Thomas Khun Incommensurability

I.1 THOMAS KUHN'S LIFE Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his B.S. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 and M.S. And Ph.D. degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively, and he remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. At Berkeley he wrote and published his best known and most influential work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Initially published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, it was published in book form by the University of Chicago Press in 1962. In 1964, he was named M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In 1979, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and, in 1983, he was named Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. He suffered from cancer during the last years of his life: he died, in 1996, at the age of 73 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I.2 THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS The structure of scientific revolution is the most important and famous Thomas Kuhn's essay about philosophy of science. Published in 1962, this work represents the beginning of the modern epistemological debate. Since my most fundamental objective is to urge a change in the perception and evaluation of a familiar data, the schematic character of this first presentation need be no drawback. On the contrary, reads whose own research has prepared them for the sort of reorientation here advocated may find the essay form both more suggestive and easier to assimilate.
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This text, composed of 13 chapters, aims to analyze the process of training in the history of science. Kuhn describes this training as a circular motion: starting from the pre-paradigmatic or pre-normal period of science, going throw the normal science and the revolutionary periods, coming back again to another new period of normal science. Its aim is a sketch of the quite different concept of science that can emerge from the historical record of the research activity itself.
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Pre-normal science is that scientific practice in which coexist various competing schools of thought. This is the reason why there is not a general agreement about the solutions of the problems to tackle. What Kuhn calls normal science is a research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice . This means that a group of scientists reach an agreement about the fundamental issues in a particular field of research. These common results are called paradigms, a word that Kuhn introduces for the first time in the philosophical-scientific jargon (it should be noted that, in the same period, even another important philosophy of science's
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author, Paul Feyerabend, introduced this word): the paradigm is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions . In the scientific activity, those whose research is based on shared paradigm also use the same rules and models. Anyhow, in order to agree to a paradigm, a theory must seems better than all the other theories, but it must not necessary clarify all the things involved in. However, the scientific research repeatedly points out new and unexpected facts: this assimilation requests a working-out of another set of rules.
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On the other hand, the scientific revolutions, in Kuhns opinion, are extraordinary moments of the sciences history in which it is necessary to take over from those paradigms which related to the normal science (such an example: the Copernican revolution, the Newtonian revolution and the Einsteinian one). During these periods the trust that the scientists put in the previous paradigm start to waver because of an anomaly, however this is not enough to let them change the paradigm itself. In order to cause a true crisis the anomaly has to be not a simple anomaly, but something deeper: only when, and only in this case, this anomaly is something destabilizing, at this very moment the transition to the crisis and to the extraordinary science is started. Since the present paradigm gives up to work suitably, the scientists start to call into question even the solutions, previously accepted, to problems that were thought to be solved. The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the fields most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and application.
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Finally, a scientific revolution is nothing but a non-cumulative episode of development (on the contrary, the normal science is cumulative) in which the previous paradigm is replaced, completely or only in part, with a new paradigm that is incompatible with that. When the transition to the new paradigm, therefore to the new normal science, is done, the scientists will consider in a different way their research, changing even their methods and their goal. Successive paradigms tell us different things about the population of the universe and about that populations behavior. [] But paradigms differ in more than substance, for they are directed not only to nature but also back upon the science that product them. They are the source of the methods, problem-field, and standards of solution accepted by any mature scientific community at any given time.
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This is the reason why Kuhn points out that the new tradition of normal science that comes out after a scientific revolution is not only incompatible with the previous one, but also incommensurable with that (all the more reason, schools that support different paradigms come to a lack of understanding). In a way, the scientists see the world in a different way: after a scientific revolution the scientists react to a different world. In Kuhns opinion, this shift on seeing things from a new perspective is on a par with the process of reorientation of the optical Gestalt: the scientist has to learn to see a new shape. Although, of course, the world does not change because of the shifting of the paradigm, the scientist starts to work in a different world. Instead, a convert to a new astronomy says, I once took the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but I was mistaken.
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II. THE CONCEPT OF INCOMMENSURABILITY: A NEW WORLD

