Truth and historicism in Kuhn’s thesis of methodological incommensurability

Methodological incommensurability and incomparabilityThe thesis of incommensurability is a much discussed subject in Kuhn's philosophy of science, which, since it has been proposed by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend in 1962, has given rise to very different interpretations.This is partially due to the multidimensional nature of the concept of "incommensurability" and sometimes to the lack of clarity of Kuhn himself.In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he distinguishes three aspects of incommensurability, each of which could easily appear independent from the others.To sum up, Kuhn says that the main features of incommensurability are as follows: a) first, the proponents of paradigms do not agree about methods, standards and aims of science 1 ; b) second, and accordingly to the holistic nature of theory change, although the new paradigms holds many concepts of the old theory "within the new paradigm, old terms, concepts and experiments fall into new relationship one with the other" 2 ; c) finally, the third aspect of incommensurability is that "the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds" 3 .We can call these aspects of incommensurability a) methodological, b) semantic, c) ontological 4 .