Let's compare my account of commensurability with Kuhn's.
By 'commensurability', Kuhn very definitely means 'measurability by a common standard'. For Kuhn, this common standard is what he calls a paradigm:
(Source for list: Wikipedia article, "Paradigm")
My common standard, on the other hand, is that which conduces to a non-coercive convergence of opinion. I would wager that Kuhn's notion of a paradigm is a subset of this more general notion. A paradigm conduces to a non-coercive convergence of opinion among scientists. It achieves this through a set of assumptions and rules along the lines described in the list above. The power of science is arguably that because the scientific community is a self-regulating culture that obeys these rules, they are able to achieve non-coercive agreement the vast majority of the time. In other words, a paradigm enables level 2 commensurability.
For Kuhn, competing paradigms are incommensurable. This is because the conceptual tools that they use to assess each other's relative merits inevitably belong to one paradigm or the other, resulting in circular reasoning. However, here is where Kuhn's account of commensurability becomes simplistic compared to my own. Kuhn does not recognise different degrees, or levels, of commensurability. I can claim that different scientific paradigms may lack level 2 commensurability with each other, but they can still have level 3 commensurability. Both sides can respect the thoroughness, completeness, self-consistency, etc. of the other's paradigms, resulting in intellectual respectability. This seems to be what happens in philosophy. Different schools of philosophy can achieve mutual respectability, but they cannot reach agreeability, because their basic operating assumptions are simply too divergent.
- What is to be observed and scrutinized.
- The kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject.
- How these questions are to be put.
- How the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted.
(Source for list: Wikipedia article, "Paradigm")
My common standard, on the other hand, is that which conduces to a non-coercive convergence of opinion. I would wager that Kuhn's notion of a paradigm is a subset of this more general notion. A paradigm conduces to a non-coercive convergence of opinion among scientists. It achieves this through a set of assumptions and rules along the lines described in the list above. The power of science is arguably that because the scientific community is a self-regulating culture that obeys these rules, they are able to achieve non-coercive agreement the vast majority of the time. In other words, a paradigm enables level 2 commensurability.
For Kuhn, competing paradigms are incommensurable. This is because the conceptual tools that they use to assess each other's relative merits inevitably belong to one paradigm or the other, resulting in circular reasoning. However, here is where Kuhn's account of commensurability becomes simplistic compared to my own. Kuhn does not recognise different degrees, or levels, of commensurability. I can claim that different scientific paradigms may lack level 2 commensurability with each other, but they can still have level 3 commensurability. Both sides can respect the thoroughness, completeness, self-consistency, etc. of the other's paradigms, resulting in intellectual respectability. This seems to be what happens in philosophy. Different schools of philosophy can achieve mutual respectability, but they cannot reach agreeability, because their basic operating assumptions are simply too divergent.
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