The Demise of the Incommensurability Thesis

Abstract

The year 1962 saw the first proposal in print of the thesis of the incommensurability of scientific theories. In that year, Paul Feyerabend’s paper, “Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism”, and Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, were both published for the first time. In “Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism”, Feyerabend employed the notion of incommensurability in the context of his critical analysis of the logical empiricist account of inter-theoretic reduction. In Structure, Kuhn ascribed a key role to incommensurability in the revolutionary transition between the theoretical frameworks that he called “paradigms”. The two authors did not employ the term in p..