Kuhn's ‘The Natures of Conceptual Change’: the Search for a Theory of Meaning and the Birth of Taxonomies (1980–1994)

ABSTRACT

This paper examines ‘The Natures of Conceptual Change’, the Notre Dame lectures given by Kuhn in 1980. In particular, I aim to examine the content of these lectures which was not published before. This exegetical task will shed light on the sources of the notion of taxonomy used in these lectures for the first time with the explicit philosophical purposes. It also will shed new light on Kuhn's position regarding the causal theory of reference. Reviewing these archival materials paves the way for intertextual comparisons, as Kuhn included part of these lectures in the texts published later and in the book Plurality of Worlds: an Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development. In recent years, the publication of Kuhn's archival material and the research on these texts increased in quantity and quality. Faced with this encouraging landscape, a comparative examination of the different unpublished texts is crucial to refining both our research tools on Kuhn's intellectual biography and the philosophical work inspired by his proposal.

KEYWORDS:

• Thomas Kuhn
• taxonomies
• unpublished work
• causal theory of reference
• scientific revolutions

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The original text of NDL is currently in the Distinctive Collections Section of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries. It is divided into three lectures: ‘What are Scientific Revolutions’ (1-21), ‘Linguistic Concomitants of Revolutionary Change’ (22-41), and ‘Language, Causal Theory and Necessary Truth’ (42-64). Hereinafter, NDL is referenced only with the page numbers of the original manuscript.

2 Eric Oberheim highlights this point through the distinction between present-centered history and hermeneutic historiography: ‘Present-centered history … explains current theories and how they developed out of earlier ideas by abstracting from what actually happened. Hermeneutic historiography reveals what actually happened by abstracting from contemporary theories and the ideas used to state them’ (Oberheim 2023, 296).

3 Vasso Kindi (2017, 407) described this process precisely: ‘We can translate any kind of text but not by using a manual or a general rule that make systematic correlations. We need to become bilingual, that is, fluent in the use of words in as great as possible variety of contexts so as to be able to find the most sensitive solutions in our attempt to match networks.’

4 Kuhn previously dealt with this topic in Kuhn (1979).

5 The manuscript was dated September 1994.

6 It is worth noting that Kuhn does not use the term ‘the descriptivist theories of meaning’. Instead he speaks of the traditional conception of meaning.

7 Kindi (2017, 406) offers a Wittgensteinian account of this trend: ‘[Kuhn] was influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy and understood concepts more as Wittgenstein did, namely, as open-ended and flexible, comprising a long series of applications of words on the model offered by paradigms.’

8 Some time ago, Kuhn employed a very similar argumentative strategy in discussing Popper's notion of falsification: ‘Only if you have previously committed yourself to a full definition of “swan”, one which will specify its applicability to every conceivable object, can you be logically forced to rescind your generalization. And why should you have offered such a definition?’ (Kuhn 1970, 18). As we will see in what follows, several passages from the second NDL were reworked from “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of research’, so Kuhn's stance in this text maintains points of contact with his initial discussions on Popper.

9 As Kuukkanen (2010, 553) has pointed out, ‘Kuhn believed that direct contact with objects and ostensive learning results in mental categories that classify objects according to their similarities and dissimilarities, that is, in accordance with his neural-processing model.’

10 For an examination of the differences between the concepts of lexicon, taxonomy and conceptual network, see Politi (2020).

11 This is Kuhn's main point of opposition to the causal theory, which appears in the previous work (Kuhn 1979, 236; 1984, 77–78) and the later work (Kuhn 1989, 98 ff.; 1990, 124 ff.). For a detailed examination of this issue in later Kuhn's work, see Kuukkanen (2010).

12 Strictly speaking, it would be seven years later, since ‘Possible Worlds’ was written from a lecture delivered in 1986.