ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes Thomas Kuhn’s positions on incommensurability and reconstructs Kuhn's taxonomic interpretation contained in his works. Kuhn's works on taxonomic incommensurability seem to be on the edge of breaking through the barrier of the traditional way of thinking about incommensurability in Tarski's truth-functional style. A lexicon provides the community with both shared taxonomic categories/kind-terms and shared similarity relationships among those categories/terms. The structure of a lexicon of a scientific language consists of two parts: taxonomic categories or kind-terms and similarity relationships among these categories. The primary function of expectations about the similarity relationships is to transmit and maintain taxonomy by passing and preserving the taxonomic categories and the structural relationships between them. Kuhn concluded that 'shared taxonomic categories, at least in an area under discussion, are prerequisite to unproblematic communication'. Languages with incompatible taxonomic structures have access to different possible worlds.
