Revolutionary Analogies

This paper discusses the role of analogy in scientific revolutions. A challenge to Kuhn’s philosophy of science emerges from this study. On the one hand, the fact that many new paradigms (understood here as ‘exemplars’) have borne out of analogies is partly explained by the fact that, compatibly with Kuhn’s requirement of ‘open-endedness’ or ‘fruitfulness’ on paradigms, they contained immediately graspable indications as to their extensions to novel domains of phenomena. On the other hand, the consideration of scientific exemplars possessing an analogical origin also suggests that new exemplars may be successful partly as the result of drawing upon a common background of familiar experiences and training among competing scientific parties. It follows that, for reasons possibly endemic to Kuhn’s conception of science, scientific revolutions are unlikely to display the forms of incommensurability that Kuhn famously ascribed to them.