Thomas Kuhn on Incommensurability 

@@jamesb46 You'll first have to solve all the philosophical problems about composition if you want to do that. 😂

@@VictorGijsbers agreed, it’s not really possible. But with respect to scientific theories, there are at least two ways to get objectivity. One is to insist that there is one objective criteria that applied to all attempts at scientific theorizing, present or past. That is probably the most straightforward way to do it. The second is to say that a scientific theory is good insofar as it is succeeds relative to the standard at the time it was conceived. So, we could then compare the “relative successes” of two theories directly. Better yet, we could attach a sort of coefficient to each relative success that adjusts for the correctness of the standards. So, for example, if Aristotle’s physics is 80% accurate relative to the paradigm at that time, and Newton’s was 90% accurate relative to his time, and newton’s paradigm was 80% accurate as a paradigm, and Aristotle’s was only 50% accurate, then 0.5*0.8

That's a very good question. I think Kuhn's best example is the shift from Aristotelian to modern science, where this idea of incommensurability makes a lot more sense. It's harder to see within the tradition coming from the 17th century. But there Kuhn suggests that if you look carefully at things like the shift from phlogiston to the caloric theory, of the chemical revolution of Lavoisier, it's rarely a case of the entire scientific community being convinced; and also rarely the case that the new theory is unproblematically better than the old one. Newton -> Einstein might actually be a fairly bad example of such a shift in standards, since the conversion of the community was relatively quick and painless. Obviously, this is not to say that Kuhn is right. I personally think incommensurability is at most a limited phenomenon, not a wholesale failure of comparability of two paradigms.

I think Kuhn confuses paradigm shifts with acceptance of new theories because they're demonstrably better (make more accurate predictions, describe a larger part of reality, or are simpler). We prefer Einstein's general relativity over Newton's laws because it's a more accurate description of a larger part of reality that does away with some of the inconsistenties in Newton's model (gravitational mass vs inertial mass and gravity as an unmediated force). The paradigm shift is our change in understanding of how (part of) the universe works by accepting the logical consequences of the new theory, by realizing what its predictive (mathematical) model implies about reality. A paradigm shift in science would mean another way of doing or thinking about science altogether (like Hume's empiricism caused).

@@JerehmiaBoaz I agree. I think we might even have a domain of philosophy examining the nature of knowing (i.e., “Epistemology”) that may be able to facilitate our comparison of theories. Furthermore, in order for people to make a decision to convert to the new paradigm, the two paradigms must be commensurable because how else would they make a decision or even notice that there is such a decision to be made in the first place? The very process of the paradigm change itself assumes that the two paradigms must be compared, and this implies that the two paradigms are commensurable.

@@mattiesavage4905 Hi! Very nice to hear from you. :-) Sophie's World is a very nice book; I don't know of any others at the same level. Perhaps some of my other viewers have tips? One thing that comes to mind, which I read when I was a few years older but maybe is already interesting to you, is the book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter. It's not completely philosophy, but it is adjacent to philosophy. But I'm especially interested whether there are viewers with other ideas. :-)