How to understand Kuhnian incommensurability: some unexpected analogies from Wittgenstein

 

The purpose of the present paper is the furthering of understanding of Thomas Kuhn’s concept of incommensurability.[i] There is a huge literature on the topic, but in my view most of it to a troubling degree just misses the point – Kuhn’s point. I shall try to get back to basics and, not worrying too much about the refinements in the concept which Kuhn himself made over the years [ii] (in his efforts to be understood – i.e. not to be catastrophically misunderstood), attempt to foster simply a basic awareness of the therapeutic and methodologically-motivated moves that Kuhn was making, in his use of the concept of ‘incommensurability’.

            It is my view then that Kuhn’s paradigm-based vision of natural science is an enduringly important and signally misunderstood one (in particular, I shall suggest that there is no interesting sense in which Kuhnian incommensurability entails ‘relativism’ about truth or about meaning). Using some of Wittgenstein’s ideas especially, I shall suggest that we can best understand what the term ‘incommensurability’ means in Kuhn by means of some unexpected analogies, analogies to domains of language and culture (and philosophy) seemingly quite distant from natural science.

            Now, it is well-know that Kuhn felt himself to have been influenced by Wittgenstein, and had prolonged and intensive philosophical interactions and associations with several other such thinkers (we might especially mention Feyerabend, Toulmin, Hanson, Hacking, Cavell, and James Conant). This is evident in any case from specific references at certain points in Kuhn’s own texts.[iii] The broad purpose of the paper is however to locate Kuhn’s most fundamental insights in the context of Wittgensteinian thinking, considered not as a form of Anti-Realism, but as an exercise simply of philosophy (in this case, philosophy of science) ‘as therapy’.

 

Religion

I want to start by taking an analogy from Wittgenstein on religious belief.

            What is the incommensurability between paradigms,[iv]between scientific communities, about? Well, among other things it’s about the kind of miscommunication which occurs when an atheist debates with a believer, for example. It’s not well-described as semantic; it’s rather a failure to understand basic starting-point and ‘framework’. Take the opening of Wittgenstein’s ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’:

 

          ‘Suppose that someone believed in the Last Judgement, and I don’t, does this mean that I believe the opposite to him, just that there won’t be such a thing? I would say: ‘Not at all, or not always.’ ...

          If some said, ‘Wittgenstein, do you believe in this?’ I’d say: ‘No.’ ‘Do you contradict the man?’ I’d say: ‘No.’ ...

          Would you say: ‘I believe the opposite’, or ‘There is no reason to suppose such a thing’? I’d say neither.

          Suppose someone were a believer and said: ‘I believe in a Last Judgement,’ and I said: ‘Well, I’m not so sure. Possibly.’ You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us. If he said ‘There is German aeroplane overhead,’ and I said ‘Possibly. I’m not so sure,’ you’d say we were fairly near.

          It isn’t a question of my being anywhere near him, but on an entirely different plane, which you could express by saying: ‘You mean something altogether different, Wittgenstein.’

          The difference might not show up at all in any explanation of the meaning. ...’ [v]

 

          Wittgenstein goes on to speak of the different ‘pictures’ (cf. paradigms) which are at the root of all this, and which create a difficulty in understanding (cf. an ‘only partial’ communication – as in SSR p.149) which would not be well expressed as a semantic difficulty:

 

          ‘Suppose someone is ill and he says: ‘This is a punishment,’ and I say: ‘If I’m ill, I don’t think of punishment at all.’ If you say: ‘Do you believe the opposite?’--you can call it believing the opposite, but it is entirely different from what we would normally call believing the opposite.

          I think differently, in a different way. I say different things to myself. I have different pictures.

          It is this way: if someone said: ‘Wittgenstein, you don’t take illness as punishment, so what do you believe?’—I’d say: ‘I don’t have any thoughts of punishment.’

          ... [One might say] ‘I don’t believe in . . .’, but then the religious person never believes what I describe.

          I can’t say. I can’t contradict the person.

          In one sense, I understand all he says--the English words ‘god’, ‘separate’, etc. I understand. I could say: ‘I don’t believe in this’, and that would be true, meaning I haven’t got these thoughts or anything that hangs together with them. But not that I could contradict the thing.

          You might say: ‘Well, if you can’t contradict him, that means you don’t understand him. If you did understand him, then you might.’ That again is Greek to me. My normal technique of language leaves me. I don’t know whether to say they understand one another or not.’[vi]

 

          The last remark takes us very close to Kuhn’s problem (and to what I will want to say is his ‘solution’ to it). For example, that there is a sense in which, while scientists normally can of course contradict one another perfectly well, there are occasions on which they cannot, on which the normal rules break down. And then they are or become at cross purposes. And communication across the rupture, during or after a revolution, is similarly inevitably partial, in this specific and (one might usefully say) non-semantic sense which I, after Wittgenstein, am endeavouring to explicate.

          For example, Kuhn holds that there really is a sense in which we

cannot now contradict those who held to the Ptolemaic system. We are in a

sense just paying ourselves empty compliments if we trumpet the truth of its successors. Ptolemy’s system is just a non-starter for us, now -- its

non-starterness ought in fact to go without saying. Thus the point that we

 cannot now contradict the Ptolemaic system does not make it ‘true, from a completely different point of view we can try to think ourselves into’, or

 ‘literally true-for-them’. Far from it: There is an important sense in which, contra a free-and-easy ‘relativism’, we cannot get as far as seriously declaring the Ptolemaic system either false or true. (Though in another sense -- the ‘non-starter’ sense-- of course we presuppose that it is wrong – for it is an astronomy that clashes through and through with the post-Copernican system.)

          Even what the first Copernicans disbelieved was never exactly what Aristotle and Ptolemy believed (Compare what Wittgenstein says about himself and the believer, above). Both because there couldn’t in a certain sense be any disbelief in the most central presuppositions of their system, and also because the dispute wasn’t (and, arguably, couldn’t have been) entirely clear.[vii] Outside of normal science, one can only unmisleadingly say that one believes the opposite of a paradigm once there is no longer any dispute, once there is clarity from the ‘victors’’ point of view about the dispute -- once the issue is no longer live, no longer an issue.[viii]

          In sum: Kuhn’s opponents have tended to say that earlier science is either absorbed seamlessly as special cases (e.g. as in Logical Empiricism), or shown straightforwardly to be false (e.g. as in classical Popperianism). Kuhn by contrast says that there is no straightforward showing of falsity when deep shifts occur, and that in those circumstances earlier science is not seamlessly absorbed but rather cannibalised.

