Perspectives on Kuhn: Contemporary Approaches to the Philosophy of Thomas Kuhn

195 Pages·2023·1.89 MB·English

by  Leandro Giri, Pablo Melogno, Hernán Miguel

The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science 84
Leandro Giri
Pablo Melogno
Hernán Miguel   Editors
Perspectives
on Kuhn
Contemporary Approaches
to the Philosophy of Thomas Kuhn
The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy
of Science
A Series of Books in Philosophy of Science, Methodology,
Epistemology, Logic, History of Science, and
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Volume 84
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A series of books in Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics and Natural Science, History
of Science, History of Philosophy of Science, Epistemology, Methodology, and
Philosophy of Cognitive Science.
The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science is devoted to studies in
philosophy of science broadly considered, including work in the philosophy and the
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Leandro Giri • Pablo Melogno • Hernán Miguel
Editors
Perspectives on Kuhn
Contemporary Approaches to the Philosophy
of Thomas Kuhn
Editors
Leandro Giri Pablo Melogno
Institute of Philosophical University of the Republic
Investigations, Argentinian Society Montevideo, Uruguay
for Philosophical Analysis
National University of Tres de
Febrero – CONICET
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Hernán Miguel
Argentinian Society of Philosophical
Analysis
University of Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, Argentina
ISSN 1566-659X ISSN 2215-1974 (electronic)
The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science
ISBN 978-3-031-16370-8 ISBN 978-3-031-16371-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16371-5
This work was supported by School of Information and Communication (FIC) at the
University of the Republic (UdelaR)
National Agency for Research and Innovation (ANII)
Sectorial Commission for Scientific Research (CSIC)
National Agency for the Promotion of Science and Technology (ANPCyT)
Institute of Philosophical Investigations-Argentinian Society for Philosophical Analysis
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Preface
100 years after Thomas Kuhn’s birth, his work continues to be topical and of inter-
est to an important community of researchers interested in the philosophy and
history of science. This text is tangible proof of the perennial relevance of the
author’s thought. There are many of us who still debate our interpretations and
seek to untie the knots of Kuhn’s ideas, and here we take advantage of the excel-
lent historical opportunity provided by the author’s centenary to offer the public a
state of the art of the most current discussions in the community of researchers on
the subject.
In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published his celebrated The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, where he coined notions such as “paradigm,” “incommensurability,”
and “normal science.” These notions—encompassed by an unconventional and
newfangled view of science—would change the course of philosophy of science in
the second half of the twentieth century. Describing this with one of Kuhn’s most
influential concepts, we could say that a new paradigm took over most of the
academic work done in professional philosophy of science since then. Moreover,
Kuhn’s strong influence contributed to consolidating and stimulating novel research
areas outside traditional philosophy of science. For instance, the rise in science
accounts based on sociology and anthropology corresponds—at least partially—to
the gradual predominance of the Kuhnian program both in philosophy of science
and social studies of science.
We could open a debate to determine if this is a faithful legacy of the image of
science advocated by Kuhn throughout his work. It is a fierce debate, mainly
because of the very complexity and evolution of Kuhn’s position. The tension
between his notion of incommensurability and his ideas of scientific revolution and
scientific progress is useful for framing several issues that still require and deserve
a response.
In the same vein, the debate on Kuhn’s work should consider the stages of his
intellectual evolution, mainly as he devoted much of his later work to refining and
clarifying many of his most controversial assertions. Maybe he did so because he
was aware of how complex his position was and the misunderstandings that could
be created.
v
vi Preface
Notions such as paradigm, normal science, scientific revolution, and incommen-
surability have become so popular that they are now part of our more intuitive pic-
ture of science and pervade our more specialized conceptual approaches. On the
other hand, as criticism and hostile exegesis have gained ground and conceptual
density, finding a critical balance in the current state of Kuhnian thought is essential.
In this context, we must also consider the projection of several and diverse research
programs aiming to understand science and inspired by Kuhn’s ideas.
Therefore, it is relevant to have a forum where such an influential picture of
science can be discussed in its roots, structure, and consequences. This was the aim
of the II Colloquium in the Philosophy and History of Science Río de la Plata 2018
“Kuhnian Studies: Past, Present and Future” held at the Argentinian Society for
Philosophical Analysis (SADAF) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and at the University
of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay. The event brought together four prominent
worldwide specialists in Kuhn’s work for the first time: Paul Hoyningen-Huene,
Howard Sankey, Eric Oberheim, and Brad Wray. They were joined by Spanish-
speaking specialists such as Juan Vicente Mayoral from Spain; Hernán Miguel,
Leandro Giri, and Pío García from Argentina; and Jorge Rasner and Pablo Melogno
from Uruguay.
The Colloquium mainly reflected on Kuhn’s influence from the second half of
the twentieth century to this day, both within and outside philosophy of science. In
this way, Kuhnian philosophy engaged in dialogue with humanities, social sciences,
and history, as well as with experimental sciences: the original realm of Kuhnian
thought.
