Incommensurability and “Multicultural Science”

Abstract

Responding to criticisms made by Siegel of Kuhn's views on incommensurability, I argue that "multicultural science" is possible; more exactly, values derived from different cultures underlie the salience of questions, open to empirical address but side-lined in mainstream modern scientific inquiry, about objects (e.g., seeds) that arise when phenomena are considered explicitly as objects of human experience and social value. Attention to such values thus points to the potential importance of identifying alternative approaches to systematic empirical inquiry that may involve interesting developments of approaches deployed in gaining "traditional" knowledge, e.g., in agriculture — as we see when we by contrast mainstream approaches to agricultural research (those, e.g., that use genetic engineering methods) with practically incompatible competing agroecological approaches.