            Let me now make clear why this is not a substantive relativism. There is a big difference between:

i)                being able to understand people (e.g. earlier scientists) better, in a sympathetic sense, and thus being able to give a much more rounded account of their intellectual and ideological situation, so that we see them more clearly, less prejudicially, less through the lens of the Western fixation on the success of (especially recent) ‘science’ which is often a massively distorting influence; and,

ii)              actually being able to affirm what these people affirm, which, of course, we do not and cannot – and neither can Kuhn (nor Wittgenstein) – do.  The extent to which or sense in which understanding someone properly involves accepting what they tell you,[ix] coming to adopt their way of seeing things as your own’: we  can’t do this.  (And not because we haven’t got enough imagination, or powerful enough brains.)  The conditions of life are not such that we can do these things – if per impossibile we became an Aristotelian scientist, people would just laugh us out of town -  it is not possible for us to do these things seriously. (That is one of the big problems with relativism, that it supposes that the issue is one of attitude. Its not possible for us, it’s not as if we can pick up or put down convictions at will -- Kuhn is not aspiring to that kind of voluntaristic relativism at all.)

The point is not to be  Newton (or Ptolemy) but to do him justice (i.e.: (i)).

 

          Thus Wittgenstein is suggesting what Kuhn suggests -- that it is misleading for us to say, qua historians or philosophers of science, that we know that Ptolemy was wrong and that the (post-)Copernican system is right -- or that we know that Newton was wrong and Einstein right. For there is no issue, for us today (and not because of our philosophy of science! But because, if you like, of our cultural and historical placement, in a more fundamental sense, one might say, than the relativist allows!). We cannot begin to take seriously the sentences of (e.g.) a latter-day Ptolemaist.[x]

          For us to be able to appreciate the ancients as rational actors, it is essential for us to appreciate their otherness. Much like the sense in which, for one to be able so much as to understand the beliefs of a believer, one has to be ready to acknowledge their otherness.

 

Literature, and painting

          Some readers may however find analogies drawn from religion just too different, too other. Another example, perhaps mentally easier to deal with, can be drawn from aesthetics, specifically from the question of what it can mean to adequately translate literature from one language to another. Take the following remark of Kuhn’s, in one of his important late reformulations of ‘incommensurability’, on this:

 

 

               “I [suggest] that the problems of translating a scientific text, whether into a foreign tongue or into a later version of the language in which it was written, are far more like those of translating literature than has generally been supposed. In both cases the translator repeatedly encounters sentences that can be rendered in several alternative ways, none of which captures them completely.”[xi]

 

            Such translations are of course made – that game is very definitely played -- but there is a sense in which we take them to be inevitably ‘partially successful’ (cf. ‘partial communication’ again) -- there is something, which need not be semantic, which is missing in even the best such translations. Or, alternatively; when you really do get brilliant and effective translations of poetry, as perhaps in the case of the deepest translations of Rilke into English, or of Shakespeare into German, they are not only non-inevitable but are moreover possessed of a kind of sui generis character. That is to say: they are themselves minor works of art, which have used clever or beautiful unanticipated devices and restructurings, etc. . Similarly, perhaps, if one is to understand and depict a vanished scientific tradition, one will need to find novel and surprising and un-inevitable ways of rendering it into terms that we can do something with. Understanding past science will then be more like producing good translations of poetry than like producing good translations of car maintenance manuals.[xii]

          This thought, concerning those aspects and effects of language which are at severe risk in translation and which are perhaps ‘inevitably partially’ communicated, has much to do with a point Kuhn came to emphasize strongly in his later attempts to reformulate ‘incommensurabilism’; namely, that translation usually cannot be effective term-by-term, point-by-point.

            Why is this? Start with a point about comparison: that paradigmatic theories cannot be compared sentence by sentence. For that would entail that they could be compared sentence by sentence with reality: but that is what Kuhn argues against, when he argues that it is only ‘via a paradigm’ that scientists touch on reality at all.[xiii]

            Comparison can only proceed wholistically.

            The point concerning translation is analogous (if not identical, for there is no issue in this case of ‘translating (with) reality’ – that’s simply bad English): One has to translate whole sentences --and more. One has to translate whole sentences in the context of the sets of (interdefined) terms which wholistically form ‘paradigms’.This is what Kuhn brings home most strongly with his late work on lexicons and taxonomies.

            So translation cannot work term by term – one can’t translate oxygen as dephlogisticated air, without remainder, for example (see especially SSR p.54f., and The Road Since Structure p.43, and p.48-9) – because one has to consider sentences, and sentences in which words are functioning in ways that are more or less systematic across a whole ‘system’ of discourse – a ‘paradigm’, a matrix of language and practice.

          How, slightly more concretely, all this can be, can be seen clearly in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and in the conceivability (and actuality) of a sense of ‘concepts’ in which it is intelligible to speak of different concepts -- and thus of partial communication -- without falling into semantic nonsense and self-refutation (as meaning incommensurabilism / semantic relativism is held to do, especially when it tells us exactly what it is that we ‘cannot’ understand). The most crucial passage of all on this in Wittgenstein himself runs as follows:

 

          ‘I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize -- then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him.

          Compare a concept with a style of painting. For is even our style of painting arbitrary? Can we choose one at pleasure? (The Egyptian, for instance.)’      

                                            

                                             (Philosophical Investigations,[xiv]Part II, p.230; italics mine)

 

Our concepts are not, Wittgenstein argues, ‘fixed’ by nature.[xv] ‘Our’ style of painting -- or of writing, for example of writing poetry, with the distinctive kinds of effects and ‘aspects’ that that yields -- is not as a result arbitrary -- and no more, of course, is our style of science, our scientific sensibility.[xvi]One might talk here of the needs of our lives and the shapes of our concepts – one might talk, that is, of ‘form of life’. Kuhn is with Wittgenstein in seeing nature not as a standard of and for comparison, except as ‘within’ [xvii] a paradigm. ‘Only’ in paradigmatic thinking –i.e. in normal scientific thinking -- does nature play a precise and demarcatable role. Kuhn is concerned that we will do bad history and philosophy of science if we – absurdly -- take our concepts to be ‘absolutely the correct ones’.[xviii]

          In a nutshell, Kuhn is interested in real cases where the formation of concepts different from our’s has happened, has been the case.[xix] Kuhn points to the same process as Wittgenstein, but in very concrete circumstances: in and after scientific revolutions. Kuhn sees scientific revolutionaries as “[imagining] certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to”, and thus as finding themselves needing “[to form] concepts different from the usual ones”. He emphasizes how rare and difficult this process is. (Whereas Popper seems to think that doing anything less than this is not science at all. Popper, in Kuhn’s eyes, would never provide enough stability to science to enable it to get off the ground. It would be left permanently in the condition of philosophy, or, ironically (given Popper’s own prejudices concerning social science), of sociology.)

