Kuhn and the Mystery of Constituting Thought, Word and Deed Into a World

Ever since my first book, Social Epistemology, I have argued that Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science presupposes a version of ‘many worlds realism’. This paper continues that line of argument by situating Kuhn’s thinking about language and science in the context of shifting philosophical developments in the 1950s-1970s. Kuhn’s view is related to others exposed to the same developments, especially Willard Quine, Donald Davidson, Wolfgang Stegmüller and Karl Popper. Notably, Quine and Davidson were not tempted to go down the ‘many worlds’ route, largely due to a background commitment to a behaviorist understanding of language that precluded any role for ‘world-making’. However, Alfred Tarski’s ‘semantic’ theory of truth made a notable impression on the logical positivists and Popper, inclining the latter towards his own version of many worlds realism. As Kuhn astutely observed in his later writings, whether one adopted a monist or pluralist approach to the world depended on whether translation or meaning was the key to making sense of language. The paper ends by suggesting that the German historiographical concept of Sonderweg (‘special way’) might provide an interesting, more normatively charged understanding of the sort of many worlds realism promoted by Kuhn.