Incommensurability and Laboratory Science

The aim of the article is to establish relations between Kuhn’s general characterization of incommensurability as the impossibility to translate the taxonomies pertaining to rival scientific theories into one another and Hacking’s more specific version of incommensurability affecting competing theories that have stabilized relatively to different laboratory equipments and measurement techniques. On the basis of an analysis of the nature of scientific taxonomies that takes its inspiration from the works of Duhem, it will be argued that Kuhn’s language-based approach is inadequate to provide an account of the way scientific terms apply to nature in the domain of physical laboratory science, in which the role of measurement procedures is essential. The analysis will be carried out by introducing the notion of dual taxonomy and the notion of ostensive character of a theory. It will result that, once these two notions are taken into account, it becomes possible to lay the foundations of an enlarged taxonomic version of incommensurability which can provide a common framework for the discussion of the examples introduced by Kuhn and Hacking.