The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science by Thomas S. KUHN (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science by Thomas S. KUHN Jonah N. Schupbach KUHN, Thomas S. The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science. Edited by Bojana Mladenović. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. xlviii + 302 pp. Cloth, $27.50 [End Page 151] When The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was first published in 1962, Kuhn (1922–1996) warned readers that “space limits” forced him to present his views “in an extremely condensed and schematic form.” From the start, Kuhn saw Structure as an essay in need of much more careful elaboration: “This work remains an essay rather than the full-scale book my subject will ultimately demand.” He endeavored to complete such a book late in his life but sadly died before completing the work. Nonetheless, we may gather a good sense of what this more careful study would have included by piecing together some important unpublished lecture notes and working drafts that he left behind. In The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science, editor Bojana Mladenović collects the most important three of these previously unpublished writings, making them generally available for the first time. The bulk of the collection is taken up by the working draft (about two-thirds complete) of the book itself. This is preceded by two finished works that lend framing to that draft. In the essay “Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product” (1986), Kuhn contrasts his developmental approach to the epistemology and history of science with the traditional foundationalist approach it seeks to displace. “The Presence of Past Science” (1987) summarizes Kuhn’s mature views on the history and philosophy of scientific development, canvasing much of the same terrain as the book was to cover in more detail. The collection also includes an introduction and abstracts by Mladenović, in which she provides context for the three writings, relates their themes, and fills in the blanks regarding the likely contents of unfinished chapters. Like Structure, these works argue against the alethic stance that science progresses by accumulating progressively more truths. Also as in Structure, Kuhn denies that this amounts to rejecting science’s cognitive authority or a legitimate sense in which science may be said to progress. Indeed, Kuhn claims that it is by understanding the incoherence of an alethic account that we gain a more accurate understanding of science’s real cognitive authority and progress. It is Kuhn’s more elaborate explanation and defense of this claim that distinguishes these last writings. As suggested by this collection’s subtitle, the central concept in Kuhn’s developed account is incommensurability. Kuhn goes beyond Structure’s more cursory remarks on incommensurability of paradigms, according to which different meanings assigned to terms lead to a breakdown of communication between normal-scientific traditions. On Kuhn’s developed account, semantic shifts still play a part in understanding scientific development, but the locus of these is specifically taxonomic or “kind terms.” “Holistic alterations of kind terms” (or “lexical redesigns”) indicate more fundamental, prelinguistic changes in ontology. Science develops by a sequence of such reconceptualizations of the world. As fundamental ontology changes, so does the taxonomic lexicon we use to communicate about the world. Scientific traditions are incommensurable when they cluster taxonomic kinds in fundamentally incompatible ways. [End Page 152] Languages are incommensurable when claims expressible using one language’s lexicon are in principle inexpressible (“untranslatable”) using the lexicon of the other. One of the most striking ways in which Kuhn carefully steps back from well-known claims in Structure is in his reluctance to speak of scientific changes as revolutionary paradigm shifts. Indeed, Kuhn abandons talk of “paradigms” and “revolutions” altogether in his developed account. Kuhn’s earlier notion of a paradigm was repeatedly criticized for being polysemic, his use of the term correspondingly ambiguous (see Kuhn, “Second thoughts on paradigms,” in The Essential Tension, 1977). Accepting these criticisms, Kuhn sets his most famous concept aside and replaces it with the more precise notion of a structured kind set—a tradition’s lexicon of kind terms, corresponding to its ontological “clustering” of the world. Ontological reconceptualizations and lexical redesigns then take the place of revolutionary paradigm shifts. Far from being...