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Kuhn’s two accounts of rational disagreement in science: an interpretation and critique

  • S.I.: Disagreement in Science
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Abstract

Whereas there is much discussion about Thomas Kuhn’s notion of methodological incommensurability and many have seen his ideas as an attempt to allow for rational disagreement in science, so far no serious analysis of how exactly Kuhn aims to account for rational disagreement has been proposed. This paper provides the first in-depth analysis of Kuhn’s account of rational disagreement in science—an account that can be seen as the most prominent attempt to allow for rational disagreement in science. Three things will be shown: First, we find not one, but two accounts of rational disagreements in science in Kuhn’s writings: one stemming from methodological incommensurability and one stemming from Kuhn-underdetermination, which are not only fundamentally different—the first purports to explain how disagreeing scientists can nevertheless be rational, while the second attempts to show how rational scientists can nevertheless disagree—but appear to be incompatible with each other. Second, I will assess both accounts. Kuhn’s account from methodological incommensurability is not convincing since it cannot explain rational disagreement in science. Whereas, on the other hand, Kuhn’s account from Kuhn-underdetermination allows for rational disagreement, his argument why we should accept it is not convincing. Third, I present a tentative sketch of an alternative to Kuhn’s account that emphasizes the fallibility of epistemic justification in order to show that Kuhn’s argument founders. In sum, the paper shows that focusing not on the muchly debated consequences of methodological incommensurability, but on Kuhn’s treatment of rational disagreement gives new insight into the adequate interpretation of his thought as well as the cogency of his ideas.

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Notes

  1. In what follows I will make no substantial distinction between the terms “rational” and “justified” as well as “rationality” and “justification”.

  2. See e.g. Kelp/Douven (2012, p. 102f).

  3. Here is just a small collection of examples: Bird (2013), George (2012, p. 8), Hoyningen-Huene (1992, p. 493f.), Hoyningen-Huene (1993, p. 152), Mladenovic (2017, p. 134), Okasha (2011, p. 83), Rowbottom (2011, p. 120), Sankey/Hoyningen-Huene (2001, p. 15), Worrall (2014, p. 316).

  4. See Carrier (2008, p. 276).

  5. See e.g. David Bloor’s description of his opponents in his founding chapter of the so-called ‘Strong Programme’: “As long as someone is being reasonable then the connections themselves would seem to provide the best explanation for the beliefs of the reasoner. Like an engine on rails, the rails themselves dictate where it will go.” Bloor (1991, p. 8). It must be noted, however, that Kuhn himself thought that his idea of incommensurability understood properly, is in fact needed to avoid “the excesses of postmodernist movements like the strong program” (Kuhn 2000a, p. 91).

  6. See e.g. Christensen (2007, p. 210), Conee (2010, p. 71), Feldman (2007, p. 205).

  7. See White (2005, p. 445f.): „Uniqueness: Given one’s total evidence, there is a unique rational doxastic attitude that one can take to any proposition. I call positions that depart from Uniqueness ‘permissive’ as they entail that epistemic rationality permits a range of alternative doxastic attitudes. […] Doubts about Uniqueness may arise from reflection on persistent and widespread disagreement among apparently rational inquirers.”

  8. I will come back to this in Sect. 3.2.

  9. See e.g. Masterman’s classical paper: Masterman (1970).

  10. See e.g. Bird (2013), Sankey/Hoyningen-Huene (2001). In SSR Kuhn distinguishes three aspects of incommensurability. Besides methodological incommensurability, there is semantic or taxonomic incommensurability such that “[w]ithin the new paradigm, old terms, concepts, and experiments fall into new relationships one with the other” (Kuhn 1996, p. 149). Finally, “the third and most fundamental aspect of incommensurability” (Kuhn 1996, p. 150) consists in Kuhn’s—widely discussed—claim that “the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds” (ibid.). This final aspect can be called perceptual or ontological incommensurability. On the development of Kuhn’s ideas about incommensurability see: Hoyningen-Huene (1990, 1993, pp. 206–218), Sankey (1993).

    Lena Soler distinguishes between ‘incommensurability of content’ and ‘incommensurability of research-norms’ (see Soler 2004). Although these labels would be more adequate for later purposes in this paper, namely to show that there is a tension between these forms once it comes to rational disagreement (see Sect. 2.2), I will stick to the more familiar labels of semantic and methodological incommensurability.

  11. See e.g. Bird (2000, p. 242), Pritchard (2011), Sankey (2013).

  12. See e.g. the definition by Kusch: “The epistemic relativist holds that people using different epistemic systems (consisting of epistemic standards) can ‘faultlessly disagree’ over the question whether a given belief is epistemically justified or not” (Kusch 2010, p. 226). In fact, I do not think that faultless disagreement about rationality or epistemic justification is sufficient for epistemic relativism. As discussed in Seidel (2014a, pp. 28–32 what is needed for arriving at epistemic relativism proper is the additional thesis that the differing epistemic systems are in some sense radically different or alternatives. To my mind, however, this further condition is trivially met by Kuhn’s notion of methodological incommensurability.

