The radical Kuhn, as I like to call his more extreme side, held that different paradigms are utterly incommensurable since there was no meta-paradigm from which to understand, evaluate and compare one paradigms to another. Inasmuch as this view entails that the same individual cannot even understand two different paradigms at the same time in his life, it is obviously flawed. Such a radical view is to see scientific models as encompassing and/or determining far too much of any person’s complete worldview. Instead, the meta-paradigm, of which any scientific theory is but a relatively small sub-paradigm, is culture, which I will roughly define as the interpretational repertoire which is common to the members of a linguistic community. Culture allows the scientist to hold scientific paradigms up to each other and compare them. (more…)
November 29, 2006
A Coherent Belief in Santa
Intuition, I suggest, tells us the following: we have at least some justified beliefs and we have at least some unjustified beliefs; therefore all of our beliefs cannot stand or fall together. Additionally, intuition suggests that justification is not an all or nothing dichotomy, but rather allows for degrees. Any theory of epistemic justification which does not allow for both of these possibilities is unacceptable. In this paper I will follow these intuitions in arguing against two approaches to a coherentist theory of justification. I will also show that where these two approaches fail, a third approach can succeed. (As an attributive note, all three approaches are supplied by Richard Feldman in his book, Epistemology.) (more…)
