Are Theories Incommensurable Due to the Untranslatability of One Scientific Language to Another?
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linguistics
school essay
date published 04/01/2008
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The most famous exponent of the theory of incommensurability is Thomas Kuhn. To state his theory in the simplest form, incommensurability is simply the idea that theories within science are not compatible, and that the languages they use are, at least in part, mutually untranslatable. This is also linked with the idea that theories cannot be meaningfully compared with each other, because if two theories use different languages that cannot be translated from one to the other, then it seems the theories cannot be compared in any normal way.