          If Kuhn is not usefully thought of as a relativist about truth, nor is he an incommensurabilist about meaning as such. As he wrote in 1982: “[‘M]eaning’ is not the rubric under which incommensurability is best discussed.”[xx] Meaning incommensurabilism would mean the imagining of schemes of meaning, such that those schemes were as it were substantively incompatible – that the meanings of words in one clashed with, and didn’t fit with, the meanings of words in another. Kuhn imagines a subtler kind of clash, a clash of the kind that one encounters in cases where one is trying to find the right word, trying to give the right impression, etc. .. Therefore Kuhn does want to say that there is something worth calling incommensurability between paradigms  --and he thinks moreover that correspondencist theories of truth are trivial or empty, and cannot be used to undermine his incommensurabilist vision.

          Kuhn, unlike Popper, thinks that ‘verisimilitude’ is an empty and unnecessary shuffle. ‘Correspondencism’ works only when it is entirely unsurprising -- when there is no live issue.[xxi] When one has an uncontroversial ontology, one can compare what one says – one’s sentences -- with reality. But ontologically-controversial claims -- i.e. all claims made at times of crisis etc., i.e. at precisely the times which Kuhn is usually concerned with and speaking of -- allow of no such adjudication.

          And so Kuhn thinks that Popper’s ‘verisimilitist’ claims are of extremely dubious philosophic standing:

 

 

          “To say, for example, of a field theory that it ‘approach[es] more closely to the truth’ than an older matter-and-force theory should mean, unless words are being oddly used, that the ultimate constituents of nature are more like fields than like matter and force. But in this ontological context it is far from clear how the phrase ‘more like’ is to be applied. Comparison of historical theories gives no sense that their ontologies are approaching a limit: in some fundamental ways Einstein’s general relativity resembles Aristotle’s physics more than Newton’s. In any case, the evidence from which conclusions about an ontological limit are to be drawn is not of whole theories but of their empirical consequences.” [xxii]

 

          Scientific theories can be thought of as making claims about nature, of course. But two mistakes must be avoided, Kuhn thinks: firstly, the mistake (which follows directly from a failure to understand the basic point of Kuhn’s concept of ‘paradigm’) of thinking that there can be a direct comparison between theory/theories on the one hand and nature bare in tooth and claw on the other. Secondly, and still more fundamentally, one must avoid the mistake of thinking that there is any such thing as comparing the elements of a theory -- its ontological fundamentals -- with nature, at all. One cannot compare a concept with nature – there is no such thing as doing so. To think that there is to be the victim of an illusion of sense.[xxiii] Only (words in)  sentences (and indeed sentences within an actual context of use) can be intelligibly and unmisleadingly described as having meanings, uses. Not words, nor concepts. Words require a context -- minimally, a sentence. It makes no sense whatseover to speak of individual words … as fitting or not fitting reality. A mere word can’t be true or false! It is only claims -- sentences in contexts (and for Kuhn, the context includes the paradigm) -- which ‘fit reality’ or otherwise. Thus point-by-point translation in a way never works or happens at all -- its would-be units of meaning are too small.

          Insofar as word for word, point by point translation can be said to happen, it can do so only when the languages in question are relatively congruent, and when we have no trouble in uncontroversially actualising the concepts in question -- for example, it is unlikely to be misleading if one translates ’La neige’ as ‘snow’, ‘est’ as ‘is’, etc.

          But, of course, Kuhn suggests [xxiv] that some languages are not like this. And, analogically, that sometimes there are shifts in the history of our thought such that even ‘the same sentence’ has a markedly different aspect, a different place in a system, a different set of connections with other sentences and concepts, at different times. (Think of Kuhn’s account in SSR of the relation between Newton and Einstein.)

            In sum: ‘The Context Principle’ -- the Fregean/Wittgensteinian principle that, philosophically-speaking, we can make no sense of isolated words or names -- when put together, as it naturally is, with the ‘modest’ version of Kuhn’s thought concerning pardigm-shifts which I am putting forth here, has as its clear consequence the complete uselessness of Realist ‘correspondencism’. But not in favour of some substantive Relativism:

 

            “My goal is double. On the one hand, I aim to justify claims that science is cognitive, that its product is knowledge of nature, and that the criteria it uses in evaluating beliefs are in that sense epistemic. But on the other, I aim to deny all meaning to claims that successive scientific beliefs become more and more probable or better and better approximations to the truth and simultaneously to suggest that the subject of truth-claims cannot be a relation between beliefs and a putatively mind-independent or “external” world.”[xxv]

 

            To give an example: Kuhn expressly holds that Newton can be rendered a special case of Einstein (and thus kept true) only at the cost of misunderstanding Newton’s theory.[xxvi] (‘Misunderstanding’, in the somewhat specific and peculiar sense which we are endeavouring here to construe.) There is a  clash between paradigms for Kuhn, in a way which Relativist readings of him typically ignore or finesse, at the cost of their completely missing Kuhn’s point. But the clash is not the clash of P and not-P, either.

 

Philosophy

          There is a sense in which we sometimes use the word ‘understand’ to mean something like ‘potentially be seriously able to say, myself’.[xxvii]  In relation to religion, for example; if one comes to understand in this ‘full’ (admittedly, a dangerous word here) sense a certain religious practice, one will not just know what it means, but be willing to partake in it. It is something like this sense of the word ‘understand’ which is in play when Kuhn speaks of partisans of different paradigms failing to understand one another. They fail to understand each other, in roughly the way in which people are evidently failing to understand each other when they say things like “But how could you ever say such a strange thing? I can hear the words, but when I try to put them together...”. What are such situations?

>> Some situations of religious and spiritual dispute, or of ethical dispute.

>> Or, some aesthetic disputes: The kind which arises for instance when a new avant-garde form of poetry is being battled over. The individual words of a line of such poetry may be fine, even the whole line may have a clear ordinary semantics. But nevertheless the point of it all may evade some readers. It may seem to be absurd, as a whole. We might usefully think of paradigm-breaking science as akin to genuinely new poetry -- which can seem to different intelligent readers: good poetry, or bad poetry, or even not poetry at all.                       

