Incommensurability and laboratory science
The aim of the article is to establish relations between Kuhn’s general characterization of incommensurability as the impossibility to translate the taxonomies pertaining to rival scientific theories into one another and Hacking’s more specific version of incommensurability affecting competing theories that have stabilized relatively to different laboratory equipments and measurement techniques. On the basis of an analysis of the nature of scientific taxonomies that takes its inspiration from the...