What is an example of incommensurable?
What is an example of incommensurable?
Two values (for example, freedom and security) are incommensurable when they cannot be ‘traded off’ against each other: for example, if there is no set amount of freedom that would compensate for a certain loss of security, or vice versa.
What does Kuhn mean by Incommensurability?
Kuhn on Incommensurability dramatically claims that the history of science reveals proponents of competing paradigms failing to make complete contact with each other’s views, so that they are always talking at least slightly at cross-purposes.
What is semantic Incommensurability?
Semantic incommensurability arises due to semantic variation between scientific theories. By contrast, methodological incommensurability arises due to variation in evaluative standards between theories. The second distinction is between two sources of semantic incommensurability.
Why are rival paradigms incommensurable?
Why are rival paradigms incommensurable, according to Kuhn? Theories from different paradigms tackle different problems, ask different questions, and adopt different terms and strategies for judging theories. Therefore no meaningful comparison of theories from distinct paradigms.
Who showed that not all lengths are commensurable?
Pythagoras
The geometers immediately following Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 bc) shared the unsound intuition that any two lengths are “commensurable” (that is, measurable) by integer multiples of some common unit.
What does commensurable mean when are two quantities commensurable and when are two quantities incommensurable?
Two like quantities are known as commensurable if their ratio is a rational number. If the ratio of two like quantities is an irrational number then they are known as incommensurable.
Are there any issues with Kuhn’s key points in how knowledge advances?
These limitations include: a failure to account for historical scientific advancements that occur outside of their supposed “paradigm”; a failure to explain additional factors that affect scientific progression, such as irrational oppression of science by non-scientific powers; and an inability to be applied …
Are paradigms incommensurable?
Hart and Georg Henrik von Wright) in Anscombe’s Oxford flat. Feyerabend argued that frameworks of thought, and thus scientific paradigms, can be incommensurable for three reasons. Paradigms often have different assumptions about which intellectual and operational scientific methods result in valid scientific knowledge.
Are values commensurable?
Values, such as liberty and equality, are sometimes said to be incommensurable in the sense that their value cannot be reduced to a common measure.
What is rival paradigm?
During crisis periods, rival paradigms coexist and advocates of rival paradigms cannot understand one another because they have different ways of seeing the world, different standards for appraisal, and different objectives for their scientific community; that is, there is incommensurability.
What happened to Hippasus?
Hippasus of Metapontum, (flourished c. 500 bc), philosopher, early follower of Pythagoras, coupled by Aristotle with Heraclitus in identifying fire as the first element in the universe. Some traditions say that he was drowned after revealing a mathematical secret of the Pythagorean brotherhood.