ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the term 'incommensurability' is used metaphorically in Thomas Kuhn's and P. Feyerabend's hands in trying to capture their strong intuition that the communication breakdown between two scientific communities is due to lack of some common measure between the two languages used. It is clear that Kuhn's different formulations of incommensurability evolved in the process of his efforts to specify a significant common measure of successful cross-language communication. Successful cross-language communication requires much more than mutual understanding. The cross-language communication breakdown is the essential sense of Kuhn's notion of incommensurability. As a complex historical-anthropological phenomenon, the problem of incommensurability manifests itself in many facets and ramifications. Feyerabend explicitly makes an analogy between the clarification of the notion of incommensurability and an anthropological discovery.
