Exercising Judgement in a Reality with Many Worlds: Analytic and Continental Stylings

Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science presupposes a version of ‘many worlds realism’, which has impeded its ability to judge and justify the history of science. Moreover, such incapacity has the downstream effect of rendering the meaning of being human indeterminate in ways that make thinking and acting towards the future difficult. The chapter opens by observing the shifting philosophical developments in the 1950s–1970s, when Kuhn’s views gestated. Notably, his contemporaries Quine and Davidson were not tempted to go down the ‘many worlds’ route, largely due to a behaviorist understanding of language that precluded any role for ‘worldmaking’. However, Alfred Tarski’s ‘semantic’ theory of truth, which strongly influenced the logical positivists and Popper, inclined the latter towards his own version of many worlds realism. Kuhn himself later astutely admitted that being a ‘monist’ or ‘pluralist’ about worldmaking depends on whether translation or meaning is key to understanding language. Here I suggest that the German historiographical concept of Sonderweg (‘special way’) might provide an interesting, more normatively charged understanding of the sort of many worlds realism promoted by Kuhn. The second half of the chapter begins by distinguishing the human sciences from the natural sciences in terms of a difference between an ‘inside-out’ and an ‘outside-in’ approach to hermeneutics, the former rendering us empirical geniuses and transcendental dopes and the latter transcendental geniuses and empirical dopes. The social sciences have been the historic testing ground for these two approaches. However, the postmodern condition has challenged their shared assumption that ‘Human = Homo sapiens’. The chapter ends by questioning whether hermeneutics is possible in a world where the ‘human’ is so ontologically indeterminate.