> >Or, perhaps most precisely of all, we encounter people saying things like, “I can see what you’re saying in a way, I mean, I hear the words, I know what you could mean if you meant them in an ordinary sense, but yet.…”… in philosophy. Think of disputes between Realists and Solipsists. Or, for that matter, of disputes between Mooreans and Wittgensteinians, or between Wittgensteinians and Derrideans – or between Kuhnians and (say) Popperians.

            Philosophers read each other’s books, but often they just don’t get it.  The characteristic form of philosophical puzzlement is perhaps not to know one’s way about in someone else’s discourse; for its components to seem perfectly familiar, but for the upshot to be simply uncanniness, or else a wild oscillation between the feeling of deep difference, the sudden dawning of mutual understanding, and then a rift opening up unexpectedly again. Philosophical disputes cannot be sorted out simply by being clear about the ordinary meanings of words. As Wittgenstein clearly appreciated, one has to try to understand how a philosopher is wanting to use their words, what effects they are intending to have by means of their unusual employments of those words, etc. . (To think otherwise to be subject to an illusion of a crude rendition of Ordinary Language Philosophy, and/or of an impossible Carnapian[xxviii] wish to lay down the limits of language in stone.) One has to try to engage with nonsense, to imagine understanding something that has only the illusion of sense.

          And here, in a way, we come right back to Kuhn’s earliest efforts to describe what a scientific revolution is. Namely, an upheaval in the course of which the discipline of normal science -- its characteristics of having a regular and cumulative nature not possessed by (e.g.) philosophy -- is partially suspended, and instead a situation is temporarily found in which philosophicalish disputes are once again possible and sometimes even necessary. Moreover, such an upheaval specifically involves such-and-such becoming a candidate for truth-or-falsity when it didn’t even make sense before, or vice versa. So perhaps what I am saying here, by means of the ‘surprising’ analogies being pursued in this paper, should be unsurprising after all. When Kuhn is talking about incommensurability, the best analogy of all may be to the situation of two persons or schools locked in ongoing philosophical misunderstanding, understood roughly as Wittgenstein would have us understand it. And again, such philosophical puzzlement, where what one side says must seem either pointless or nonsensical to the other, is virtually never resolvable through semantic clarification, through a simple mutual demonstration of meanings.[xxix] (The philosopher must practice a ‘hermeneutic’ effort to understand another philosopher – and just this is what is called for in the philosophy of science, too.)

          No more is Kuhnian incommensurability simply a matter of meaning. If it were, it would be either simply resolvable (as ‘Realists’ think, thus missing the phenomenon) or incoherently extreme/self-refuting (as Relativists find to their cost).

         

          What is an ontology?

To sum up much of what I have been saying here, following in the philosophical train of Wittgenstein (and of Frege) about Kuhn’s view: Words cannot be compared with reality. Nor can concepts. And so it follows: nor can sets of these – ontologies. Ontologies (‘furnitures of the universe’) cannot be compared with reality. Only scientific claims can (in a way) be.

            ‘Isn’t an ontology itself regardable as making a claim?’No – no-one says ontologies (except, sometimes, metaphysical philosophers). Ontologies are what one works with, one’s resource, not one’s topic. Ontologies are, if you like, what makes claims possible. An ontology is at best specifiable as something like a list (e.g. ‘matter’, ‘form’…) of properties that things (using that word now in the vaguest possible sense) can have or not have or have to various degrees, etc. .

            Scientific claims are precisely makeable only ‘within’ one paradigm or another, on the basis of one ontology or another. Advocates of different paradigms thus misunderstand each other, in roughly the respect in which philosophers find themselves not infrequently systematically puzzled at things which other philosophers say.

          But what exactly is an ontology, now? If we repudiate on Kuhn’s behalf the untenable claim that ontologies represent or ‘correspond’ to hermetically sealed systems of meaning, what do they ‘represent’? How are they to be understood?

 

          Outrageous as it may sound, I think that the consequence of the argument of this paper so far is that Kuhn’s point of view, what he is trying to say, can be fully appreciated only if one gives up the notion that what it is for one to understand an ontology -- a particular scientific ‘conceptual scheme’, if you like -- is to do something like grasp a metaphysical system, or comprehend a set of super-facts. Instead, one should think of understanding an ontology, roughly … as ‘getting’ a style. I am not saying simply that there is an interesting analogy between ontology and style. No; I am saying that one should see an ontology as a style, as (a) form; and that that is possibly the only way one can see ontologies in the present context, without falling into philosophical illusion. There is no such thing as magisterially surveying ontologies from an external -- semantic -- point of view. There is no such thing as an external point of view to language,[xxx] or indeed to our best science, which alone could provide one with a ‘position’ from which to entertain the alleged claims of ‘Metaphysical Realism’ or ‘relativism’. Only if there were, could it make any sense straightforwardly to give the true account of the history of scientific progress toward ‘cutting nature at its joints’ (‘realism’) or to describe incommensurable systems of meaning (‘relativism’). The latter is self-refuting; the former misses (or accounts purely reductively and inadequately for) the difficulty which prompted Kuhn’s philosophy of science in the first place, the ‘strangeness’ of much past science, if one actually looks at it properly, rather than merely propagandistically.

          The difference between chemistry before and after the Chemical Revolution, then, is not that the meanings of the sentences of phlogistic chemists are literally inaccessible to us. It’s not that their ontology is literally ‘cognitively closed’ to us. It’s rather that they operated with a significantly different taxonomy -- a taxonomy which is worth calling ‘significantly different’ because it is directly translatable into our’s only at the cost of a fatal (to historical understanding) loss of style, of form, of sensibility. Kuhn wants ‘us’ (historians and philosophers of science) to be able to become attuned to the connotations of the words of the old paradigm. Being able to translate, so as to understand from our point of view what the sentences of the old scientists meant, is not enough.[xxxi]

          Kuhn proposes, then, that “Proponents of different [paradigmatic] theories...are...like native speakers of different languages.” [xxxii] As Cedarbaum puts it: “Just as, for example, one who is not a native speaker can almost never acquire the Frenchman’s feel for the use of the imperfect tense, the physicist trained in the nineteenth century would almost certainly not have the same facility with problems involving discontinuous motion as the researcher committed to the quantum mechanical paradigm.” [xxxiii]  This feel, I would suggest, is terribly important, even if it is not crucial for the purposes of making oneself understood, in one’s straightforward meaningful utterances  (Analogically: a highly-competent non-native French speaker may have no difficulty making themselves understood even in the most complicated matters, but will still normally be missing something about the language, especially in literaryish contexts). Similarly, to actually be able to think ‘mass’ in the Newtonian way, for example, is more than to be able to translate Newtonian sentences involving the term into Einsteinian sentences involving the same term. It is to be able to understand what is lost in the translation, much as in situation of the translation of natural language, or particularly of poetry. What is lost is not a semantic item, a meaning. It is the awareness -- the ‘presence’ -- of the systematic network of associations and connections of words with one another and with certain practices in Newtonian physics, and the ‘grammatical effects’ of that system (much like the grammatical effects of words in a Frost poem).[xxxiv]It is something like a feel, an atmosphere. To think ‘mass’ or whatever a la Newton is to be able imaginatively to ‘re-create’ that atmosphere, and to re-grasp those effects.[xxxv] It is as that task that we can intelligibly understand the project of depicting incommensurability, divining different ‘conceptual schemes’ (= different ‘sensibilities’ / ‘atmospheres’), and thus unmisleadingly describing the activities of past scientists. In other words, it is that difficult task which Kuhn sets the history of science, and himself.

