I had forgotten that Kuhn was such a brilliant writer. Much easier to read than most philosophy. Many of his observations are also fascinating, and naturally I agree with many of his conclusions. The big sticking point for me is now, as it always has been, incommensurability. I continue to believe that Kuhn fails to establish that different scientific paradigms are incommensurable in any strong sense. It is, of course, not clear exactly how strong Kuhn intends the incommensurability between paradigms to be; in one place, he says things that make it sound very strong indeed, in another, he talks as if incommensurability amounted to little more than the obvious fact that two paradigms disagree. This lack of clarity remains in his postscript of 1970, though the postscript, as many have noted, seems to lean toward the weak side; his notion that translation between paradigms is possible seems incompatible with the stronger senses of incommensurability that most of Kuhn's readers, both fans and critics, have usually attributed to him.
Still, my essential conclusion is this; if he means to claim incommensurability in a strong sense, his data doesn't establish it, and I know of no independent data which does. If he intends a weak sense, his conclusions are not particularly novel (the strong incommensurability of paradigms is the only feature of his discussion not easily accommodated by the philosophy of science of, say, Carnap or Ernest Nagel). Either way, I cannot see that the book deserves its reputation as itself a revolutionary work.
The commenter on my previous blog post also mentioned Feyerabend, who is of course often grouped with Kuhn. I don't know when I'll get around to talking about Feyerabend. I am rather a fan of his work, but examination of his writings faces a difficulty not encountered with Kuhn; Feyerabend is a self-conscious practitioner of rhetoric, while Kuhn certainly seems to be always trying to say what he means. This obviously makes interpretation of Feyerabend's claims more difficult, as one must distinguish between what he intended to seriously advance as true and what he presented for merely rhetorical purposes (not that this is a sharp line, of course, but that just makes things even harder).
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