Aristotle and Kuhn. If you know anything about the two of them you know their fates intertwine. Aristotle was trashed because his theoretical edifice was incommensurate (Kuhn's word) with ours.
Kuhn was trashed because he said, essentially, that Aristotle made sense to Aristotle, within his theoretical universe. We just can't get into that universe from our current theory.
I say both need reclamation. Aristotle’s corpus was brilliant in toto and is with us still in part. He was one of the greatest minds in the history of civilization. Kuhn's work, to oversimplify, on paradigm shifts was brilliant. He was one of the last first rate minds working outside of symbolic logic in philosophy in the United States.
The concept that salvages both is that of points of coincidence, where equations can be written from theory to theory, and points of divergence, where no possible equation exists. It is not, definitely not, a matter of translation, same universe; different language. It is as Kuhn said a matter of incommensurability with coincidence and divergence.
That key concept rescues the reputation of both and salvages brilliant contributions to science and the philosophy of science. We are not drowning in brilliant philosophy. We need to conserve what we have.
Do Well and Be Well
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