draust: Completely agree with your position. The big problems with Kuhn are his ambiguity, which have opened the door to wild interpreations that he disavowed, and his aversion to the idea that improved theories are a better approximation to the truth. The latter view makes him seem to be a relativist, a label he rejected.

His idea of resistance to change is a bit more interesting than the “scientists are stick-in-the-mud’s” interpretation some put on his work. In his scheme resistance stops most scientists wasting time on wild goose chases and enables them to get some useful work done.

A couple of observations based on the excerpts you have highlighted. Firstly the people using the term incommensuarable clearly don’t understand it. As you say it seems to be a rhetorical gambit, one that means “I refuse to play by your rules, so you aren’t allowed to judge me by them”, rather than a position with any logical force.

Secondly they seem to confuse Kuhn with a strong sociological programme in the study of science, that is as some sort of strong relativist. This couldn’t be further from the truth (as you clearly knwo based on your comments).

As far as most science “practitioners” think of it, a lot of the time science really does work by gradual improvements in understanding based on empiricism – experiments underpinned by falsifiability / veriability (though few can be bothered with the philosophical arguments).

Most would accept parts of Kuhns’s argument, I think, in the sense that (i) the science-proceeds-by-infinitesimal-gradualism view struggles to take in “big jumps” in understanding, which one MIGHT call paradigm shifts; and (ii) Kuhn correctly identifies that there is a certain inbuilt resistance to junking theories that are dominant in the field. (Also known as “human nature”)

In this sense you could simply view Kuhn as adding a new element to the “gradual accretion of better ideas” paradigm.

However, the way Kuhn’s thinking is interpreted by some sociologists to say “science is all a construct of a belief system” is rejected by every single working scientist I have ever met. Kuhn is quoted somewhere as saying that he didn’t believe in the idea of one theory being “a better representation of how the world really works” than another. The standard response to this among scientists is eye-rolling, hoots of derision and perhaps a quoting of Richard Dawkins’ line about “show me a relativist [in an airplane] at 35,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite”

Of course, he was concerned with comparing scientific theories. His ideas come from a historical analysis, looking at the classic examples from physics and chemistry (Aristotle, Ptolomy, Copernicus, Newton, Dalton etc.). I think that to apply them outside of the physical sciences requires extensive justification. The body of knowledge would need to be shown to progress in a very similar manner and share many of the features of science.

Homeopathy clearly doesn’t meet the criteria for being science, but if it’s advocates want to make claims about being scientific, having ‘paradigms’, having theories that are subject to Kuhnian incommensurability than I’m happy to evaluate those claims.

Given all that, Kuhn also thought that competition between different schools of thought in science was quickly settled. His revolutions, where a new ‘paradigm’ supplanted an old one, seem to be thought of as fairly swift as well.

Also Kuhn’s analysis was of competing paradigms [disciplinary matrices as he later called them]. So homeopathy (or elements of it) are, as you say, in direct competition with parts of medicine (pharmacology, germ theory, etc.). In fact homeopathy pre-dates virtually all scientific medicine. They competed in the past (Germany, US particularly) and homeoapthy lost. I think in Kuhnian terms the competition is over. Homeopathy has lost to the challenges presented by dose-response relationships, germ theory, the massive success of antibiotics, vaccination and many, many more.

To quote Kuhn [p.204], “as argument piles on argument and as challenge after challenge is sucessfully met, only blind stubbornness can at the end account for continued resistance”

On the other hand General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics don’t really compete, hence the percieved need for ‘Unification’.

Andysnat: I’ve had some similar circular discussions. Some homeopaths or fellow-travellers can’t seem to make their minds up. The invocation of explicitly Kuhnian incommensurability implies that we are comapring two scientific theories. If they don’t think they’re doing science (or something very similar) then this concept doesn’t really apply and they can’t use it as an excuse!

Thanks to both for your comments.

Since I too am a (still active) chess geek, I have to follow the gambit idea a little bit… Many gambits are known to be unsound and to backfire against a skilled opponent.
Here, declining “Kuhns Gambit” (as offered by proponents of CAM) is the right antidote.

Coulter & Willis nearly get to the heart of the matter when they write that “Presumably dilution can’t do both. The paradigms are incommensurable [...]“ This, of course, begs the question whether homeopathy and evidence-based medicine (“conventional” medicine) can both be true. Regarding this, there seems to be a lot of confusion, but also some double-talk among homeopaths.
If homeopaths want homeopathy and conventional treatment to complement each other, both need – in some way – to be true. Generally, this is what they publicly state… (although some homeopaths openly reject conventional medicine). But then, both methods cannot meaningfully be incommensurable.

Correct me if Kuhn says something different (haven’t read his work…), but if two scientific theories are incommensurable, then:
- if they share common subject matters (as homeopathy and conventional medicine certainly do!), this situation should only be temporary or partial. The optimal description of the relevant phenomena has not been found yet. But eventually, one of the two theories (or a different one altogether) will become the dominant paradigm, and the alternatives will be discarded.
- they do not treat the same subject. An example from physics would be general relativity and quantum mechanics: combining the two theories is exceedingly difficult because of their radically different mathematical structures. While both are certainly “true” (in the scientific sense of the word), they describe very different classes of phenomena.

I don’t see any other kind of scientific incommensurability. So, is “Kuhns Gambit” anything more than an outright rejection of the scientic method, nicely wrapped up in inconspicuous language?