Kuhn on Pluralism and Incommensurability

Abstract

A conference called “Incommensurability 50” in honor of Kuhn’s book, in Taipei in 2012, put his philosophy in the best light possible. When discussing Kuhn’s philosophy, what we want to know most is, how did he manage to avoid both relativism and dogmatism, as he said he did. Here let us suppose that he did. After all, there is no proof that he failed, and so we may assume that he succeeded. His chief problem then was, how can science display the pluralism that since Einstein it does, yet avoid controversy? To come to grips with this question, we should dismiss some common superstitions first and see what remains then of Kuhn’s celebrated teachings. Kuhn’s claim that different paradigms cannot be compared is reconcilable with Einstein’s constant search for crucial experiments and his methodological theory of scientific theories as series of approximations to the truth: they are comparable in their degrees of precision, not as images of the world. Hence, researchers who follow different paradigms live in different worlds. On this we may disagree with him: we live in one world.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking

(Einstein, 1936, 59).

No fairer destiny could be allotted to any physical theory than that it should of itself point out the way to the introduction of a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case

(Einstein, 1920, 78).