NEO‐KANTIAN PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE: CASSIRER, KUHN, AND FRIEDMAN1
In some recent writings, as well as in the article published here, Michael Friedman offers a fascinating account of how Thomas Kuhn’s groundbreaking work in the history and philosophy of science is related to—and even explicitly indebted to—an important strand of Neo-Kantianism. Friedman shows that Kuhn’s talk of “shifts” between paradigms, in particular, is influenced by the Neo-Kantian conception of the exact sciences as evolving by way of a series of massive structural transitions which do not aim at “convergence to a final truth about a mind-independent reality” (p. 242). Kuhn takes a step beyond the NeoKantians, however, in giving up not just convergence towards things-inthemselves but also any sort of convergence at all. According to Friedman, this final step of Kuhn’s is in fact a misstep—an unfortunate result of the fact that he followed Alexandre Koyre and Emile Meyerson in assuming that any convergence in mathematical physics would have to be “substantial.” Substantial convergence, roughly speaking, involves a series of theoretical structures having the same “physical referents” but accounting for them (descriptively and predictively) in an increasingly adequate way. And this, as Kuhn himself points out, is not the way the history of the exact sciences has actually gone. Instead, the physical referents of, say, the Einsteinian theory are essentially and substantially different from the physical referents of the Newtonian theory.