L'importance de la classification chez le dernier Kuhn

Abstract

Kuhn argued that the classificatory terms of a science must be arranged on taxonomic trees. It was his final explanation of incommensurability. Counterexamples abound, of which those drawn from the periodic table are basic. The paper describes eleven arguments from sociology through information theory for thinking that natural kinds must have a tree like structure, and finds none compelling. It concludes with recent suggestions that even classificatory trees for species may in the end have to be uprooted.