Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

But can we then find a way of saying that the considerations advanced against the Copernican theory by Cardinal Bellarmine—the scriptural descriptions of the fabric of the heavens—were “illogical or unscientific?”12 This, perhaps, is the point at which the battle lines between Kuhn and his critics can be drawn most sharply. Much of the seventeenth century’s notion of what it was to be a “philosopher,” and much of the Enlightenment’s notion of what it was to be “rational,” turns on Galileo’s being absolutely right and the church absolutely wrong. To suggest that there is room for rational disagreement here—not simply for a black-and-white struggle between reason and superstition—is to endanger the very notion of “philosophy.” For it endangers the notion of finding “a method for finding truth” which takes Galilean and Newtonian mechanics as paradigmatic.13 A whole complex of mutually reinforcing ideas—philosophy as a methodological discipline distinct from the sciences, epistemology as the provision of commensuration, rationality as possible only on the common ground which makes possible commensuration—seems endangered if the question about Bellarmine is answered in the negative. Kuhn does not give an explicit answer to the question, but his writings provide an arsenal of argument in favor of a negative answer. In any case, a negative answer is implied by the argument of the present book. The crucial consideration is whether we know how to draw a line between science and the...

December 6, 2020. Page 330.