A misgiving about level 3

I'm a little concerned about level 3 now. It seems a little strange to talk about commensurability when there is no possibility in principle of non-coercive agreement. That certainly sounds more like a condition of incommensurability than commensurability, and this is how Kuhn uses the word "incommensurability" himself. Do you think that you could change the scale so that you just had levels 1 and 2 of commensurability, and then you could have two corresponding levels of incommensurability? Level 1 incommensurability would be the absence of level 2 commensurability, and level 2 incommensurability would be the absence of level 1 commensurability.

What I like right now about the three levels of commensurability is the elegant way that they represent the Trade-off of Science:

  1. At the prescientific stage, pre-science starts off with nothing but level 3 claims.
  2. To achieve a paradigm, pre-science trades in some of its level 3 claims for level 1 claims in order that the rest of its claims become level 2.
  3. The result is a paradigm for normal science.

I doubt that you can achieve the same level of elegance if you have to use two different scales to elucidate it. It doesn't matter if one scale is the converse of the other; the pattern is broken.

You put your point very persuasively, but if we stay where we are, then commensurability no longer really seems the right word to use. It does not seem reasonable to call level 3 views commensurable if there is no possibility of non-coercive agreement about their truth-value.

But wasn't that the point of calling it 'respectability'? The common standard by which you measure level 3 claims is their respectability, because in principle, cogent arguments can be provided for both sides of the debate.

I suppose, but it must be understood as a much weaker kind of commensurability than anything Kuhn had in mind. Still, I suppose that that is acceptable, since level 2 commensurability is still solid, Kuhnian commensurability.

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