This event coincided with the Spanish edition of Scientific Development and
Lexical Change—a collection of Kuhn’s unpublished papers—published by Pablo
Melogno and Hernán Miguel and translated by Leandro Giri. These writings are the
basis of the Thalheimer Lectures delivered by Kuhn at Johns Hopkins University in
1984. They include essential ideas to understand Kuhn’s mature thought.
A considerable effort went into bringing these scholars together in Buenos Aires
and Montevideo. We had long and intense debates between the guests and the
audience. Several topics related to Kuhnian thought were unpacked for critical
examination; the aim was to go beyond the mere exegesis and interpretation of the
primary source. The event also focused on various philosophical research programs
inspired by Kuhn, programs that have evolved in recent years and still pose
challenges and hints that pave the way to a more precise picture of science and
scientists’ work.
Below we present the results of the debates. These texts are a valuable contribution
to contemporary philosophy of science, since they show that Kuhn’s thought is still
a pillar for issues of fundamental interest.
“Kuhn, Coherentism and Perception” is the title of Howard Sankey’s contribution.
Sankey explores the compatibility of Kuhn’s epistemological thinking and a
coherentist approach, as Jouni-Matti Kuukanen did previously. Sankey takes
Kuukanen’s exploration of Kuhn’s allegedly coherentist thinking as interesting but
argues that such characterization is not fully addressed. Although Sankey
Preface vii
understands the lack of evidence about Kuhn’s coherentism, he provides clues as to
how Kuhn would deal with one of the most critical issues in coherentism: the “input
objection.” Sankey states that Kuhn was not a coherentist tout court but could have
been one without resigning any relevant part of his epistemological theory.
In “Sankey on Kuhn and Epistemological Coherentism,” Juan Vicente Mayoral’s
commentary to Sankey, Mayoral agrees with Sankey and Kuukanen regarding the
existence of some coherentist elements in Kuhn’s epistemology. However, a more
plausible hypothesis is that Kuhn deliberately avoided being identified with
coherentism or foundationalism. This hypothesis is based on Kuhn’s admitted
inspiration from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s epistemology (at least as presented in his
classical work On Certainty). Mayoral shows that the way in which Wittgenstein
and Kuhn view the change of belief (changing the community’s viewpoint by
applying value-based criteria) is incompatible with coherentism as it is not based on
proving a new core of belief through doxastic justification (or nondoxastic
justification as empiricist foundationalism would require).
In “A Defense of Structure in Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” K. Brad Wray
examines Lorraine Daston’s interpretation of the current value of Kuhn’s work in
the history of science. She points out that the notion of structure in The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions is essential because of how popular the term was in social
sciences when Kuhn wrote the book. Daston further states that the ideas of a
historical structure and long-term historical regularities have been abandoned, both
in history and social sciences. Once Kuhn’s notion of structure is framed in this
zeitgeist, it can be rejected and becomes useless for the history of science.
Conversely, Wray declares that Structure is not primarily a book on the history
of science, so the notion of structure is not a tool for historical narrative. Furthermore,
Wray aims to show that Kuhn’s use of “structure” is intensely philosophical rather
than historical, making his position immune to Daston’s criticism. This is how
Kuhn’s notion of structure retains its philosophical legitimacy and conceptual
interest.
In “A Vindication of the Structure in Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” his
commentary to Wray’s text, Pablo Melogno also aims to vindicate the notion of
structure in Kuhn’s work through a discussion with objectives analogous to Wray’s,
but with differences in method and scope. Melogno examines some implicit
assumptions in Wray’s discussion and tries to discuss the Kuhnian notion of
structure in the historiographical realm, and not only within philosophy.
In “Reconstructing Structure: the Theoretical Background,” Juan Vicente
Mayoral reconstructs and explains (mainly from Kuhn’s viewpoint in The Presence
of Past Science, his 1987 Shearman Lectures) Kuhn’s lexicon model, which
enhances (and does not leave behind) his position in Structure about the nature of
the dynamics of scientific change as an alternative to positivistic, relativistic, or
pragmatic models. The connections between The Quest for Physical Theory (Kuhn’s
1951 Lowell Lectures), Structure, and later Kuhn works show continuity in his
project (although presented with evolving language). This continuity was forged
during Kuhn’s transition from physics to history and philosophy of science in the
viii Preface
late 1940s and he never cast it aside. On the contrary, it only became more
sophisticated as Kuhn achieved maturity.
Pío García presents “A Role for Cognitive Agents from a Kuhnian Point of View”
as a comment to Mayoral’s work. He complements Mayoral’s view by indicating
that it could be fruitful to include an analysis from the individual scientist’s
viewpoint as a unit in Kuhnian research programs. One of the most influential
dimensions in Kuhn’s philosophy is a shift from the individual researcher’s
viewpoint—typical of positivistic and Popperian philosophies—to scientific
disciplinary communities. However, García argues that Kuhnian philosophy has
room for a “compatibility account,” where important topics like the role of individual
learning, the shift from the “rational individual” to the “interpretative subject” (who
decides based on community shared values but weighing them independently), and
the nature of individual processes in scientific innovation, among other topics, can
be followed to enrich and fill some gaps in Kuhn’s program.
