Closing the door to cloud-cuckoo land: a reply to Šešelja and Straßer

Šešelja and Straßer’s critique fails to hit its target for two main reasons. First, the argument is not that Kuhn is a rationalist because he is a coherentist. Although Kuhn can be taken as a rationalist because of his commitment to epistemic values, coherence analysis provides a more comprehensive characterisation of cognitive process in scientific change than any of these values alone can offer. Further, we should understand Kuhn as characterising science as the best form of rationality we have outside logic, which rules out algorithmic rationality and allows non-cognitive factors to play a role in theory change. Second, Šešelja and Straßer overemphasise the importance of a priori reasoning in Kuhn, which was only an alternative to his earlier historical-empirical approach. My suggestion is that Kuhn’s neo-Kantian historical cognitivism integrates the earlier empirical and the later a-prioristic orientations. According to it, that any understanding of the world is preconditioned by some kind of mental module that is liable to change, detected as a discontinuity in the historical record of science.