At this stage I propose explaining how Kuhn, during his life, has changed his mind about the concept of incommensurability. Starting from his main work, The structure of scientific revolution (SSR), published in 1962, to arrive at his scheme of things during the seventies and the eighties, studying the postscript to the same work written in 1969. II.1 INCOMMENSURABILITY IN THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION (1962) Kuhn borrows the word incommensurability from the mathematic jargon. In the mathematic jargon two quantities are incommensurable when they have an irrational ratio, therefore they do not have units of the same dimension, common measures, basis or standard of comparison. In mathematic the first case of incommensurability is between the diagonal and the side of the square: d=2l In the 10th chapter of The structure of the scientific revolution, Revolution as Changes of World View, Kuhn proposes himself to talk about the changing that occurs in science when perspective, language and symbology change. Kuhn borrows the mathematical concept of incommensurability: he uses it in order to clarify how different paradigms are incommensurable to each other, therefore they do not have a common measure. Kuhn takes three different aspects of the concept of incommensurability into consideration: 8 1. The first one is a methodological aspect: different paradigms turn their interest to different problems, therefore even the criteria of problems solution changes. The problems whose solutions were fundamental for the previous traditions of research can disappear, whereas issues that were paltry before the scientific revolution can become important after it. Changings such as these are mostly due to the shift of the phenomenal world. Changing the paradigm means not having cumulativeness neither about the scientific problems involved, nor about the technics used to solve them or about the accepted solutions. Kuhn gives a lot of examples of this: the development of dynamic from Aristotle to Cartesian and Newton until the XVIII century, the revolutionary transition in chemistry by Lavoisier and the development of electromagnetic theory by Maxwell. 2. The second one is a semantic aspect: the meaning of some concepts that transit form a paradigm to another can change. As a matter of fact, it rarely happens that the elements that were used in a previous tradition remain the same after a scientific revolution: some fundamental terms change completely their meaning because of they have now different relationships with each other. The classical example is the passage from the Newtons view of the world to the Einstein one: To make the transition to the Einsteins universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole.
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In Kuhns mind, this conceptual changing prevents the possibility to derivate the natures laws, provided for a previous paradigm, from another paradigm that takes the place of it. For instance, the Einsteins physical laws are not the same as the original ones: this is because the Einstein idea of those laws uses relativistic concepts for space, time and mass according to the way Einstein thinks about them, that is different from the way of thinking of Newton.

3. The third one is an ontological aspect: changing the paradigm means even to take into consideration different worlds. Passing form a paradigm to another is not a logical imposition, but it must occurred at one go: the world changes and new knowledge is reached in a non-cumulative way. II.1.2 Living in a different world During a scientific revolution the world changes, and new knowledge is acquired on a non-cumulative basis: what is changing is the phenomenal world region with which a community of scientists is in contact with, and it is also changing the research work in it. As a matter of fact, after a scientific revolution the phenomenal world can contain new phenomenon and entities which there were not before it. In order to say this with a Kantian language: on one hand the noumenal world exists independently of paradigms, languages and minds; but on the other hand a lot of phenomenal words exist, and every one of these is made up of a different paradigm. Kuhn goes on talking about this and he said that this world changing is a Gestalt switch, therefore a gestalt reorientation, in order to underline this drastic world changing. One of the examples which Kuhn talks about in order to demonstrate how much our consideration of the world changes after a revolution is the discover of Uranium by Sir William Herschel made in 1781: what before the revolution was considered a simple star, after it becomes a planet. Another example of the same type is told by Kuhn: the pendulum movement observed by Galileo. Since the ancient times it was observed that a matter hanged by a thread swings backwards and forwards until it is in a state of rest: according to the Aristotelians view, whose were thinking that a matter moves according to nature from up to down, a swinging matter was only a matter that was difficultly fowling down. Galileo saw in the same situation something different, he noticed other qualities. Since the scholastic paradigm was not invented, the scientists could not see pendulums, but only swinging matters. What Kuhn is trying to explain is that, during and after the revolutionary aspect of science, changing a paradigm means that the scientists see two different worlds. The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.10 Moreover the contest in which Kuhn talks about this thesis of different worlds does not make us have doubts on the fact that he does not want the paradigm to create ex novo its world. Even though the world is not changing due to a paradigm changing, after the revolution the scientist is working in a different world. In Kuhns mind this different world is nothing but a changing in the point of view, what he call Gestalt switch, that forces to review the previous laws, knowledge and the changing in the scientific practice such as the transformation of the experimental technics and the way to interpret new data. After a scientific revolution the scientists see not only the world in a different way, but also they react and proceed in a different way. On the whole, the paradigm transforms the phenomenal world that itself contributes to establish. This is the reality that the scientists see and test as different from a paradigm to another. For instance,

