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

by Richard Rorty

Kuhn says that he offers students the maxim: When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, … when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.4 Kuhn goes on to say that this maxim does not need to be told to historians, who, “consciously or not, are all practitioners of the hermeneutic method.” But Kuhn’s invocation of such a maxim was disturbing to philosophers of science who, working within the epistemological tradition, were bound to think in terms of a neutral scheme (“observation language,” “bridge laws,” etc.) which would make Aristotle and Newton, for example, commensurable. Such a scheme could, they thought, be used to render hermeneutical guesswork unnecessary. Kuhn’s claim that there is no commensurability between groups of scientists who have different paradigms of a successful explanation, or who do not share the same disciplinary matrix, or both,5 seemed to many such philosophers to endanger the notion of theory-choice in science. For the “philosophy of science”—the name under which “epistemology” went when it hid itself among the logical empiricists—had envisaged itself as providing an algorithm for theory-choice. Kuhn’s claim that no algorithm was possible save a post factum and Whiggish one (one which constructed an ep...

December 6, 2020. Page 324.