CONCEPT
Residual Problems
Problems the new tradition cannot solve within its own commitments because solving them would require maintaining the very practices the new tradition exists to replace — losses structurally unpreservable, not merely unaddressed.
A residual problem, in Laudan's technical vocabulary, is not an unsolved problem in the ordinary sense — a problem the new tradition simply has not yet addressed. It is a problem the new tradition's commitments prevent it from addressing. The industrial production system could not preserve the framework knitters' embodied knowledge, because preserving it would have required maintaining the very production methods industrialization was designed to replace. The knowledge was not unpreserved. It was structurally unpreservable. This structural feature distinguishes residual problems from merely unsolved problems, and makes them more troubling. Unsolved problems can be addressed with time, resources, and attention. Residual problems often cannot, because the conditions for their solution have been eliminated by the transition itself.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept forces a harder accounting than the aggregate arithmetic of progress permits. The triumphalist claim that the industrial revolution produced more good than harm in the long run is empirically defensible; Laudan's framework does