Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Perovich, Anthony N.
• Munévar, Gonzalo

Titel

Incommensurability, Its Varieties and Its Ontological Consequences

Ist Teil von

• Beyond Reason, p.313-328

Ort / Verlag

Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Professor Feyerabend’s views on the incommensurability of theories are perhaps more widely criticized than understood; the source of the difficulty in understanding him lies, at least in part, in the variety of ways in which he has presented those views. Consequently, in the subsequent discussion I direct my attention to an examination of his various accounts of incommensurability rather than to a consideration of alleged instances of it, attempting to disentangle the major strands and to determine whether these indicate differences of doctrine. I shall argue that Feyerabend’s writing in fact contains two distinct accounts of incommensurability. Whatever his mode of presentation, however, two elements have been fundamental to his position from the outset: terms in incommensurable theories are neither synonymous nor co-referential. Yet the relation between these two elements is not at all clear, and I do not believe it can be made clear until we have examined the different ways in which incommensurability is explained. Once that is done we see what relations between meaning and reference Feyerabend’s views plausibly suggest, and this understanding allows us to eliminate what I take to be misconceptions regarding the ontological consequences of incommensurability. The doctrine of incommensurability has such consequences, but they are not of the sort condemned by critics and recently defended by Feyerabend himself.