A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...) is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (shrink)

A highly condensed account of the author's present view of some philosophical problems unresolved in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept of incommensurability, now considerably developed, remains at center stage, but the evolutionary metaphor, introduced in the final pages of the book, now also plays a principal role.

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

This paper addresses the issue of how it is possible to understand the language of an incommensurable theory. The aim is to defend the idea of translation failure against the objection that it incoherently precludes understanding.

Since 1962 Kuhn's concept of incommensurability has undergone a process of transformation. His current account of incommensurability has little in common with his original account of it. Originally, incommensurability was a relation of methodological, observational and conceptual disparity between paradigms. Later Kuhn restricted the notion to the semantical sphere and assimilated it to the indeterminacy of translation. Recently he has developed an account of it as localized translation failure between subsets of terms employed by theories.

A highly condensed account of the author's present view of some philosophical problems unresolved in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept of incommensurability, now considerably developed, remains at center stage, but the evolutionary metaphor, introduced in the final pages of the book, now also plays a principal role.

Kuhn regards local incommensurability as an unavoidable result of changes in worldview, but his account fails to explain both historical cases in which rivals with different paradigms obtained consensus, and psychological experiments in which people with different cultural backgrounds accurately presented other points of view. Although the conditions required to generate local incommensurability were present in the dispute between Brewster and Herschel on light absorption, they succeeded in communicating. Ultimately Brewster understood his opponent's position, in the same way that subjects (...) in Barsalou's recent psychological experiments proved able to comprehend alien conceptual structures. Building upon recent cognitive theories of graded conceptual structures, I offer a new account of incommensurability, which accommodates these historical cases and psychological results. By correcting and extending Kuhn's account I show that local incommensurability may be a matter of degree. (shrink)