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Specialisation and the Incommensurability Among Scientific Specialties

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Abstract

In his mature writings, Kuhn describes the process of specialisation as driven by a form of incommensurability, defined as a conceptual/linguistic barrier which promotes and guarantees the insularity of specialties. In this paper, we reject the idea that the incommensurability among scientific specialties is a linguistic barrier. We argue that the problem with Kuhn’s characterisation of the incommensurability among specialties is that he presupposes a rather abstract theory of semantic incommensurability, which he then tries to apply to his description of the process of specialisation. By contrast, this paper follows a different strategy: after criticising Kuhn’s view, it takes a further look at how new scientific specialties emerge. As a result, a different way of understanding incommensurability among specialties will be proposed.

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Notes

  1. For the distinction between the mathematical concept and the philosophical thesis of incommensurability, see Hoyningen-Huene and Sankey (2001, pp. vii–viii); compare with Kuhn (1983).

  2. “[T]he proponents of competing paradigms will often disagree about the list of problems that any candidate for paradigm must resolve. Their standards or their definitions of science are not the same”(Kuhn 1996, 147).

  3. “[W]ithin the new paradigm, old terms, concepts, and experiments fall into new relationships one with the other. The inevitable result is what we must call, though the term is not quite right, a misunderstanding between the two competing schools”(Kuhn 1996, 149).

  4. “[P]roponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds”(Kuhn 1996, 149). For a neo-Kantian interpretation of Kuhn’s idea of ‘world’, see Hoyningen-Huene (1993); for a discussion of Kuhn’s ‘working in a new world’ problem, see, among the others, Bird (2000, ch. 4), Hacking (1993) and Massimi (2015).

  5. Wray (2011) claims that Kuhn’s philosophy describes different kinds of scientific change—namely, scientific revolutions, on the one hand, and specialization, on the other. Politi (2018), however, argues that, although the creation of a new specialty does not completely discard a pre-existing paradigm, the mechanism driving specialisation is very similar to that leading to revolutions, to the point that it is possible to consider specialisation as a type of revolutionary change. Since this paper is concerned with the issue of incommensurability among specialties, the arguments developed in here can be considered irrespectively of any considerations on whether specialisation is a type of revolutionary change or a different kind of scientific change tout court.

  6. One of the most authoritative philosophical introductions to statistical mechanics is Sklar (1993); in ch. 2, the relations between statistical mechanics and classical thermodynamics are discussed from a historical perspective. Albert (2000) is an accessible introduction to the philosophical problems that statistical mechanics and the concept of entropy pose to the classical idea of the ‘arrow of time’. For a recent discussion of some philosophical issues with the two major approaches in statistical mechanics—namely, Boltzmann’s approach and Gibbs’s approach—see Frigg (2008).

  7. For some analyses on the relations between synthetic biology and disciplines such as system biology and, on the other, nanotechnology, see Church (2005), Khalil and Collins (2010), Knuuttila and Loettgers (2013). For some philosophical discussions on synthetic biologists’ methodologies, see Gramelsberger (2013), Friedrich (2013), Knuuttila and Loettgers (2014). Recent sociological studies on the emergence of synthetic biology and on its disciplinary identity include Balmer et al. (2016) and Roosth (2017).

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Acknowledgements

This paper was written during a period of postdoctoral research at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filoso´ficas of UNAM (Mexico), under the supervision of Prof. Atocha Aliseda.

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Correspondence to Vincenzo Politi.

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Politi, V. Specialisation and the Incommensurability Among Scientific Specialties. J Gen Philos Sci 50, 129–144 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-018-9432-1

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