Kuhn’s Readings and Misreadings of Wittgenstein

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s influence on Kuhn’s thought can be traced from his 1951 Lowell Lectures through The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to his last unfinished manuscript. Meaning as use, vague concepts, family resemblance, aspect seeing, paradigms as models, knowledge and certainty are some of the Wittgensteinian ideas that have left their imprint on Kuhn’s work. In the present paper, I argue that although Kuhn drew on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and agreed with him on fundamentals, he misread certain aspects of Wittgenstein’s work without threatening their overall alignment. I concentrate on three issues: Kuhn’s understanding of concepts, Kuhn’ s understanding of knowledge and certainty, and Kuhn’s take on the accessibility of radically different frameworks, as discussed in The Plurality of Worlds (2022), Kuhn’s unfinished manuscript.