification in the media and on the campuses and in the corridors of power-a smear campaign of a kind that no other nation on earth is subjected to on a regular basis.
...
To put this in slightly different terms, it's not the maintenance of a security zone in South Lebanon, or Israeli control of the Gaza Strip, or a raid on a Turkish blockade runner's boat that is reponsible for what is happening to Israel's position on the world stage. These specific instances of Israeli policy are, for our opponents, nothing but symbols of something deeper and more hateful that they see revealed time and again when they look upon the state of Israel and its deeds. And until we understand what this deeper issue with Israel is, I believe we'll remain powerless to understand the progressive growth of the hatred toward us-and powerless to fight it.
The rest of this letter will be devoted to trying to get at what that underlying objection to Israel is.
...
In 1962, a Berkeley professor named Thomas Kuhn published a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which went on to become the most influential academic book of the last half century
...
scientists are trained to see the world in terms of a certain framework of interrelated concepts, which Kuhn calls a paradigm
...
Those facts that can't be made to conform to the reigning paradigm are overlooked entirely or dismissed as unimportant.
Kuhn was famous, of course, for pointing out that things don't go on like this forever. The history of science is punctuated by shifts in the dominant paradigm
...
As Kuhn points out, even a mountain of facts will not change the mind of a scientist
...
How, then, do scientists come to change their minds? Kuhn says that in many cases, they never change their minds-and that an entire generation has to pass before the scientific community enters a new paradigm:
"How, then, are scientists brought to make this transposition? Part of the answer is that they are very often not. Copernicanism made very few converts for almost a century after Copernicus' death. Newton's work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the Principia appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on.. And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that 'a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.'".
http://books.google.pl/books?id=9LDdUH8Szb8C&lpg=PP1&dq=The%20Structure%20of%20Scientific%20Revolu&hl=en&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
quoting a passage from The Origin of Species in which Darwin suggests that even the most brilliant scientists will likely be unable to adjust to his theory of natural selection.
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Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume., I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite mine.. [B]ut I look with confidence to the future-to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.
(Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York, 1889), vol. II, pp. 295-296. Quoted in Kuhn, p. 151.)
Kuhn's ideas have had an immense impact on the way the scientific enterprise is understood in the universities.
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Read the whole article here
www.jidaily.com/4fU
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Read the whole article here
www.jidaily.com/4fU
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