Eric Oberheim’s “Incommensurability and Metaincommensurability: Kind
Change, World Change and Indirect Refutation” includes a detailed and in-depth
analysis of the historical roots and fluctuations of the notion of incommensurability
in both Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. He argues that discovering incommensurability
led both of them (based on Einstein’s philosophical writings) to defend a “Kant-on-
Wheels” metaphysical position, where ontology is partly defined by the prevailing
theories. This kind of metaphysical position is incompatible with scientific realism,
which led Howard Sankey, one of its most tenacious defenders, to attack the very
notion of incommensurability as Kuhn and Feyerabend presented it.
Oberheim states that Sankey—along with many other scientific realists—is
mistaken in his general strategy when arguing against incommensurability. It is
impossible to understand both Kuhn and Feyerabend’s frameworks from the
viewpoint of a scientific realist. This is because incommensurability occurs at the
meta-theory level (where notions like “truth,” “progress,” and others describe the
structure and dynamics of scientific theories). This type of meta-level
incommensurability is called “meta-incommensurability” and precludes fruitful
discussions among people with different metaphysical positions unless they become
bilingual. According to Oberheim, Sankey’s sin is not being aware of meta-
incommensurability in sustaining the demise of the incommensurability notion
from the scientific realist point of view.
Finally, Oberheim also argues that meta-level incommensurability is an indirect
refutation of scientific realism, as it is a metaphysical position that cannot formulate
the very phenomenon of incommensurability coherently.
Leandro Giri, in “The Landscape of a Metaphysical Battle,” his reply to
Oberheim, analyzes his work in the context of a long controversy between Oberheim
and Hoyningen-Huene and Sankey on the interpretation of the notion of
incommensurability and the metaphysical consequences of each interpretation. Giri
argues that there is no relevant difference between how they hermeneutically
interpret Kuhn and Feyerabend’s versions of incommensurability but rather in what
they do with that interpretation. Giri acknowledges the incommensurability and
Preface ix
meta-incommensurability between the contenders. He also supports Oberheim in
that endorsing scientific realism is insufficient to show that Kuhn and Feyerabend
were wrong about incommensurability. However, Giri defends the plausibility of
Sankey’s weakened version of incommensurability, which enables the use of
incommensurability to assess the viability of a metaphysical position. Every viable
metaphysical framework should be able to explain incommensurability in its terms,
a test that both scientific realism and Kant-on-wheels realism easily pass. According
to Giri, this shows that a metaphysical plurality is possible.
Paul Hoyningen-Huene, in “The Plausibility of Thomas Kuhn’s Metaphysics,”
addresses the issue related to taking the term “world change” instead of “change in
the worldview.” He reminds us of the comparison between the Gestalt change and
the revolutionary change to underline the differences, as pointed out by Kuhn. He
also focuses on the fact that scientists have no unconceptualized framework to see
the world or talk about it. The position to take—as if there were a change in the
worldview without a world change—is based on the view that epistemology and
metaphysics are strictly separated. But the “principle of economy” proposed by
Kuhn is critical for analyzing the way scientists can refer to the existing things in the
world. Hoyningen-Huene also considers the point of view of historians of science
and analyzes how plausible the Kuhnian way of talking about world change is. His
analysis includes the reasons that scientists have to take something as real, given
how they see and detect things or because there is a “considerable number of
empirical phenomena that can best be understood as causal effects of existing
unobservable objects.” Thus, world change is the result of scientists’ ontological
commitment when talking about the world, and this scenario is not completely
captured by the term “change in the worldview.”
In “Seeing, Talking and Behaving... Ways of Inhabiting the World,” Hernán
Miguel presents two concerns regarding the issues addressed by Paul Hoyningen-
Huene. First, he focuses on how scientists engage in their research according to the
current paradigm. This is how their behavior, and even that of non-scientific people,
must be considered to understand that they are in a world and behave in that world,
apart from seeing that world and talking about it. In this way, behavior analysis
helps support use of the term and understanding the change as a “world change”
instead of a “change in a worldview.” Second, Miguel analyzes the preservation of
terms after a revolution, although those terms are related to nature in different ways
through different paradigms. In this regard, he analyzes the problem of the features
associated with the definition and identification of objects as corresponding to a
node in the lexical network. Scientists must make decisions when selecting these
features and this task is part of the process to obtain a new lexical network used to
understand and describe the world. The points made on these two topics help cast
light on conversations about world change.
We would like to thank the institutions which made all this possible: in Uruguay,
the School of Information and Communication (FIC) at the University of the
Republic (UdelaR), the National Agency for Research and Innovation (ANII), and
the Sectorial Commission for Scientific Research (CSIC). In Argentina, the