Philosophical skepticism and Kuhn’s concept of scientific development

Kuhn’s famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was addressed to the physical scientific community, but gained considerable popularity among representatives of the humanities. This article offers an explanation for this circumstance by the proximity of Kuhn’s views and his conceptual machinery to philosophical skeptical arguments about the nature of reality and knowledge. In particular, an analysis of two of Kuhn’s theses is proposed: the interpretation of a paradigm shift as a Gestalt switch and the incommensurability of paradigms as the impossibility of translating the beliefs of representatives of different paradigms into each other. The first thesis is seen as Kuhn’s own attempt to absurdly literalize Gestalt switching as switching between different worlds. The degree of error of Kuhn’s thesis is considered in terms of the deliberate ambiguity of Kuhn’s style and the ambiguity of his terminology. Kuhn’s more serious mistake is to implicitly base scientific progress on human psychology and sociology. His theory explains the transition from one paradigm to another in terms of sociology or psychology, rather than appealing to the objective merits of competing explanations. But if a person does not understand science as a search for explanations, the fact that it finds more and more new explanations, each of which is objectively better than the previous one, remains inexplicable. It is shown that conceptually, Kuhn’s paradigm is equivalent to Quine’s “web of faiths”, since both concepts derive from holism, and also that Quine’s concept is primary. Its consequence is a skeptical thesis about the uncertainty of translation, which is equivalent to the incommensurability of paradigms, which indicates the proximity of Kuhn’s view to a skeptical argument. Then Quine’s criticism is significantly reflected in Kuhn’s view. It is shown that this criticism can be carried out in two directions. Firstly, it is the implausibility of Kuhn’s thesis in the real contexts of historical episodes (Hacking), and, secondly, it is the rejection of the very concept of conceptual schemes, with a corresponding devaluation of their comparison (Davidson). Finally, the concept of a paradigm can simply be rejected in favor of an alternative concept of the style of scientific thinking introduced by Alistair Crombie, which does not need support from skeptical arguments at all. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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