Integrating Kuhn’s Taxonomic Incommensurability and Derrida’s Iterability

Science is often imagined as a steady march of accumulation, where new discoveries simply add to a growing pile of facts. But the history of science tells a different story. Sometimes, a new theory arrives that does not just add to the old one; it changes the very rules of the game. When this happens, the words scientists use to describe the world can shift so dramatically that the old theories and the new ones seem to speak different languages. This is the problem of "incommensurability," a concept developed by the historian Thomas Kuhn. He argued that when a scientific revolution occurs, the categories scientists use to sort reality—like what counts as a "planet" or a "force"—are so deeply interconnected in their own time that they cannot be perfectly translated into the new system. It is not that scientists stop talking to each other, but that they cannot simply swap words and expect the meaning to stay exactly the same.

For decades, philosophers have debated how we can possibly understand these shifting worlds. If the old words cannot be perfectly translated, does that mean we can never truly know what past scientists meant? Or does it mean that every time we try to explain an old idea, we inevitably change it? A recent article by philosopher Ivana Nikolic tackles this puzzle by bringing together Kuhn's historical insights with the linguistic theories of Jacques Derrida. Derrida proposed that the meaning of any word or sign is never fixed; it depends entirely on the context in which it is used, and because that context is always shifting, the meaning is always open to change. Nikolic uses this idea to show that understanding across scientific revolutions is not a failure of translation, but a specific kind of creative act. She suggests that when we try to understand a past scientific theory, we are not just moving a static meaning from one box to another. Instead, we are performing a "transformative interpretation," where we take the old concepts and re-embed them in our current world, knowing that they will inevitably look slightly different, yet still remain intelligible.

The core of Nikolic's work is a new model for how we bridge these gaps in understanding. She argues that we must stop looking for a perfect, one-to-one match between old and new scientific terms. In her view, such a match is impossible because the old terms were part of a specific network of relationships that no longer exists in the same way. For example, in the old view of the solar system, the sun and the moon were both classified as "planets" because they moved across the sky in a specific way. In the new view, the sun is a star and the moon is a satellite. You cannot simply translate the old word "planet" into the new system without breaking the rules of the new system. Kuhn recognized this difficulty, noting that scientists can become "bilingual," learning to navigate both systems without merging them. However, Nikolic points out that Kuhn did not fully explain what happens in the mind of the person doing the translating.

This is where the article introduces Derrida's concept of "iterability." This is the idea that for a word to have meaning, it must be repeatable in different situations. But every time you repeat a word, you are doing so in a slightly different context, and that context changes the word's meaning. Nikolic applies this to science by showing that when a modern scientist reads an ancient text, they are repeating the old words in a new context. This repetition is not a mistake; it is necessary for understanding. The act of reading the past automatically changes the meaning of the past words because they are now being used to explain things to people who live in a different time. The paper argues that this transformation is not a loss of truth, but a necessary part of how knowledge survives. The meaning is not preserved like a fossil in amber; it is preserved like a story that is retold, where the core narrative remains clear even if the details shift to fit the new audience.

The author is careful to distinguish this process from simple translation or from making things up. Translation usually assumes that there is a fixed meaning waiting to be moved from one language to another. Nikolic says this is impossible in science because the meaning is tied to the whole system of ideas, which has changed. On the other hand, she rejects the idea that this means anything goes or that we can never know the past. Instead, she proposes a set of rules for "transformative interpretation." To do this correctly, a scholar must stay faithful to the original text and the historical facts of the time. They must respect the original relationships between the words, even if those relationships cannot be perfectly copied. They must also be honest about how their own modern perspective shapes the explanation. The goal is to make the old ideas understandable to us today without pretending they are exactly the same as our ideas.

This approach offers a way to navigate the tension between continuity and change in science. It acknowledges that when a scientific revolution happens, something is lost, and something is gained. The old way of seeing the world cannot be fully recovered, but it can be understood in a new light. The paper suggests that this understanding is a disciplined practice. It requires the interpreter to be accountable to the evidence, to the history, and to the structure of the arguments. It is not about finding a perfect equivalence, but about creating a bridge that allows us to see the logic of the past, even if that logic looks different from our own. By combining Kuhn's historical analysis with Derrida's linguistic insights, the article provides a robust framework for how we can talk about scientific change without falling into confusion or skepticism.

Ultimately, the paper concludes that cross-paradigm understanding is a dynamic negotiation. It is a process where we accept that we cannot simply copy the past, but we can reconstruct it in a way that is faithful to its original intent while acknowledging our own position in time. This allows for a genuine dialogue between different scientific worlds. We can see how the old scientists thought, not by pretending they thought like us, but by carefully translating their unique way of seeing the world into terms we can grasp. The result is a richer, more nuanced view of scientific progress, one that respects the complexity of how human knowledge evolves. It shows that even when the categories of science shift, the human effort to understand the world remains a continuous, though ever-changing, conversation.