  13. Kuhn’s example is the sun worship in Kepler’s thought.

  14. I will discuss this idea in Sect. 3. See Hoyningen-Huene (1993, pp. 239–245) for an account of how different factors play a role in different phases of conflict. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

  15. An anonymous reviewer maintained that this quote is taken out of context such that Kuhn in fact affirms illogicality and unscientificness. I am not convinced. Here is the full quote such that the reader can decide for herself: “Though the historian can always find men—Priestley, for instance—who were unreasonable to resist for as long as they did, he will not find a point at which resistance becomes illogical or unscientific. At most he may wish to say that the man who continues to resist after his whole profession has been converted has ipso facto ceased to be a scientist” (Kuhn 1996, p. 159).

  16. See e.g. Baghramian/Carter (2017), Boghossian (2006, chap. 5 and pp. 118–128), Sankey (2011), Seidel (2014a, chap. 2 and 3).

  17. The following interpretation builds on Seidel (2014a, pp. 145–150).

  18. See also Carrier (2008) who distinguishes in a similar way between Kuhn-underdetermination or methodological incommensurability and Duhem–Quine underdetermination. In what follows I will go further by emphasizing the importance also of distinguishing between Kuhn-underdetermination and methodological incommensurability.

  19. Let me emphasize that there are important and non-negligible differences between Duhemian and Quinian underdetermination (see e.g. Ariew 1984; Vuillemin 1986; Seidel 2014a, pp. 85–99). For the present purposes, it is not necessary, however, to distinguish these different versions.

  20. An anonymous reviewer maintained that I seriously misread this passage, since “Kuhn only states the absolutely trivial fact that in empirical science, there can never be a logical proof for the correctness of a theory on the basis of empirical data”. This, however, “is independent of the Duhem-Quine thesis, because there the underdetermination results from an interplay of the theory with auxiliary hypotheses, which is a completely different topic.” I completely agree that the two forms of underdetermination mentioned by the reviewer need to be distinguished. However, I do not see that the Duhem-Quine thesis is a completely different topic than Und-1, since I do not think that there exists THE Duhem-Quine thesis: of course, in Quine’s work forms of Und-1 can be found under the heading ‘underdetermination’ (see the literature in the former footnote for exposition). Furthermore, I do not see how the reviewer’s distinction sustains the claim of serious misinterpretation on my part: Und-1 is just meant to be the trivial thesis mentioned by the reviewer.

  21. See for an argumentation along these lines e.g. Laudan/Leplin (1996), Psillos (1999, pp. 168–176). Note, that the argument above shows only that we need to distinguish between (Und-1) and (Und-2). I am not arguing here that the additional virtues needed to explain theory-choice in fact are epistemic or rational virtues, although I in fact believe this to be correct. The argument above remains neutral regarding the question whether the theoretical virtues are epistemic or just pragmatic virtues whose value might change culturally.

  22. See Luper (2004, p. 274), Sankey (2011), Seidel (2014a, pp. 145–150). For a book-length, recent discussion about the relationship between Pyrrhonian skepticism and epistemic relativism see Bland (2018).

  23. For establishing forms of (Und-1) Kuhn, in fact, sometimes in SSR simply just refers to previous work by others: “Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data” (Kuhn 1996, p. 76). It is a safe bet that Kuhn thinks of Duhem and Quine here.

  24. This point is discussed by Seidel (2014a, chap. 2).

  25. See Carter (2016, p. 62), Seidel (2013a, b, 2014a, pp. 155–159).

  26. On extraordinary science see: Hoyningen-Huene (1993, pp. 230–236).

  27. In fact, this is one decisive difference between Popper’s falsificationism and Kuhn’s account: Kuhn criticizes Popper for characterizing “the entire scientific enterprise in terms that apply only to its occasional revolutionary parts” (Kuhn 1977b, p. 272).

  28. See e.g. Kuhn (1996, p. 19): “they are simply read out of the profession”.

  29. Otherwise, first, normal scientific activity wouldn’t be interesting for normal scientists, and, second, it would be miraculous how crises for paradigms arise at all.

  30. See Bird (2000, p. 75).

  31. See Kuhn (1996, pp. 38–42).

  32. It must be noted that this quote originates not from Kuhn’s discussion of normal science, but is a counterfactual claim about the absence of incommensurability in times of crisis. Since in normal science, however, the forms of incommensurability mentioned in the quote are absent, we can transfer his conclusion to normal science.

