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Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Thomas S. Kuhn
Thomas S. Kuhn*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Extract

Twenty years have passed since Paul Feyerabend and I first used in print a term we had borrowed from mathematics to describe the relaationship between successive scientific theories. ‘Incommensurability’ was the term; each of us was led to it by problems we had encountered in interpreting scientific texts (Feyerabend 1962; Kuhn 1962). My use of the term was broader than his; his claims for the phenomenon were more sweeping than mine; but our overlap at that time was substantial. Each of us was centrally concerned to show that the meanings of scientific terms and concepts — ‘force’ and ‘mass’, for example, or ‘element’ and ‘compound’ — often changed with the theory in which they were deployed. And each of us claimed that when such changes occurred, it was impossible to define all the terms of one theory in the vocabulary of the other.

Type
Part XVI. Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1982 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1982 , 1982 , pp. 668 - 688
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Since this paper was first drafted, many people have contributed to its improvement, among them colleagues at M.I.T. and auditors at the P.S.A. meeting and at the Columbia seminar in History and Philosophy of Science where a preliminary version was first tried out. I am grateful to all of them, above all to Ned Block, Paul Horwich, Nathaniel Kuhn, Stephen Stich, and my two official commentators.

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