Thomas Kuhn & problems of incommensurability between scientific paradigms
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/#IncoWorlChan
The Austin LessWrong philosophy working group discussed this yesterday. The main ideas discussed:
1. A sense that Kuhn focuses strongly on physics, and that paradigm shifts in many other fields are fuzzy or absent. e.g. in neuroscience or computer science, have there been any?
2. All language is fuzzy, and (in the strongly held view of one pragmatist participant), even "truth is not an exact precise thing", and "all theories have some slop in them". So incommensurability is nothing unusual or specific to scientific paradigms, it's present in all our talk, and we're mostly quite good at grokking what each other mean.
3. Kuhn's work itself suggests options for a common language between people using different paradigms. He seemed to presume logic and deductive validity are common across all the paradigms, for example. And he gave 5 characteristics (accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness) for deciding between paradigms, and these 5 are a neutral basis for deciding rather than part of a paradigm.
4. Scientists and especially engineers are typically realists about what they're working with. They might technically have incommensurable definitions of "mass", for example, but they get past it essentially by saying, "Let me show you what I mean", and getting out some materials and equipment and pointing at something they do.
It's not essential that the pointing behavior always succeeds in having a real referent. Phlogiston and the ether are examples where the pointing might fail. But enough of the behaviors succeed: e.g. at temperature increases in the case of phlogiston, and light propagation in the case of ether. The successes or apparent successes in "pointing out" things give a realist way of bypassing incommensurability.
@gabe
Ah, I see! Sorry for misreading. :)
@ceoln
It should be interpreted as "it's true of scientists and it's especially true of engineers". There's no intended implication that they're the same thing.