Incommensurability: Its Implications for the Patient/Physician Relationship Veatch and

Contemporary philosophy of science, as seen in the work of Popper, Kuhn, Hanson, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Quine, Winch, Rorty, Fleck, and Laudan, has struggled with similar epistemological problems. A group that we, to coin a phrase, will call the incommensurabilists,2 has argued that the enterprise of science operates within social constructs called paradigms or thought collectives or worldviews that are broad cultural frameworks for doing science. The work done within one of these paradigms, to use the now somewhat out-of-fashion term, is incommensurable with that done in another. The concepts used mean different things to those working in different paradigms. The questions are formulated differently, the evidence processed differently, and success measured differently.