The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn
Incommensurability in Science
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Beschreibung des Verlags
A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.
This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn’s unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve. The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper “Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product” and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, “The Presence of Past Science.” An introduction by the editor describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds and sheds light on its central philosophical problems.
Kuhn’s aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. In his view, incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of the real world that science investigates, the rationality of scientific change, and the idea that scientific development is progressive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas S. Kuhn's seminal 1962 history The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gets a posthumous follow-up in this complex volume edited by Mladenovic (Kuhn's Legacy), a philosophy professor at Williams College. Mladenovic explains that Kuhn was not happy with how the book was received, believing that "both his critics and would-be followers seriously misunderstood" it; he worked on a subsequent account titled The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development for years, but died in 1996 before finishing. Mladenovic presents the five extant chapters of the book, along with a previously unpublished essay and a series of lectures Kuhn delivered at University College London. The "fundamental concept" of his second book centers on his idea of incommensurability, which suggests that "the difficulties of translating science are far more like those of translating literature than has generally been supposed." And as Mladenovic writes, Kuhn believed that "in order to understand science, we must understand its history." While Mladenovic provides a comprehensive and thoughtful introduction to the work, the technical, jargony nature of Kuhn's text makes for difficult reading. Philosophy lovers who stay the course, though, will find plenty to chew on.
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