 

          And here is how Kuhn himself puts what I am saying here, in response to the familiar Popperian etc. accusation of Kuhn being a semantic Relativist:

 

 

          “[T]he dogma to which [Popper] objects is not that frameworks are like languages but that languages are untranslatable. But no one ever believed they were! What people have believed, and what makes the parallel important, is that the difficulties of learning a second language are different from and far less problematic than the difficulties of translation. Though one must know two languages in order to translate at all, and though translation can then always be managed up to a point, it can present grave difficulties to even the most adept bilingual. he must find the best available compromises between incompatible objectives. Nuances must be preserved but not at the price of sentences so long that communication breaks down. Literalness is desirable but not if it demands introducing too many foreign words which must be separately discussed in a glossary or appendix. People deeply committed both to accuracy and to felicity of expression find translation painful, and some cannot do it at all.” [xxxvi]

 

          We see here Kuhn quite clearly denying that he is advocating an ‘untranslatability’ thesis -- the kind of Relativist view, radically opposed for example to Davidson, which is often attributed to him under the heading of ‘incommensurabilism’.[xxxvii] Instead, he advocates something profound but modest: an attempt to understand what it is that is lost if one translates (say) one paradigmatic theory into the terms of another. There can be no point for point, word for word translations, in such domains, in such cases.

         

            So: Words/terms in a scientific context have an extremely specific web of connections with the other words/terms around them. Take an exemplar like Newton’s ‘F=M.A’. Kuhn (and Feyerabend) argued that this is only the equation that it is if it stands in very specific relations to various other equations, to various laboratory proceedures, and so on. One might say, that it is only the equation that it is in a certain great physics text (Newton’s Principia) and other texts which have stood in a historical relation to that text. It is in a way absolutely tied to its scientific context. By contrast, an ordinary language expression, like “Pass the salt”, is much less context-specific. It can be used in numerous settings, and can survive many other changes in the language around it without having to suffer any significant modification in its use. Now, in a way, lines of poetry, are less context-specific still. They are endlessly re-contextualisable. Thus they might seem the absolute opposite of scientific terms.

            But the analogy that I have been pursuing (with literature) still has force. For the web of connections of a line of poetry has with the language around it actually has in one sense a very great deal of specificity, even if it is far less formalized than in the case of scientific terms. Unlike ordinary terms, words in poetry are not transparent – their whole point is often to fit in particular ways with the lines that surround them in the poem, or at least to facilitate specific kinds of associations and connections which are, as it were, provided for in the language. Take for instance the opening two lines of Robert Frost’s “On a bird singing in its sleep”:

                        A bird half wakened in the lunar noon

                        Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.[xxxviii]

Isolating one of these lines from the other would make a nonsense of their poetry. And even were they so isolated from one another, then we can still say that the non-transparency of the language here is shown by for instance the importance of the rhyme of ‘lun-’ with ‘noon’, the aural-semantic ‘allusion’ from the word ‘noon’ to the concept ‘moon’, and the powerful metaphor of ‘lunar noon’ itself. None of this kind of specificity is present in the words, “Pass the salt” (in almost any imaginable ordinary language context for them).

            Here, then, is another way of putting the respect in which literature can amplify the nature of incommensurability in science. Unlike in the case of most ordinary language, literature shows clearly its ‘wholistic’ nature – a wholism shared, according to Kuhn, with scientific language and practice. F=M.A is tied so utterly to a context that the same words in a new (Einsteinian) setting are best-described as not signalling the same concepts; just as a line of poetry intimately involves a unique and utterly necessary web of connections, not just with the rest of ‘its’ poem, but usually, if it is a good poem, with damn near the entire language in which it is nested.

            If there remains, after this elucidation of what it is to have a change in taxonomy or ontology (e.g. from Newton to Einstein) – of what it is to have a serious change in way of thinking/speaking -- …if there remains a sense in which what I am saying is ‘vague’, then I am entitled to ask both whether anything suffers from this vagueness; and whether in any case this ‘vagueness’ is avoidable, even in principle. For one might ask the same thing about  a key metaphor of Kuhn’s in SSR (again following Wittgenstein, along with the gestalt psychologists): aspect-seeing / ‘gestalt-switch’.[xxxix] Isn’t the notion of gestalt-switch uncomfortably ethereal and intangible – isn’t the phenomenon unpleasantly ‘unspeakable’ or ‘undescribable’ --, someone might ask? And for sure, it is true that when one asks someone (say) to draw what they see when they experience a switch of gestalt, they are hard-pressed to draw anything at all. (Should I draw a character from ‘Watership Down’ when I am asked to draw what I see after experiencing the change of aspect from duck to rabbit? But the shape I see has not changed -- neither on paper nor even in my own ‘inner’ experience. Only the shape’s aspect has changed.)  But this ‘unspeakability’ does not imply that gestalt-switch doesn’t happen. Far from it! The phenomenon is perfectly real. What greater difference could there be, than seeing the duck-rabbit as a rabbit, than as a duck?

