Abstract
In this chapter, I evaluate the thorny issue as to whether Thomas Kuhn’s view supports a form of realism or relativism. I consider two prominent realist readings of Kuhn, offered respectively by Hoyningen-Huene and Giere, and some of the challenges each of them faces. I offer then a reading of Kuhn’s contentious claim about “working in a new world” in terms of what I call naturalized Kantian kinds. I show how this reading can escape some of the challenges and deliver a mild form of realism.
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Notes
- 1.
The problem does not arise if one is willing to endorse or entertain the possibility of conceptual relativism, of course. Appealing as conceptual relativism might be as a philosophical position, the point I want to make here is a different one. Namely, that if Kuhn’s view has to be qualified as a form of realism, it cannot possibly fall into the traps of conceptual relativism. Kuhn’s view is either relativist or realist; it cannot be both at the same time. One may respond at this point that PiKu1 does not, after all, rule out perspective-independent facts. We may, for example, assume that there are natural kinds in nature, which none of our conceptual taxonomies gets exactly right (because the world is too complicated). But some conceptual taxonomies get closer and in so doing, they tell us a lot about the world. Thus, on this reading, PiKu1 is compatible with there being perspective-independent facts (I thank Paul Teller for this comment). In reply, it is worth noting that this might be (or may be intended to be) a possible reading of the Kantian relation between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world. But it does not work as a reading of Kuhn (even as a Kantian-flavoured perspectival reading of Kuhn). For it takes Kuhnian conceptual taxonomies to representational schemes that do not get the world exactly right. But Kuhn never understood conceptual taxonomies as sheer representational schemes for a mind-independent world. On the contrary, he entrusted conceptual taxonomies with the role of opening up entire worlds by affecting the very same experimental data, measurement techniques, nomic generalisations, and ensuing classifications of objects into natural kinds.
- 2.
One may reply that truth and falsity are indeed perspective-dependent. Teller (2011), for example, argues that both sentences “water is a continuous fluid” and “water is a statistical collection of molecules” are true in their respective perspectives (i.e. hydrodynamics and statistical mechanics), despite being in conflict with one another. If we understand again perspectives as ‘idealised representational schemes’, no threat of alethic relativism ensues. In reply to this point, I concede that Teller’s way of characterising scientific perspectives avoids the risk of alethic relativism, and, I would argue, it is in fact closer to a form of contextualism than relativism. But again one may wonder whether Teller’s characterisation of perspectives captures the spirit of Kuhn’s view, and whether Giere’s characterisation comes instead closer. It is to Giere’s reading of Kuhn as a perspectivalist that I focus on here.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Ron Giere, Paul Hoyningen-Huene and Paul Teller for kindly reading earlier versions of this paper. Not surprisingly perhaps, they did not share my worry about relativism and incommensurability; but they were all very gracious to provide me with helpful comments and suggestions for improving the paper.
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Massimi, M. (2015). Walking the Line: Kuhn Between Realism and Relativism. In: Devlin, W., Bokulich, A. (eds) Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions - 50 Years On. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 311. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13383-6_10
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