How to Forestall the Risk of Synchronic Incommensurability in Scientific Practice: A Way at Hand a la Ludwik Fleck

초록

Incommensurability in a diachronic relation between successive scientific theories, or paradigms, makes at most trouble for philosophers. It is seldom a substantial problem for working scientists to worry about. In contrast, synchronic incommensurability which was not Kuhnian topic in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions would be a nontrivial obstacle for scientific communication and cooperation across the boundaries of paradigm-like unit of specialties. The threat of such incommunicativeness among disciplinary partitions due especially to lexical incommensurability is a reality today and can be growing tomorrow. Ludwik Fleck’s Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache (1935) which preempts some essential portions of Kuhnian analysis of scientific practice in Structure and deserves higher appreciation in the history of 20th century philosophy of science than it has hitherto got, suggests a general but effective way for prevention from such threat.