Abstract
In his essay “Afterwords”, Kuhn describes his “double goal” as (1) To justify that science achieves knowledge of nature, and at the same time, (2) To show that science neither achieves, nor should aim towards achieving, truth. I hold that Kuhn’s denial of truth helps to bring out a tension between the two goals of his enterprise: Kuhn cannot both maintain that science achieves knowledge of nature and dismiss the notion of truth altogether from his philosophy of science. The same arguments that attack truth will ultimately damage the quest for knowledge. In this chapter, I intend explore this problem—which I will call the problem of inconsistency—and ultimately provide a defense on behalf of Kuhn. I argue that Kuhn can achieve both of his goals, and so remain consistent, by reevaluating the notion of truth in his philosophy of science. Here, I introduce an alternative correspondence theory of truth, which I call the phenomenal-world correspondence theory of truth. I will argue that Kuhn’s philosophy of science will remain consistent with this alternative view of correspondence. I believe that this notion of truth not only succeeds in defending Kuhn’s enterprise from the problem of inconsistency, but is also a kind of truth that Kuhn can accept into his philosophical enterprise despite his rejection of the traditional correspondence theory.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of Kuhn in relation to perspectival realism, see Massimi, Chap. 10, this volume.
- 2.
Kuhn defines a lexicon as “a conceptual scheme, where the ‘very notion’ of a conceptual scheme is not that of a set of beliefs but of a particular operating mode of a mental module prerequisite to having beliefs, a mode that at once supplies and bounds the set of beliefs it is possible to conceive” (1991, p. 94).
- 3.
Kuhn, himself, seemed to have been growing more comfortable accepting such discussion about a mind-dependent, or phenomenal world. In Kuhn’s (1990), he discusses the co-dependent world as a world that is constitutive of intentionality and mental representations, which he traces back to his original emphasis in Structure as his “recourse to gestalt switches, seeing as understanding, and so on.” And while Kuhn suggests that he was wary of using such manners of discussing world change, by 1991, he seemed more confident in discussing his metaphysical picture of changing worlds so that he could now return to references to his gestalt switch analogies and empirical structures of lexicons with a clearer understanding of what he had in mind in Structure.
References
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Devlin, W. (2015). An Analysis of Truth in Kuhn’s Philosophical Enterprise. 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_11
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