Abstract

Moti Mizrahi (2015) examines whether there are “good arguments” to support Kuhn’s taxonomic incommensurability (TI) thesis. He concludes that there is neither “valid deductive” nor “strong inductive” support for the thesis and that consequently TI should not be believed or accepted. In response, Lydia Patton (2015) claims that the most “influential” arguments within the history of science are abductive or inference to the best explanation (IBE) rather than deductive or inductive arguments. After reviewing and analyzing this exchange, I propose that although argumentation is important for supporting Kuhn’s TI thesis, it is not the only type of support—or possibly even the most persuasive. I contend that the historian’s personal or psychological experience of accessing a revolutionary change in science—as illustrated in Kuhn’s own experience of laboring to understand the Aristotelian idea of motion while assuming a Newtonian idea of motion—represents a compelling type of support for TI. To that end, I reconstruct briefly a case history from the biomedical sciences and discuss how it supports TI vis-à-vis the Mizrahi-Patton exchange.