  33. See also Bögner/Meyer/Schnieder/Seidel (2018, p. 20).

  34. This definition is modelled after Kölbel’s definition of faultless disagreement (Kölbel 2004, p. 53f.), but it differs from Kölbel’s: since Kölbel is interested in faultless disagreement whereas I am interested in rational disagreement, I changed (b) accordingly.

  35. Kuhn himself in later work discusses this possibility (see Kuhn 2000c, p. 231f.). It has to be noted that Kuhn in that work is skeptical about resolving disagreement stemming from semantic incommensurability in this way (see Kuhn 2000c, p. 232). Nevertheless, for the present purpose it is only important that Kuhn, too, sees a difference between verbal and genuine disagreements: “What they differ about is, in that sense, convention rather than fact. […] They were disagreeing about words, not about things” (Kuhn 2000c, p. 231f.).

  36. See e.g. Dummett (1993, p. 18). Of course, drawing a sharp distinction between these two kinds of disagreement might be forestalled by Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction (see Quine 1980) as well as Davidson’s broad holism of belief and meaning (see Davidson 1974). See e.g. Rott (2015) for problems of clearly disentangling merely verbal disputes and genuine disagreements.

  37. I am not the first to see such a tension between methodological and semantic incommensurability in Kuhn (see Bird 2000, p. 240f.).

  38. The subject of semantic incommensurability is probably the most discussed subject in the aftermath of Kuhn’s SSR (see Bird 2000, p. 151; Wray 2011, p. 71) with whole books devoted exclusively to this topic (see e.g. Sankey 1994). As far as I see, there are two reasons for this: first of all, Kuhn himself in later work restricted his discussion of incommensurability to semantic incommensurability (see Bird 2000, p. 151; Hoyningen-Huene 1993, p. 212f.). Second, most early commentators on Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability focused on the semantic aspect (see Wray 2011, p. 71).

  39. See Kuhn (1996, pp. 102, 128).

  40. See Bird (2000, p. 151).

  41. See e.g. Hoyningen-Huene (1990, p. 483, 1993, p. 209f.).

  42. The consequences of this claim to partial communication are one of the most discussed topics in the debate about incommensurability. For example, critics have maintained that Kuhn’s approach is self-defeating. They think that Kuhn’s thesis of semantic incommensurability implies a thesis of radical untranslatability which is self-undermining because providing alleged examples of untranslatable vocabularies in our language belies the very thesis of untranslatability: “To tell us that Galileo had ‘incommensurable’ notions and then to go on to describe them at length is totally incoherent” (Putnam 1981, p. 115), see also Davidson (1973), Newton-Smith 1982, p. 114). Kuhn himself (2000d) maintained that these critics have misunderstood the strength of semantic incommensurability: Incommensurability is local and thus implies only partial failure of communication (Kuhn 2000d, p. 35f.). Furthermore, untranslatability does not mean uninterpretability (Kuhn 2000d, pp. 37–40). I will not go into this and other debates surrounding semantic incommensurability (see for an overview Sankey/Hoyningen-Huene (2001, pp. 9–13).

    An anonymous reviewer noted that Kuhn exaggerates the amount of misunderstanding during extraordinary science. I would like to thank the reviewer for pointing this out.

  43. A note on why Kuhn claims that „the term is not quite right“. Kuhn thinks of revolutionary change as a kind of gestalt-switch. Following the quoted passage, Kuhn explains misunderstandings from meaning change by citing the Einsteinian revolution. He says: “To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole.” (Kuhn 1996, p. 149) and on the next page he explicitly claims that because of underdetermination the transition between competing paradigms requires a gestalt-switch that “must occur all at once […] or not at all” (Kuhn 1996, p. 150). Kuhn’s reservations about using the term ‘misunderstanding’ stem from his fear that describing this switch by the term ‘misunderstanding’ belittles the profoundness of the changes and might raise futile hopes of a piecemeal remedy for semantic incommensurability.

  44. In fact, Hoyningen-Huene interprets Kuhn’s remarks in SSR about “sorts of argument that prove particularly effective in the battles over paradigm change” (Kuhn 1996, p. 153) (which I alluded to in Sect. 2) such that what Kuhn means by ‘values’ in later work is what he means by ‘argument’ at these places in SSR (see Hoyningen-Huene 1993, p. 149 n. 115).

  45. Kuhn later explicitly states he no longer wants to speak about incommensurability in the sense discussed in the last section: “I spoke also of differences in ‘methods, problem-field, and standards of solution’ (Structure, 2d ed., p. 103), something I would no longer do” (Kuhn 2000d, p. 34 n. 2).

  46. See Kuhn (1996, pp. 182–187, 1977c) (where Kuhn discusses only the first three elements).

  47. See Carrier (2008, p. 278).

  48. Kuhn himself does not claim that this list is exhaustive (see Kuhn 1977a, p. 321). See Hoyningen-Huene (1993, p. 149) for more values occasionally mentioned by Kuhn.