passing from a paradigm to another involves changings such as the fundamental problems, the modality used in the problem solving and, at last, the language used by different theories and the meaning of the term itself. The plurality of scientific worlds declares the distance between the praxis used by scientists with different paradigms. In addition, Kuhn underlines the fact that incommensurability does not mean absolute communication incompatibility between theories or paradigms, but it makes this communication more difficult. Incommensurability problem is strictly connected to the theme of scientific revolutions and to the shift of trust from a paradigm to another (because this is the point, the faith of one or more scientists in a new paradigm). The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem-solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigms has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.11 II.2 INCOMMENSURABILITY FROM 196912 Starting from 1969 Kuhn rethinks his idea of incommensurability. What is changing is that Kuhn is not still talking about incommensurability between paradigms, but he starts to speak about incommensurability between languages. Thus incommensurability is not still untranslatability between two paradigms, but it is involved in the differences that a scientific revolution creates in the process of acquirement of concepts belonging to two different theories. So Kuhn cuts down the concept of incommensurability: whereas before it was distinguished in three different aspects, now the only aspect that remains is the changing of meaning (the other two aspects are the consequences of the meaning changing itself). In any case, Kuhn specifies that not every concept changes its meaning passing from a theory to another, the incommensurability is only connected to a small group of terms. During the 70s Kuhn, in all his works, avoids the metaphors used in The structure of scientific revolution, as the one about Gestalt psychology. His conception is really changed, and this can be noticed starting from his way of writing. The first important thing that Kuhn wants to underline, and he does it not only one time in the Postscript of The structure of scientific revolutions, is that incommensurability does not mean that proponents of incommensurable theories cannot communicate with each other at all. What Kuhn supports is not a complete lack of communication. Nevertheless the communication between scientists that support different theories is incomplete and limited. Two men who perceive the same situation dierently but nevertheless employ the same vocabulary in its discussion must be using words dierently. They speak, that is, from what I have called incommensurable viewpoints.13 Kuhn talks about a new concept, the untranslatability: he derived this thesis from a Quine work, Word and object, published in 1960. Quine analyses how it is possible to translate expressions from a foreign language according to verbal answers and perceptive stimulus. He supports that in radical translations, therefore translations between languages those are not correlated with each other, it is possible to find several translations, at the same time logically incompatible and empirically equivalent (this is the open-endedness of translation thesis).