          In short, if reading of incommensurability be criticised as ‘vague’, I am quite happy to plead “Guilty” -- so long as my interlocutor recognises that it is not clear that anything less ‘vague’ than our reading either could be submitted or is needed. I hold that what Kuhn means by ‘incommensurability’ is, if one is prepared to work at it, as subtle and as hard-to-pin-down and as blindingly obvious as aspect-perception...[xl]

 

Conclusion

          Kuhn believes that correspondencism is either trivial or empty. It is trivial in cases where it’s unsurprising: No-one could disagree with the truism that ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white. But it is an empty shuffle -- and a dangerously misleading one (because it may seem non-empty) when applied to interesting cases:

 

 

          “To apply [the semantic conception of truth] in the comparison of two theories, one must...suppose that their proponents agree about technical equivalents of such matters as whether snow is white. If that supposition were exclusively about objective observation of nature, it would present no insuperable problems [xli], but it involves as well the assumption that the objective observers in question understand “snow is white” in the same way, a matter which may not be obvious if the sentences reads “elements combine in constant proportion by weight”. Sir Karl [Popper] takes it for granted that the proponents of competing theories do share a neutral language adequate to the comparison of such observation reports. I...do not.” [xlii]

 

And again, none of this need be seen as producing ‘idealism’ or ‘relativism’, no more than Wittgenstein was advocating one of these. Instead, we have, in Kuhn as in Wittgenstein, the possibility of getting off the merry-go-round.The nature of what Kuhn means by ‘incommensurability’ has been missed by nearly all of Kuhn’s ‘friends’ and foes, because, by means of attributing to Kuhn a (self-refuting) semantic doctrine, they have wrongly assumed otherwise.Their first mistake was perhaps to think that there must be some ‘ism’ that Kuhn was/is putting forward…[xliii]

          Kuhn thus has a ‘view’ with far less in the way of dogmatic theoretical committments than most of his ‘opponents’ have presumed. This intimates the real challenge: not to insist that Kuhn be read as having a position (be it ‘relativist’ or otherwise) at all. I believe that a full understanding of Kuhn leaves one in something like the non-theoretical non-position of Wittgenstein. This non-position can seem to some a wilful and culpable ‘quietism’.[xliv] Or a continuing ambivalence, which must be settled. “Are you a relativist or a realist? Or somewhere in between? Decide, Mr. Kuhn!” Thus Kuhn, and Wittgenstein are sometimes accused of being ambivalent between on the one hand the kind of ‘conceptual relativism’ allegedly present in any talk of “the formation of concepts different from the usual ones” [xlv] , and on the other hand the kind of quasi-Davidsonian or Hollisian ‘anti-relativism’ allegedly present in Wittgenstein’s famous claim that “If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also...in judgements.” (PI, para. 242)  It is sometimes thought that the kind of agreement ‘transcendentally’ required by the latter rules out the kind of deep conceptual differentiation seemingly allowed for in the former. But I see no contradiction between these two remarks. For both are grammatical remarks -- which is to say, reminders, for particular purposes. If one is talking with someone who thinks that our concepts could or perhaps even must be “absolutely the correct ones” (perhaps even a quasi-Kantian or Davidsonian), someone who thinks that it makes sense to compare our concepts with reality, then it may be wise to cite Wittgenstein on the formation of (different) concepts. If one is talking with someone who thinks that there can be complete breakdowns of communication, of the kind suggested by some Sceptics, Solipsists or Relativists, someone who thinks that there can be no comparison of one person’s or culture’s concepts with another, then it may be wise to cite Wittgenstein on agreements in judgement. Such citations would be the starting-points in discussions, attempts to mutually comprehend. They would not be what mainstream philosophy thinks of as ‘positions’.

 

            Kuhn mostly found himself writing in an intellectual milieu in which the dominant ‘positions’ were cumulativist or correspondoncist or both. So he spent most of his time doubting that our concepts were or even could be absolutely the correct ones, as it were. He spent most of his time putting forward concepts like that of ‘incommensurability’. But that strategic decision, which perhaps he regretted later in life, in truth no more makes him a Relativist than it does Wittgenstein.

            If I am right, then Kuhnian incommensurability can be not only non-relativistic, but a correct and important insight -- arrived at in part through a proper understanding of (understanding) religion, the arts, and philosophy itself – into the tremendous and tremendously solid (even though at points, importantly, discontinuous) achievements of the natural sciences.[xlvi]


[i] As expounded principally in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U.Chicago Pr., 1970 (1962); henceforth SSR).

[ii] See for instance his “Dubbing and Redubbing: The Vulnerability of Rigid Designation” (in Scientific Theories (ed. Savage; Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14, Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990, pp.298-318), and several of the essays collected in his The Road Since Structure (Chicago: U.Chicago Pr., 2000).. I detail elsewhere (in my Thomas Kuhn (Oxford: Polity, 2002; jt. with Wes Sharrock)) the changes which Kuhn made to the incommensurability concept over the years, and argue that they are elucidatory/clarificatory rather than being changes of doctrine as such.

[iii] See for example the crucial role played by avowedly Wittgensteinian considerations in section V of SSR, “The Priority of Paradigms”.

[iv] Why continue to use the word ‘paradigm’, given that Kuhn himself ceased doing so in about 1969? Firstly, because, for better or for worse, it is the term that everyone knows. Secondly, for the reason given in note 2, above: in very brief, that the more precise terms that Kuhn later introduced (‘exemplar’ and ‘disciplinary matrix’, and then later still ‘lexicon’, ‘lexical structure’ and ‘taxonomy’) do not I think carry with them any difference in substantive point of view (or of ‘paradigm’). So, so long as we do not fall into the usual traps of misinterpreting what a paradigm is (e.g. thinking that it is an inviolable framework of thought-and–perception-constraint), there need be no harm in using this word, in trying to enable a better understanding of what the word ‘incommensurability’ (and indeed the word ‘paradigm’ and its ‘cognates’) is for.

[v] Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Berkeley: U. Cal., 1970), p.53 (italics mine); henceforth LCA. My point here about an analogy between the case of scientific revolutions and the case of disputes about religion does not particularly depend upon the role played in certain people’s lives by certain sets of words (e.g. the religious person’s reliance upon certain ‘pictures’, as opposed to the atheist who has no pictures (or different pictures)), or even upon Kuhn’s own familiar and ‘outrageous’ partial analogy between change of point of view in religion and science (‘religious conversion’), but rather upon the difference between the believer and the atheist being not a semantic matter. We are in search of a way of understanding ‘incommensurabilism’ which does not make it a matter of meaning. (But this should not be taken as implying that (the criteria for) the concepts of understanding or meaning are in general the same in science as in religion. Far from it: Wittgenstein and Winch consistently emphasize their radical difference -- their incommensurability, one might indeed say...-- and the gross errors and myths which follow from failing to keep them apart.)

[vi] LCA p.55, italics mine.

[vii] I.e Because of the clash of ‘thought-styles’ which became more pronounced, the further the Copernicans journeyed from Ptolemy.

[viii] This is one way of putting why for Kuhn there are no truly crucial experiments between paradigms -- because crucial experiments are only decisively identifiable as such once one of the paradigms has been obliterated. That is to say, once there is no longer any dispute to adjudicate, nothing ‘crucial’ to establish.

