O relativismo cognitivo é autorrefutante?

Abstract

Hilary Putnam sought to undermine cognitive relativism by charging it with selfdestructive incoherence. Thomas Kuhn’s conception of the development of scientific knowledge occupies a prominent place in that critical endeavor, and the incommensurability between rival paradigms constitutes the core of the dispute. Putnam claimed that incommensurability is selfrefuting, taking into account only its semantic dimension. This article examines this anti-relativist attack. I consider two senses of self-refutation, the material and the formal, and argue that they do not affect the semantic formulation of incommensurability. Additionally, I show that the epistemological dimension of incommensurability is also unaffected.