  49. In the following I stick to the notion ‚paradigm‘instead of ‚disciplinary matrix‘. Compared with the term ‘paradigm’ Kuhn’s term ‘disciplinary matrix’ didn’t win much recognition among philosophers of science.

  50. See also (1977a, p. 335).

  51. See Carrier (2008, p. 276).

  52. See Kuhn (1977a, p. 322, 1996, p. 185), see also Bird (2000, p. 241f), Hoyningen-Huene (1993, p. 150), Mladenovic (2017, p. 120f.).

  53. See e.g. Bird (2000, p. 242, Sankey (2013).

  54. See e.g. Hoyningen-Huene (1992).

  55. I say here that only part of the debate is merely verbal because Kuhn’s idea of values weighed differently might still lead to the charge of relativism. According to Kuhn, (Und-3) implies that “it is the community of specialists rather than its individual members that makes the effective decision” (Kuhn 1996, p. 200). Whether this leads straightforwardly to a sociologistic form of epistemic relativism or is merely an expression of Kuhn’s integrated social epistemology (see e.g. Wray 2011, part 3) is still open to debate.

  56. Against Carrier (2008, p. 276) who uses the terms interchangeably.

  57. Though Kuhn in the context of the following quote merely speaks about a change in the use of the term ‘incommensurability’, the quote might nevertheless point in this direction: “I spoke also of differences in ‘methods, problem-field, and standards of solution’ (Structure, 2d ed., p. 103), something I would no longer do” (Kuhn 2000d, p. 34 n. 2).

  58. In fact, the problem alluded to in the text is a variant of a problem Kuhn never was able to solve: “the meta-methodological question of the normative ground of standards of theory appraisal” (Sankey/Hoyningen-Huene 2001, p. 15).

  59. I do not discuss here how Kuhn’s later account can temper my reservations with respect to Kuhn’s underdetermination-circularity-argument in SSR. Obviously, Kuhn’s later account fares better in this respect since it does not rely on this argument.

  60. See e.g. Kuhn (1996, p. 199f.) and Kuhn’s examples in Kuhn (1977a, pp. 322–325).

  61. See Hoyningen-Huene (1993, p. 148) for the two levels on which values operate.

  62. See Hoyningen-Huene (1993, p. 150f.), see Kuhn (2000c, p. 251): “Accuracy, precision, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness, consistency, and so on, simply are the criteria which puzzle solvers must weigh in deciding whether or not a given puzzle about the match between phenomena and belief has been solved”.

  63. See Kuhn (1996, p. 199, 1977a, p. 321f.) (here he also explicitly mentions the Lakatos-quote), Kuhn (2000e, p. 118f., 2000f, pp. 155–158).

  64. See Kuhn (1977a, pp. 322–324), where he shortly mentions also the chemical revolution.

  65. Note that this does not imply general acceptance of Kuhn’s account of values, but only acceptance of the thesis that it allows for rational disagreement in science. For example, whether the values should be treated as a means for the end of puzzle-solving or, as Hempel proposed, as goals at which inquiry aims (see Hempel 1983, see Kuhn 2000g and Hoyningen-Huene 1992, pp. 496–499 for discussion), is—among other questions—still open to debate. See also Mladenovic (2017, p. 91ff.).

  66. See also Mayo (1996, chapter 4) for discussion.

  67. See Conee (2010), Goldman (2010) and Seidel (2014a, chap. 4) for more elaborate versions of the idea expressed below.

  68. See Seidel (2014a, pp. 199–201) for a non-fictional example.

  69. The following builds on Seidel (2014a, p. 204).

  70. Under the condition, of course, testimony by experts is sufficient justification at all. See Seidel (2014b, 2016) for a defense.

  71. See Kuhn (1977a, p. 322, 1996, p. 185).

  72. See White (2005, p. 445). White’s definition pertains to the evidence of one person. Others, for example Conee (2010, p. 71), use a definition with two peers.

  73. See also Conee (2010), Goldman (2010) and Seidel (2014a, chap. 4).

  74. See Rosen (2001, p. 71f).

  75. I am convinced that it is because it avoids the still lurking relativistic predilections of Kuhn’s later account. This is discussed in Seidel (2014a, chap. 4 and 2013c).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Julia F. Göhner, the members of Ulrich Krohs’s and Oliver Scholz’s colloquium at the University of Münster and two anonymous reviewers as well as the editors of the special volume for providing invaluable help in improving former versions of this paper.

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    Markus Seidel

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Seidel, M. Kuhn’s two accounts of rational disagreement in science: an interpretation and critique. Synthese 198 (Suppl 25), 6023–6051 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02113-z

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