Fall 2025 Colloquium - William Goodwin

Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida

Title: Kuhn’s speciation metaphor and the birth of biochemistry

Abstract: Biochemistry is an intersectional field: it, “arose by division and recombination of specialties already matured.”  This means that standard Kuhnian models of discipline formation cannot be expected to apply in the case of biochemistry. Kuhn’s later account of discipline formation is by analogy to acts of evolutionary speciation, with ‘incommensurability’ playing the role of an isolating mechanism.  Since ‘incommensurability’ seems to play no role in the formation of biochemistry, this paper attempts to generalize and extend Kuhn’s speciation analogy thus making a considerably more interesting and plausible general account of discipline formation and eliminating any essential appeal to ‘incommensurability’ in that account.