Greg
I take your point.
The difficulty that needs to be resolved is, given that we can and do disagree, how is it that we come to tentative consensus and as Peirce and Royce both project that we can eventually come to a common understanding of the universe. The Kuhnian argument which should not be taken to preclude either a local or global consensus simply presents the difficulty.
What is most important in Kuhn's version (and it is prominent in (pragmatist) Quine as well) is that there are no 'basic statements' evidence that is neutral between perspectives. The existence/reality of neutral basic statements was central to the positivist representation of the scientific process in other words that 'the evidence' would 'speak for itself' and adjudicate between alternative hypotheses (and perspectives).
The current display of republicans and democrats 'talking past each other' is a common display of the lack of neutral evidence.
One way this has been discussed is in terms of how to compare different hypotheses, different theories. If theories and the evidence that they 'see' (can make sense of) are incommensurable then we have an apparently unsolvable problem in accounting for agreement. This difficulty leads many back to a positivist attitude a sort of naive realism where everything that we see is common and neutral. But this doesn't work and is certainty not helpful in the actual process, in the trenches of debate. It leads to characterizations of those with whom you disagree as being ignorant, irrational disingenuous and so forth.
I think that the pragmatic theory of knowledge/understanding resolves the question, but it would be inappropriate to try to lay it out here.
My soon to be completed book 'supposedly' deals with all this and lays out the implications of the pragmatic resolution.
Anyone want to critique the readers draft in December?
Hi Terry,
I argued in my dissertation, Revolutionary Progress in Science: The Problem of Semantic Commensurability (1984) that Kuhnian problems are typically, if not always, pragmatic (Pragmatic incommensurability, PSA 84, P. D. Asquith and P. Kitcher (eds) (East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1984): 146-153.). The different meanings come from different expectations different sides have, and there evaluation of the results of experiments allow these to be maintained. The differing evaluations depend on implicit (tacit) presuppositions. The route to resolution is to tease out where these presuppositions differ, make them explicit, and render them into a common language (e.g., affine geometry in the case of relativity versus Newtonian mechanics).
It is basically a Peircean work, but in 1984 I did not want to embroil myself in the widely differing interpretations of Peirce that were prevalent but inimical to my treatment (e.g., Putnam and Rescher in their idiosyncratic ways).
I've been returning to some of the technical aspects of the required underlying continuity between differing paradigms treating the same phenomena that "float" on tacit presuppositions recently, but it isn't my most urgent interest right now. I only published one chapter of my dissertation as I got side-tracked by applications of information theory and statistical mechanics in biology in 1981, and this has been my main focus since then.
John
Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
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