KUHN'S "LINGUISTIC TURN", INCOMMENSURABILITY AND WEAK TAXONOMIC OBJECTIVITY

In his last works, after his own 'linguistic turn', Kuhn abandons the concept of paradigm, proposes a view based on taxonomic concepts and introduces other two concepts, such as conceptual network and lexicon. My aim in this paper is to analyse the impact of these new concepts on Kuhn's model of scientific theories and to explore their relation with the concept of paradigm and the idea of incommensurability. I argue that Kuhn tried to escape from the highly relativistic consequences of the early version of his theory and he was ready for a realistic approach at least in the case of the sciences that use tools in order to distinguish between the so-called "natural kinds". As a consequence, Kuhn proposes a new heuristic principle as a guide for his research: "The world is not invented or constructed."