On Kuhn's Late Philosophy Of Science

Thomas Kuhn(1922-1996) is the best-known and most influential historian and philosopher of science the latter part of twenty century. Because of the writing style of Kuhn's most influencial work of The Structure of Scientific Revolution, Kuhn claims that both his supporters and his objectors misunderstand what he had said. After the Structure was published, his main task was to fight against all kinds of misreading, clarifying and developing his ideas in controversy. When Kuhn give up to demonstrate the key notion of the Structure, Paradigm, he hope to elucidate the other key notion of the book, that is, incommensurability, to vindicate his early standpoint .He take the aim of his later work as to fill in the philosophical skips of the Structure. He censures that both the traditional theory of meaning and Kripke's causal chain theory of reference couldn't explain term's meaning change between scientific revolution. Then Kuhn fall back on linguistic analysis and advise a taxonomic interpretation of his controversial notion of incommensurability. That is called Kuhn's "Linguistic Turn".In this dissertation, I intend to explore why Thomas Kuhn ventured into a new and unwieldy territory, linguistic analysis. There are two possible causes. First, the analytical tools from non-philosophical discipline, primarily psychology and AI(artificial intelligence) programme couldn't support his thought. Secondly, the philosophers proficient in linguistic analysis attracted him to a more purely philosophical, a prior tone. But almost all of the philosophers of Science ignored Kuhn's later work based on the taxonomic interpretation of incommensurability, Alexander Bird denounces Kuhn's later work was a wrong turning. At first view, the style of writing switch from naturalistic description to a prior language analysis, it seems that Kuhn's own thought was in a direction opposite to that of the mainstream of the philosophy of science after 1980, that is, Naturalized Philosophy of Science. But in his late years Kuhn hints that we should see his late thought from a cognitive perspective. Some cognitive scientists begin to utilize the fruits of cognitive science to explain the nature of conceptions and the cognitive mechanism of conception change, in a sense those works supports and develops Kuhn's late thought.Inspired by late Wittgenstein and B. Whorf, late Kuhn tend to take scientific revolution as language revolution, the scientific community thus become the language community. The different taxonomic lexicon owned by different community is the long-term production of tribal experience in the natural and social worlds. Each lexicon makes possible a corresponding form of life within which the truth of falsity of propositions may be both claimed and rationally justified, we couldn't assert which possible world is closer to the entity. So Kuhn advised an evolutionary theory of knowledge. He compared the evolution of knowledge with the proliferation of biological specialties, then the progress of science now finds it's expression in theproliferation of disciplines, and the incommensurability was the necessary mechanism of the development of scientific knowledge. This is the position Kuhn called "post -Darwinian Kantianism ".We categorize the world with different similar-dissimilar relation, so different lexicon has different categorical framework, then something projectable in a language can't be expressed in an alien language. At this point, Thomas Kuhn denies that Qunine's translation-pamphlet could resolve the obstacles of communicability and comparability between incommensurable theories. Kuhn suggested it was the bilinguist, not the translator, who resources to language learning, with the bridge of metaphor, could break through the obstacles of communication, entering into the possible world constructed by alien language. We may adhere to the conception of incommensurability, at the same time we could understand the incommensurable theories.In the last chapter, the author demonstrates the significance of Kuhn's later work will emerge from the cognitive approach in the philosophy of science.