Abstract
Someone is “verballed” in the Anglo-Australian idiom if they have attributed to them statements they did not actually make and indeed have explicitly denied. We will examine the evidence that Kuhn and Feyerabend were verballed in this sense by their critics and that the role of the idea of incommensurability in their argumentation has been systematically misunderstood and -represented. In particular, we will see that neither Kuhn nor Feyerabend, despite what their critics often say about them, held that incommensurability of theories implies the rational incomparability of theories. This is especially clear in the case of Feyerabend, whose argument is NOT that theories in a scientific tradition are on occasion incommensurable, but, rather, that, when the relations of theories in a tradition are represented in a particular way, they may on occasion be incommensurable according to that representation and hence incomparable if that representation is taken as providing the mechanisms of comparison. And the point of this claim is not to establish something about science, but, rather, to establish something about the representations of science which yield this result (i.e. that two theories might be incommensurable). Feyerabend in other words invokes incommensurability (according to the standards of a particular representation) as a reductio of that mode of representation. And this argument in fact depends precisely on the comparability of theories which are, according to the representation, incommensurable. Feyerabend’s argument is about the ways in which we should understand progress in science and he is concerned, in particular, to establish that a historically informed approach is superior to an approach which, if applicable, is applicable only to what he calls “abstract traditions”. Kuhn’s work, especially in the Postscript—1969, provides complementary materials, especially in relation to a collectivised and non-“algorithmic” account of theory choice across formally incommensurable paradigms.
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Notes
See in this regard Brown (1983, p. 4): “[B]ut Kuhn and Feyerabend insist that the claim that two theories are incommensurable does not entail that they cannot be compared”. I happily came upon Brown’s useful discussion after I’d started framing my own analysis, which reflects, of course, the conclusions arrived at in my book Incommensurability and Commensuration (2003), though, oddly, that book was written at one remove from the historiographical debate about who said what when in the Kuhn–Feyerabend/Shapere encounter.
Cp. Feyerabend (1981, p. 16): “These remarks apply especially to philosophical views about ... theory comparison. Many such views assume that a comparison of rival theories involved logical relations between their statements”. Notice that this assumption of set-theoretical comparability gives formal expression to the “accumulationist” model of and for science that was a particular target for Kuhn’s analysis. See Kuhn (1970, p. 2).
These are Feyerabend’s First and Second “Examples” in “Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism”. The first example involves the Newtonian explanation of Galilean laws of motion (or the reduction of the latter to Newton’s laws). The second example involves the relation of the idea of “impetus” in Aristotelian physics to Newtonian dynamics. In both cases, according to Feyerabend, we have meaning-variance and hence no simple logical relation between the implications of the two rival theories.
This is the relevance of Feyerabend’s focus on meaning-invariance in “Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism”. (See 1962/1981, p. 48 for the definition.) Meaning-invariance as between T and T* is arguably a precondition of those theories being comparable in terms of the sub-/super-set relations of their implications. After all, if a term t common to T and T* has different referents in the two theories, then it cannot be guaranteed that the statements of T are either a sub- or a super-set of the statements of T*. Since t is common to both theories, there will be statements in each theory based on t. But it could happen that, since t has different meanings in the two theories, the statements based on t in one theory do not stand in some logical relation of inclusion to those based on t in the other theory. Hence, the two theories are incomparable relative to the model of comparability which is based on relations of logical inclusion.
In relation to points 4 and 5, Feyerabend (1966, p. 28/1981, p. 44) says, in the very first paragraph of “Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism” that “[W]herever such [philosophical] theories play a decisive role both Nagel’s theory of reduction and the theory of explanation associated with Hempel and Oppenheim cease to be in accordance with actual scientific practice and with a reasonable empiricism”.
That this seems like an odd thing to say isn’t helped, of course, by his own dandyism and rhetoric, as, for instance, in Against Method, but, again, Feyerabend’s aims in that book are quite a bit more specific and subtle than his critics realize. For example, Feyerabend’s notorious “anything goes” is really meant, on my understanding, to signal his skepticism about the adequacy of a rules-based scientific method, very much in the manner of Kuhn, as we will see in due course.
See Eric Oberheim and Paul Hoyningen-Heune, “The Incommensurability of Scientific Facts”, Sect. 3.2.3 at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incommensurability/, accessed 5 April 2012 for an interesting account of Albert Einstein’s appreciation of the role of interdependent values in scientific reasoning.
Cp. David Weinberger, “Shift Happens”, The Chronicle Review, 22 April 2012: “But Kuhn is not blameless for how we appropriated his thought. SSR shook up our culture in part because he wrote it in such bold strokes. More important, he struggled to find a way—not always consistently—to shove SSR from a shoal we still have not found a way around: Our old paradigm of truth is no longer up to the task, but we don’t yet have a new one to replace it”.
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D’Agostino, F. Verballed? Incommensurability 50 years on. Synthese 191, 517–538 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0288-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0288-y