[ix] Again, it is important to note that ‘understanding’ is a family-resemblance concept. Translation from foreign language to native tongue is not the paradigm of ‘understanding’.

[x] We are in the situation, say, of an atheist -- we just do not and cannot attach any weight to the sentences of a believer, do not and cannot enter into their ‘pictures’. We can’t contradict the person -- they are too distant from us for us to be able to do so. But yet we are obviously in a way meaning to contradict them -- we do not have a happy ‘agreement to disagree’ hereabouts. We do not both just accept that what the other says is ‘true for them’. We cannot happily switch from one system to the other and back again. The point is to be able to see how they can see it like that – not to be able to see it like that for ourselves.

[xi] “Dubbing and Redubbing…”, op.cit., p.300.

[xii] Here is Kuhn, on p.238 of The Road Since Structure: “Language learning and translation are…very different processes: the outcome of the former is bilingualism, and bilinguals repeatedly report that there are things they can express in one language that they cannot express in the other. Such barriers to translation are taken for granted if the matter to be translated is literature, especially poetry.  …[T]he same difficulties in communication arise between members of different scientific communities, whether what separates them is the passage of time or the different training required for the practice of different specialties. For both literature and science, furthermore, the difficulties in translation arise from the same cause: the frequent failure of different languages to preserve the structural relations among words, or in the case of science, among kind terms. The associations and overtones so basic to literary expression obviously depend upon these relations. But so…do the criteria for determining the reference of scientific terms, criteria vital to the precision of scientific generalizations.” (italics added)

[xiii] Which is absolutely not, of course, to say that they do not touch on reality at all. One ought not to forget self-descriptions such as the following, used by Kuhn on p.203 of The Road Since Structure (op.cit.): Kuhn says that he, like Boyd, is an “unregenerate realist”!!

[xiv] London: MacMillan, 1953 (henceforth PI).

[xv] This point is known in the Wittgenstein literature as ‘the autonomy of grammar’.

[xvi] This is why no substantive relativism follows – and why all attempts to treat ‘the autonomy of grammar’ as a contentful philosophical thesis, and then perhaps to deduce a form of meaning-relativism or truth-relativism, are hopeless (or at least: profoundly un-Wittgensteinian. Contrast Peter Hacker’s work).

[xvii] The scare quotes here are to mark again that this is not relativism  (For discussion of how we ought to take the term ‘form of life’ – as something we are not constrained or limited within, i.e. in a non-relativistic and indeed non-sociologistic way – see my “Meaningful Consequences” (jt. with James Guetti; Philosophical Forum XXX:4 (Dec. 1999), pp.289-315). The difficult issue of the ‘limits’ of thought, is an issue whose resolution lies beyond our present scope, but is of course central to the philosophy of Wittgenstein (also of Foucault, Kant, and others; for some discussion, see my “The ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is made harder by all attempts to solve it”, forthcoming in Theory, Culture and Society)).

[xviii] A danger should be borne in mind here: One should not start to think of the ‘different concepts’ to which Wittgenstein refers as potentially forming a quasi-metaphysical ontology ‘wholly alien’ to our’s. To do so risks falling straight back into an over-strong meaning-relativism (and associated ‘meaning-change’ doctrines). (See David Cerbone’s work; and notes 15, 16, 17, above; and the section “What is an ontology?”, below.

[xix] But, as is clear from the quotes above from Wittgenstein on aesthetics etc., this need not and indeed should not be thought of as a strictly semantic – meaning-involving -- matter.

[xx] The Road Since Structure, p.36. The present paper might be usefully seen as an attempt to supplement slightly the ‘rubrics’ which Kuhn found available to him – that is, to provide some terms, drawn from Wittgenstein studies, which can help achieve Kuhnian goals.

[xxi] The point here is the very same point as Kuhn tends to make about crucial experiments (cf. n.8, above)-- that crucial experiments, decisive choosers between paradigms, only exist in the mind of a historian (and a poor historian, at that -- the kind of historian who isn’t interested really in how things were at the time!).

[xxii] “Reflections on my critics” (in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (eds. Lakatos and Musgrave; Cambridge: C.U.P., 1970; also reprinted in The Road Since Structure); henceforth “Reflections…”),  p.265. One might wish to object as follows: Can’t Newton’s propositions (as opposed to his ontology) be truer than Aristotle’s (etc.)? The answer is: Sure; but only given a paradigm.

[xxiii] See the work of Kuhn’s literary executor, James Conant, on the Context Principle in Wittgenstein (and Frege). See also Read’s paper in The New Wittgenstein (Read and Crary (eds.), London: Routledge, 2000). These writings provide more argument than there is space for here for the conclusion that it just doesn’t make any sense to compare a concept alone with nature.

[xxiv] See in particular Kuhn’s “Reflections…”,pp.264-6.

[xxv] The Road Since Structure, p.243.

[xxvi] See SSR 98-101. One should add to this that global judgements of truth or falsity are of relatively little use hereabouts, anyway. Ptolemy’s system included many ‘small’ accurate observations; and all theories, even ‘true’ ones, are born refuted. All theories work – to some extent.

[xxvii] For example, cf. the maxim ‘To understand everything is to forgive everything.’ For those who find themselves able to use this maxim, the word ‘understand’ clearly functions in roughly the way we are describing here. (For elaboration, see my “Is forgiveness possible?”, Reason Papers 21 (Fall ’96), pp.15-35.)

[xxviii] For exposition of this term, see E. Witherspoon’s paper in The New Wittgenstein (op.cit.).

[xxix] For typically, as Wittgenstein puts it, “The one party attack the normal form of expresion as if they were attacking a statement; the others defend it, as if they were stating facts recognized by every reasonable human being.” (PI para. 402). This, according to Wittgenstein, is what disputes between ‘Relativists’ etc. on the one hand and ‘Realists’ on the other are like. And even if one (wisely) gives up such ‘isms’, the basic situation remains the same. Efforts at mutual understanding (in philosophy) are, for Wittgensteinians, beset continually by disconcerting little and large incommensurabilities.

[xxx] For detail here, see the essays in Part I of The New Wittgenstein (op.cit.). Imagining otherwise, fantasizing that there can be any such thing as a point of view wholly outside of language, is what alone gives most contemporary views of ‘reference’ any sense or plausibility. One can fantasize that it makes sense to speak of words as it were pointing to things (e.g. the word ‘electron’ ‘pointing’ to actual electrons, long before anything like our current take on what an electron is were in place) only if one fantasizes that one can step outside of one’s language, and take a ‘sideways-on’ look at reality, a look which enables one to see which words ‘hook up’ to things; which don’t; which (e.g. ‘electron’) do and have done since they were coined, even though the way they hook up has changed vastly, etc.