Initially Kuhn supports at all Quines thesis, because it explains how upholders of different paradigms speak different language, suitable to different worlds. In this way Kuhn can explain how it is not possible to compare point by point different languages (therefore different theories), because there are different translations possible and incompatible to each other, which question the obtained results. As a matter of fact, every translation needs a compromise. If there is disagreement about conclusions, the parties to the ensuing debate can retrace their steps one by one, checking each against prior stipulation. At the end of that process one or the other must concede that he has made a mistake, violated a previously accepted rule. After that concession he has no recourse, and his opponents proof is then compelling. Only if the two discover instead that they differ about the meaning or application of stipulated rules, that their prior agreement provides no sufficient basis proof, does the debate continue in the form it inevitably takes during scientific revolutions. That debate is about premises, and its recourse is to persuasion as a prelude to the possibility of proof.14 Thus persuasion is the only mean through which it is possible to decide which theory is more suitable. So scientists supporting different theories can communicate to each other, but only in one way: Briefly put, what the participants in a communication breakdown can do is recognize each other as members of different language communities and then become translators. [] Each will have learned to translate the others theory and its consequences into his own language and simultaneously to describe in his language the world to which the theory applies.15 The translation is a powerful vehicle of persuasion. Although persuasion is often not enough, and nothing can guarantee the persuasion. So translating one theory in a new language does not mean that the people that use that language will accept that theory. Afterwards, Kuhn distances himself from Quines position: I dont think that a referent in natural or scientific languages is absolutely impossible, only that it is very hard to discover it and you cannot be absolutely sure to reach success16. Kuhn differentiate himself from Quine, it is not true according to Kuhn that it is not possible to noticed any difference between the various translations. Instead of a plurality of translation logically incompatible but empirically equivalent, often the translations are not possible at all. Although most of the words are used before a scientific revolution and after it, the approach of some of them with the phenomenal world is changed. The mutual translation becomes impossible without a loss or a alteration of meanings: it does not exist a conceptual system that can accept all the empiric consequences of both theories. As between two different languages the translation is problematic, likewise the one between two different theories, because they cut the world in a different way. In any rate, as it is said in the Structure of scientific revolution, it is not impossible to compare two different theories. The latest version of the incommensurability thesis retails to a taxonomical changing17: the scientific revolutions produce, according to Kuhn, a new lexical taxonomy. The prerequisite for a complete translation between two taxonomy is not made of common measures of unique concepts, but it is made of a common lexical structure. In order to have a communication between people, it is not necessary that they have common criteria of application of terms to the world, but that they work with homologous lexical structures, therefore with a structured vocabulary which has the same taxonomic system. Scientists which support different paradigms have to face incommensurability problems because they built different lexical taxonomy, so that they classify the world in a different way.

Moreover the problem is that it is not possible to translate terms belonging to a taxonomical structure in another because there are restrictions that manage the relation between the natural types: this is what Kuhn calls no overlap principle. The restriction of the reference to the same natural type becomes, in the latest works by Kuhn, the main component of incommensurability: members of a particular natural type can belong to another natural type only if one of the two types is itself contained in the other. But none of the natural types can comprise members belonging to more than one category in a taxonomical structure; due to the fact that this restriction prevents the possibility of an overlap between the belongings to types, Kuhn call it no overlap principle. Kuhn takes as an example the translation of the Ptolemaic term planet into the Copernican lexicon.

II.2.1 The progress of science Even if it is possible to see a progress in science according to the scientific revolutions and the paradigm changing, it cannot be described, according to Kuhns opinion, as a process that make us reach the truth. The solution that Kuhn proposes, in order to preserve the idea of progress in science, is an evolutionary one: starting from primitive stages, going through a process which characterizes the following stages as a more elegant and detailed comprehension of nature. But nothing has to tell us that this is an evolutionary process that goes at something. For instance, this Kuhns position submits this thesis to criticism: what Kuhn criticizes is a rational and progressive view of science that was so popular in Kuhns time. What Kuhn excludes is a characterization of science as an inter-paradigmatic system of reference. According to Kuhn, it is not possible to find a super-historical concept of truth that is able to work as a regulative structure over the paradigms. According to Kuhns opinion, the importance of science as a practice and the scientific research are the fundamental points. What we want to verify is the possible convergence of realism and constructivism in Thomas Kuhn. Strictly speaking, the neo-Kantian constructivism is the only constructivist version that comes into conflict with realism. Kuhns paradigms are not only points of view or conceptual network that spread over the world modeling it. They are more heterogeneous concepts: they include a variety of cultural and technique resources which interact with the world and put a fundamental importance down to the matter world and to their characteristic of building our knowledge. In Kuhns works, nature continuously occurs as a source of resistance or anomalies during the constructive processes of scientific knowledge. Certainly as far as Kuhn is concerned, scientists live in a world in which not only their social relationships seem built-up, but also the natural reality with which they get in touch with is artificially made. Moreover, social world and material one interact with the scientific research. As a matter of fact, this world changes with the paradigms changing, it is made of matter that derive their skill and proprieties from the natural world. Even if adopting a paradigm the scientists built a social world, there is nothing antirealist in this description. Recognizing the complexity of nature means that every theory can be suitable only in limited perspectives. This is motivated by the Kuhns idea of paradigms plurality, that can boast about

