In a recent post by Dan Bednarz in the online journal Health After Oil discusses the difficulty of engaging in rational debate when the participants operate from different paradigms and use different organizing metaphors to communicate. The post entitled “But You’ve Offered no Solutions,” is an illustration of Thomas Kuhn’s Incommensurability Thesis.
"Recently I spoke to a gathering of medical and public health students at Columbia University about the contribution the health sciences can make to Mayor Bloomberg’s PLANYC, a vision for a sustainable New Your City in 2030.
"Although I had prepared opening remarks on how I was speaking from a paradigm premised upon the end of the physical expansion of the economy, this discussion quickly became an example of Thomas Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis. This means that proponents of competing paradigms are prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation and, overall, “talking past” one another as they find one another’s conceptual positions and policy recommendations incomprehensible or absurd." (more...)