Scientific progress and incomensurability in Thomas Kuhn

Abstract

Despite many criticisms received along his academic career, Thomas Kuhn has undoubtedly advanced a new image about scientific progress. He showed that progress occurs in two different, but complementary directions. His thesis was that scientific development occurs through the essential tension between what is normal and what is revolutionary in science. According to Kuhn, there is progress in the sense of profounding of knowledge, given by the acquisition of a paradigm, and there is progress by means of the enlargement of knowledge accomplished by the emergence of incommensurability. The main point developed in this article states that Kuhn's problem was to think incommensurability and paradigms as concepts which have only linguistic and theoretical meanings.