successes, nevertheless they compete against each other. Kuhns constructivism is based on the important preliminary remark that it does not exist a unique and right description of the world. His most important treatment is the one that forces us to give up hope about an objective knowledge and, on the contrary, it pin us down to a world made of partial prospects and knowledge. Perspectivism let us leave both relativism and objectivism behind. It let us accept the historical contingency of scientific knowledge though known that it is a knowledge related to something. In SSR Kuhn took the image of biologic evolution in order to explain the progress of science: scientific improvement is compared to the biologic evolution because they are both the result of a competition and a selection. In the late 70s, Kuhn explains that both the scientific progress and the biological evolution give rise to isolated units: in the scientific field this means that specialist communities pass well on to each other, because they have in common the same taxonomy. On the other hand this can be very difficult with other specialist communities. Thus incommensurability is unavoidable for the sciences progress. According to Kuhn incommensurability has a positive function, therefore the one to cause a reciprocal isolation between scientist communities, encouraging their proliferation and so the sciences progress.

III. CRITICISM AND ANSWERS18 The incommensurability thesis that Kuhn states in The structure of scientific revolutions leaves himself open to criticism. He is accused of relativism and even of irrationalism: his incommensurability thesis was interpreted as if Kuhn thought that there are no independent criteria from the paradigm in order to choose a theory. In SSR19 Kuhn wants to assault not against the rationality, but against the common position of realism: Kuhn does not challenge the rationality of evaluation and of the theoretical choose into question, but he challenge the epistemological nature of chosen theories into question. For instance, it is not possible that these theories constitute a better approximation to reality. Moreover Kuhn and Feyerabends methodological ideas seem to guide to a determined epistemological relativism. Scientist, in an absolutely rational way, can agree with theories that are in conflict to each other on the basis of different groups of methodological standards, even alternative to each other. In addition, without better standards that are able to determinate the choice between competitive theories, the selection seems to be founded on subjective and irrational basis. A lot of authors criticized these Kuhn and Feyerabends ideas. For this reason in his last writings Kuhn underlines neither that he want to deny that the choice between different scientific theories can be a rational process, nor that he wants to deny the existence of fix standards of theoretical evaluation. Feyerabend himself criticizes Kuhn, and he does it from three different viewpoints: historicaldeductive, methodological-evaluative and for Kuhns way of writing. Firstly Feyerabend calls the real historical existence of normal science periods into question: according to Feyerabend the moment of theoretic monism and the one in which coexist a lot of theories take part of a unique simultaneous moment in which coexists two different ways of treating science. The second point of Feyerabends critic is about the valuation of normal science: the problem is the dogmatic element that characterizes the normal sciences periods. In Feyerabends opinion, the normal element of normal science is conservative and antihuman. Last but not least, Feyerabend criticizes Kuhn about the way of his writing: he let a methodological point of view according to which Kuhn judges some elements of science as rational and some others as irrational, but he criticizes Kuhn because he does not shows his viewpoint clearly. Feyerabend thinks that showing the point of view is so important because the other

