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Implications of Incommensurability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Philip Kitcher
Philip Kitcher*
Affiliation:
University of Vermont
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Extract

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn offered an account of the difficulties which attend the reception of revolutionary scientific ideas: “Communication across the revolutionary divide,” he wrote, “is inevitably partial.” (Kuhn 1962, p. 149). Eight years later, in the postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he sounded the same theme, characterizing the participants in revolutionary debates as people who attach their terms to nature differently, so that their communication is “inevitably only partial” (Kuhn 1970, p. 198). In his most recent discussion of these issues (Kuhn 1983), Kuhn has explained more clearly than before the nature of the differences in language which he takes to be present in revolutionary debates.

Type
Part XVI. Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1982 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1982 , 1982 , pp. 689 - 703
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Philosophy of Science Association

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