Paul Hoyningen-Huene: What is uncontroversial about Kuhn?

[2012]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCp8MMT-pjU
Plenary Session at History of Science Society and Philosophy of Science Association Conference, 15
Nov 2012, San Diego

Outline
Answer to the title question, What is uncontroversial about Kuhn?
Thomas S. Kuhn produced more confusion than any other 20th century philosopher of science or
historian of science.
Questions (perhaps shamefully) posed by some:
Was Kuhn really a philosopher of science?
Was Kuhn really a historian of science?
and the confusion begins to emerge.
Quite some confusion exists about many topics Kuhn brought up, for instance about
context of discovery vs. context of justification
paradigms
scientific progress, relativism, subjectivism, irrationality
internalism vs. externalism in historiography, etc.
one topic treated: Incommensurability

Incommensurability
There are many different sources for the confusion about incommensurability
Four Sources: Paul Feyerabend, Incomparability, Self-refutation, World-change

Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend also introduced a concept of incommensurability in 1962, slightly but not
insignificantly different from Kuhns.
At the time, it was not obvious that two different notions of incommensurability
Difference: (See HH: Three biographies: Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Incommensurability In Rhetoric and
Incommensurability, ed. R. Harris, 2005)

Incomparability
Incommensurability always means some sort of incomparability.
Common thesis: if paradigms/theories are incommensurable, theory choice cannot be rational
because it cannot be based on a comparative evaluation.
However, incommensurability means some sort of incomparability.
It cannot mean absolute incomparability such a thing does not exist.
Incommensurability means incomparability with respect to some standard procedure that usually
works; its a special category of failure (Randy Harris)

For Kuhn, incommensurability means that the standard procedure of (rational) theory comparison does
not work, i.e., the comparison of the respective lists of solved problems.
Why?
Not exactly the same set of problems is relevant for both theories
Not exactly the same set of concepts is relevant in both theories
Not exactly the same set of values is relevant for both theories
Thus, Kuhn only reject one specific kind of rational theory comparison, not rational theory comparison
altogether.
In other words: incommensurability does not imply incomparability, and therefore does not imply the
irrationality of scientific development.

Self-refutation
Some philosophers thought that incommensurability is self-refuting.
Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth and History, 1981, pp. 114-115:
The thesis of incommensurability [] is a self-refuting thesis. [] To tell us that Galileo had
incommensurable notions and then to go on to describe them at length is totally incoherent
(Putative reaction by historians: Yes, weve always thought that it is very difficult to talk to
philosophers)
There is a very simple solution to this puzzle.
Of course, you can use todays English as a meta-language in order to explain the incommensurable
differences between todays English and Galileos Italian.
This is why Kuhn insisted that historians of science are often involved in some language teaching.

World change
In Structure, the third and most important aspect of [] incommensurability is world change (p. 150)
There have been several reactions to this claim:
a. Dismissal because of idealism
b. Defusing of world change by a metaphorical or psychological reading
c.

Neo-Kantian reading

World change, reaction a: dismissal

Israel Scheffler in Science and Subjectivity, 1967, p. 19:
I cannot, myself, believe that this bleak picture, representing an extravagant idealism, is true.
The full argument contains four premises and one conclusion (this is for the philosophers):
P1: Incommensurability encompasses world change
P2: World change (in revolutions) implies idealism.
P3: Idealism is bullshit.
P4: Bullshit can be dismissed.
Conclusion: Incommensurability can be dismissed.
Ad P2: Yes, perhaps, but what sort of idealism?
Ad P3: The high-school version of idealism is certainly very questionable: What reality is depends on
how you think of it period
Was this Kuhns view?

World change, reaction b: metaphorical/psychological

Example: Alexander Bird, BJPS 63 (4): 859-883 (2012):
In summary, a change in paradigm can bring with it a range of important psychological changes that
have cognitive (and emotional) consequences []. It is these psychological changes of that Kuhn is
referring to with the metaphor of world-change (p. 869)
World-change focuses on the psychological consequences of a scientific revolution (p. 871)
Kuhn in the (unpublished) Thalheimer Lectures Scientific Development and Lexical Change, Nov 12-19,
1984, Baltimore:
When I first used [the locution that the world changes with the lexicon] more than twenty years ago, I
thought my remark metaphorical and the metaphor eliminable. Now I am not so sure. (pp.97-98)
I shall then suggest that reiterated assertion that the world changes with the structure of the lexicon
used to describe it ought not be heard simply as metaphor. (p. 3)
I see no alternative to taking literally my repeated locution that the world changes with the lexicon.
(p. 120)
Is this an idealist position? Perhaps it is. But the idealism is then unlike any other of which I am
aware. (p. 122)
Result: the metaphorical/psychological reading of world change does not capture Kuhns intentions.

World change, reaction c: Neo-Kantian

From 1979 onward, Kuhn described his position as Kantian with temporally mutable categories (or in
Peter Lipsons words: Kuhns position is Kant on wheels)
Note first that this cannot be entirely correct because
Kants forms of intuition and forms of thought (categories) are responsible for the constitution
of what physical things in general, i.e. spatio-temporal things, are: Kants forms of intuition
and thought are constitutibe of thinghood
By contrast, Kuhns world change does (usually) not affect thinghood itself, it only affects the
existence, the qualities, and the relations of specific things.
However, Kuhns spirit is the same as Kants:
What we correctly take as objective reality is nevertheless somehow shaped by genetically subjectsided components.
Does this make sense?
Here is an analogy: colors
Suppose colors (as phenomenal qualities) are secondary qualities: they are an amalgam of genetically
object-sided and genetically subject-sided components (the standard view)
Are colors real?
Well, yes, very much so if you
want to buy a blue sweater or a red car
want to find out the colors of dinosaurs (in 2010 several articles on this question appeared in
Nature and Science)
discuss the laws and regularities of colors (see, e.g., Journal Color Research and Application)
Are colors real?
Well, not really real if you focus on the purely object-sided components of colors: light of certain wavelengths.

Colors are only secondary qualities less real than primary qualities.
Now imagine that all (observable and theoretical) properties of things were
secondary qualities, as robust as colors
but without any access to their purely object-sided components, i.e., the corresponding
primary qualities
We would probably take them as simply real, as really real.
This is the position that Kuhn had somehow in mind:
In so far as [the scientists] only recourse to [the world of their research engagement] is through what
they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different
world (Structure, p. 111)
As far as I can see, this position is indistinguishable from the position of perspectival realism 9or
scientific perspectivism) as developed by Ron Giere (and Paul Teller)
Basically: all humanly accessible reality is reality under a certain perspective.
Giere used color vision as a prototype for a scientific perspectivism (Giere 2006, p. 14) as I did for
the pertinent kind of Neo-Kantianism.
This suggests the convergence of both positions.