readers can reach awareness of the existence of others viewpoints and of other possibilities of valuation. As for theories, both Kuhn and Feyerabend reject the empiricist idea of a neutral language, provided with an independent-from-them meaning. Incommensurability follows on the thesis of meaning variation combined with the observation theory-leadenness: concerning the contextual nature of meaning, theories vocabulary cannot have meanings shared among more theories. Thus if it is not possible to express theories through a shared vocabulary, their contents cannot be directly compared. This semantic incommensurability theory of radical meaning variation is possible to be expressed in a weaker way of partial meaning variation: the radical version of this theory is often ascribed to Feyerabend, the partial one to Kuhn. The criticism to this theory of incommensurability is focused on two different aspects: on one hand, some authors believe that a semantic intersection area is sufficient to make the comparison possible, even though they accept a meaning variation of terms belonging to two different conceptual systems. For example, Israel Scheffler in his work, Science and subjectivity (1967), underlines that even though the sense of a scientific term changes with its theory, despite this the denotation of this term is not changing in the same way, therefore its meaning. On the other hand, some other authors supports the inconsistency of the untranslatable idea. A lot of authors consider paradoxical the idea of a totally untranslatable language: as a matter of fact, if it is not possible to translate neither in a small part a language, actually it is not also possible to know that is a language. Starting from the early 80s it is possible to find a better incommensurability thesis: firstly Kuhn replies to this criticism developing the local incommensurability thesis according to which the translation impossibility is concerned only to few groups of terms belonging to a local scientific theory. Secondly both Kuhn and Feyerabend always clearly tried to distinguish a language translation form its comprehension. The criticism towards the incommensurability theory is not limited to this, it even includes more metaphysic questions. Particularly, semantic incommensurability leads to a lot of disputed themes about the relationship between theory and reality. A radical conceptual changing can give rise to referential discontinuity, so that there is no term belonging to a new theory is related to an object that is related to the previous theory too. This discontinuity about referents comes into conflict with a realistic philosophy of science. For instance, realists support that following theories in the same area of interest provide different alternatives about the same entities and that the process in science is an increase in known trues about a common group of entities. According to realism, entities related to terms belonging to a scientific theory exist independently form the theory itself, and the world studied by science is an objective reality that exist independently from the human thought. The result is a clear separation between those who support realism and those who do not support it, according to which the world and its matters are made up of human thought, concepts and language. While Feyerabend defends scientific realism, Kuhn has always criticized realism. As a matter of fact, Kuhn often uses images as the world changing in order to describe the transformation due to a paradigm changing, or the image of living in a different world: these elements suggest an idealistic view of the relationship between theory and reality. In any case Kuhns realism is not an extreme one (according to which the world is totally made up of human mind), but his view suggests the existence of an reality independent from human mind. Kuhn distinguishes reality from the phenomenal world: phenomenal world is a particular reconstruction of the itself world and it preserves the objective characteristics of this world. For instance, the Kuhns image about different possible worlds on one hand is thought to be only a metaphor, on the other it is thought to be a real idea.

In the early 80s Kuhn, in order to improve his incommensurability theory, distinguishes two different aspect of translation process: on one hand there is the technical aspect, therefore the substitution of worlds expressed in one language to the words of the other language. On the other hand there is an interpretative aspect according to which who is learning a language tries to understand it in relation with his linguistic context, not with his own language. Incommensurability concerns only the first one of these two aspects. It is not possible to translate a foreign term not because of the absence of a correct translation, but because we cannot find a suitable term in the foreign language that does not have referents which the original language does not have. The possibility to communicate between upholders of different paradigms is not guaranteed by the translation, but by bilingualism. Bilingual people can learn a second language and communicate with it without the mediation on the first one: the comprehension is possible even without translation. Like this it rational comparison is guaranteed.