Eric Oberheim

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | HU Berlin · Department of Philosophy

The idea that there is incommensurability in science has been controversial since its popularization by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. While incommensurability in science does have significant implications for understanding science and its development, much of the controversy about incommensurability appears to be at least in part due to a lack o...

This book offers an inside look into the notoriously tumultuous, professional relationship of two great minds: Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend. It collects their complete surviving correspondence (1948-1967) and contains previously unpublished papers by both. An introduction situates the correspondence in its historical context by recounting how th...

Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend promote incommensurability as a central component of their conflicting accounts of the nature of science. This paper argues that in so doing, they both develop Albert Einstein's views, albeit in different directions. Einstein describes scientific revolutions as conceptual replacements, not mere revisions, endorsing ‘...

In 1962 in independent, influential publications, Thomas S. Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend suggested the provocative idea that some scientific theories (concepts, paradigms, worldviews) separated by a scientific revolution are incommensurable. They have “no common measure.” The idea of incommensurability became central to both Kuhn’s historical philosoph...

Contrary to Sankey’s central assumption, incommensurability does not imply incomparability of content, nor threaten scientific realism by challenging the rationality of theory comparison. Moreover, Sankey equivocates between reference to specific entities by statements used to test theories and reference to kinds by theories themselves. This distin...

Baltas’s discussion of the positive functional roles of nonsense raises a number of interesting issues concerning the nature of conceptual progress. They have direct pragmatic implications for how best to teach new ideas. He aims to specify and describe a positive functional role of nonsense in learning and teaching, and then to argue that nonsense...

This paper strengthens and defends the pluralistic implications of Einstein's successful, quantitative predictions of Brownian motion for a philosophical dispute about the nature of scientific advance that began between two prominent philosophers of science in the second half of the twentieth century (Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend). Kuhn promoted...

This paper investigates the historical origins of the notion of incommensurability in contemporary philosophy of science. The aim is not to establish claims of priority, but to enhance our understanding of the notion by illuminating the various issues that contributed to its development. Kuhn developed his notion of incommensurability primarily und...

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