The communality of interepistemic translation: Charles Sanders Peirce and Thomas Kuhn on the interepistemicity of scientific communities

Abstract

This paper explores interepistemic translation as only secondarily taking place between epistemic systems—primarily between what the historian, philosopher, and sociologist of science Thomas S. Kuhn calls ‘epistemological communities.’ In the 1969 Postscript to his 1970 second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn explores the specifically translational quality of attempts among those splinter epistemological communities in what he calls a ‘paradigm shift’ to overcome the ‘communication breakdown’ caused by the erosion and collapse of the previous paradigm; the long middle section of the paper is devoted to an unpacking of Kuhn’s account of ‘interepistemological’ or ‘intercommunal’ translation. Bookending that long middle section, however, are accounts of other sociological theories of such ‘epistemological’ communities, from Charles Sanders Peirce’s 1877 article ‘The fixation of belief’ on the communal movement from doubt to belief, through John Dewey's 1897 position paper ‘My pedagogic creed’, back to Peirce again on the expanded triadic semiosis of instinct-experience-belief and abduction-inductiondeduction.

KEYWORDS: Epistemological Communities; Communication Breakdown; Persuasion; Conversion; Interepistemic; Translation