From the Cluster Theory to the Taxonomic Incommensurability: a Chapter in Thomas Kuhn’s Intellectual Development

PABLO MELOGNO; LEANDRO GIRI

Irvine

Congreso; HOPOS 2022 (The Fourteenth Biennial Congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science).; 2022

University of California in Irvine

In this lecture we will take an important step in exploring Thomas Kuhn's intellectual history, taking advantage of sources that have been little studied so far. On the one hand, the Lowell Lectures of 1951 (The Quest for Physical Theory), and on the other hand, the hitherto unpublished Notre Dame Lectures of 1980. The analysis of these texts aims to reconstruct Kuhn's development of a semantics capable of accounting for scientific progress. This analysis will show that the supposed "linguistic turn" attributed to the author is a reactivation of interest in problems that existed well before publishing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.