[xxxi] Unless, again, that translation is more like good translation of a poem. There is a serious analogy, which in a fuller presentation we should love to pursue, between Kuhn on old science, and Foucault on old ‘epistemes’. My feeling is that, in the final analysis, Foucault runs a somewhat greater risk, in The Order of Things (and in Madness and Civilization, in his quasi-poetic attempt to attune his readers to the otherness of the mad), of facing the Relativist dilemma: of brilliantly speaking what he has claimed to semantically put out of reach.

[xxxii] Essential Tension (Chicago: U.Chicago Pr., 1977), p.338.

[xxxiii] “Paradigms”, Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 14:3 (1983), pp.173-213; p.205. In short, if one is asked to say what difference (talk of) incommensurability makes, the answer is we think to be found in (the sensibility of...) quotations from Kuhn such as this one. If one is asked further what the test is of a historian or philosopher having ‘got the feel of’ a paradigm, the answer must be the old answer of whether one has been enabled to see it as relatively coherent, whether one has been enabled to see its practitioners as normal scientists, whether one can thus make decent sense of their activity. Thus this ‘feel’ that we (after Kuhn) are speaking of is simultaneously theoretically ineffable and practically mundane.

[xxxiv] My argument hereabouts is indebted deeply to James Guetti’s Wittgenstein and the grammar of literary experience (Athens, Georgia: U. Georgia Press, 1993). The distinction between ‘meaning(s)’ and ‘grammatical effects’ is employed to great effect there; and perhaps also in his recent joint paper with me, “Meaningful Consequences” (op.cit.). ‘Grammatical effects’ are the systematic effects that words have upon one which are not well-identified with their meaning, considered as communicative use. Now of course, ‘meaning’ means lots of different things… Some uses of the word ‘mean(-ing)’, including some of Kuhn’s uses, are ‘actually’ best heard as invocations of a concept like ‘grammatical effect’: for example, the use of the word ‘mean(-ing)’ in  the question, “What does ‘America’ mean to you?”, or “How does this word at this point in the poem come to seem so ‘full’ of meaning?” (See also paragraphs 12 and 20 from lecture 1 of Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Aesthetics”, in his Lectures and Conversations (op.cit.)).

[xxxv] My argument here puts Kuhn closer to Hacking than has typically been perhaps assumed. For my thought is that ‘conceptual scheme’ or ‘taxonomy’ actually more or less amounts to ‘style of reasoning’, in something not unlike Hacking’s sense of that phrase. Hacking, like me, rejects meaning-incommensurability. But I have now suggested that an incommensurability centred upon ‘grammatical effects’ (see n.34, above) actually represents Kuhn’s thoughts slightly better. And that when one starts to look carefully at what is lost in translation (viz. ‘grammatical effects’ -- which are also what changes in shift of taxonomy) one is also looking at style of reasoning.

[xxxvi] “Reflections...”, p.267.

[xxxvii] See Kuhn’s “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability”, Chapter 2 of The Road Since Structure, for Kuhn’s specific response to Davidsonian and Quinian approaches, via arguments in favour of localized translation ‘failure’ between interdefined complexes of terms – the scare quotes I am using indicate that the ‘failure’ is not a failure straightforwardly to communicate, but rather the achievement of ‘partial communication’, in just the sense in which I have been trying in this paper to explicate that notion.

[xxxviii] I am indebted for this example to James Guetti – and for the idea of this paragraph to James Conant.

[xxxix] Of course, this perceptual metaphor was far less a ‘master-metaphor’ in Kuhn’s later work, post-SSR, but this does not affect my present point, which concerns the impact, the experience, of a gestalt-switch, not what people (even Kuhn) have tried to say about that experience.

[xl] Thus the phenomenon of aspect-perception is helpful to one in understanding what it is to be ‘in’ a paradigm and to experience a paradigm-shift -- and helps one in understanding what incommensurability is, as a ‘meta-issue’. There isn’t, in a certain sense, much to be said about it, and there’s nothing useful to be said about it by way of theorizing -- but whoever said there had to be?

[xli] Presumably, Kuhn uses the words ‘no insuperable...’ here because he believes the problems presented are still severe, even in the case of ‘objective observation’. Not only the straight scientific difficulties, but more importantly the difficulties posed by the way in which Kuhn holds that scientists ‘see’ according to a paradigm (e.g. the different ways in which Galileo and Aristotle saw the pendulum).

[xlii] “Reflections…”, pp.265-6. Kuhn goes on to add that “If I am right, then ‘truth’ may, like ‘proof’, be a term with only intra-theoretic applications.” This may sound alarmingly like a strong Relativism about truth. But one should note how Kuhn immediately continues, and explicates his ‘position’: “Until this problem of a neutral observation language is resolved...”, and Kuhn believes of course that it will not be resolved (see the note immediately above, and see also “Reflections...” p.234-5), “...confusion will only be perpetuated by those who point out that the term is regularly used as though the transition from intra- to inter- theoretic contexts made no difference.” In other words, Kuhn’s point is not to make a dogmatic denial of the inter-theoretic validity of uses of the term ‘truth’, but rather to draw one’s attention to differences. Viz., in this case, the difference between an intra-theoretic application of the term ‘truth’, and an inter-theoretic application of same. The difference made, I have suggested, is an important difference of aspect.

[xliii] Of course, Kuhn does occasionally give the strong impression that he would like to put such a doctrine forward, if he could (see e.g. p.55 and p.229 of The Road Since Structure). But even that is not tantamount to actually putting forward such a theory; though I think that Kuhn would have done well in 1990 to have simply accepted, rather than provisionally declined, Hacking’s friendly amendment to his position: “[Hacking] hopes to eliminate all residues of a theory of meaning from my [Kuhn’s] position…” (ibid., p.229).

In any case, Chapter Two of Kuhn’s (ibid.) gives Kuhn’s own response to the self-refutation charge, a response which I have here been endeavouring to complement.

[xliv] For rebuttal of the charge, see D.Cerbone’s essay in The New Wittgenstein (op.cit.).

[xlv] As quoted earlier, from p.230 of PI: “...if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize -- then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to...”.

[xlvi] My overwhelming debt in the writing of this paper is to Wes Sharrock. Deep thanks also to Alice Crary, James Conant, James Guetti and to an anonymous referee for some useful ideas and critical comments.