Kuhnian incommmensurability is often rejected as silly or false by the very same folk that dismiss, say, Heidegger or Derrida as unintelligible nonsense. [Admittedly the former is less fashionable now (after -- in some sense even more misleading -- revisionary scholarship) that Carnap and Kuhn are said to be in general agreement.] It is possible, of course, that both claims are true, but it never seems to cross the self-confident mind that finding a whole philosophic movement or tradition unintelligible is, perhaps, evidence of the reality of incommensurability.
These thoughts come to me because (due to encouragement by Michael Della Rocca) I am reading Stewart Candlish's extremely clear The Russell/Bradley Dispute. The book provides overwhelming evidence for the existence of shared myths within analytic philosophy (about Bradley). They are, in fact, origin myths. Some of the very best and most interesting analytic philosophers are caught up in these--Candlish provides detailed evidence of the silly, misleading, uncomprehending, and thoughtless things said about Bradley by, say, Ayer, Geach, (my beloved teacher) Linsky, Wollheim, Broad, Grayling, Blackburn, Rorty (when he was still an analytic philosopher) and, of course, Russell and Moore--not to mention many more minor figures. (This is a partial list; Candlish also documents parochial sins of omission.)
We are often told that the divide between analytic and continental philosophy is merely sociological or the product of special pleading by inferior philosophers. Even when this claim is granted, it is a strange conception of reality when sociological facts (even when invented by philosophic prophets [and here]) are thought to be somehow of little consequence. But we can identify analytic philosophy as a social kind in virtue of its shared myths. For example, Candlish reports 18 myths about Bradley. A bunch of them look familiar to my all-too-ordinary philosophic eyes. (I am not sure where I encountered them; I am of the generation that was introduced to analytic philosophy by the Ammerman and Rorty anthologies.) In a paper that we frequently cite here, Abe Stone reveals the pernicious myths shared by analytic and continental philosophers, not to mention the Wittgensteinians, about the Heidegger-Carnap debate. (I am not claiming that Ernest Nagel's philosophic prophecy in combination with Russell's characterization of Bradley, etc, exhausts our myths.)
Now, let bygones-be-bygones. Many of my closest friends cherish the idea that philosophy is analogous to or in some sense scientific, and in doing so they are the ongoing inheritors of Russell's victory over Bradley (and Carnap over Heidegger, etc). (Recall Mohan's post on PES and my satirical post.) This self-understanding is a strategic blunder--if we present ourselves as wannabe-scientists we will be judged (by scientific metrics) and found wanting. I suspect few philosophers will appreciate my alarmist prudence (until it is too late). But if Kuhn (whose notion of a paradigm and accompanying emphasis on consensus is downright pernicious) is right about anything, it's this: if we understand ourselves as normal scientists we will keep adhering to old origin myths or enshrining new ones in the way we train our students and, thus, our self-understanding will be continue to be paradigmatic, that is, the contrary to philosophical.
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