Holism in Kuhn and Quine

In this paper, we are going to compare the thesis of holism embedded in Kuhn’s philosophy of science and Quine’s epistemology. Both of these philosophers have emphasized philosophers after them a great deal. One of most crucial concepts in Kuhn’s philosophy is incommensurability which is widespread nowadays in philosophy of science. He defines it in three levels including observational, methodological and semantic. To do such a thing, Kuhn appeals to a kind of partial holism, i.e. at the level of paradigm. On the other hand, Quine holds a kind of epistemic and semantic holism which seems to have much affinity with Kuhn’s partial epistemic and semantic holism used in his incommensurability thesis. This paper aims, while introducing Quine’s holism in his “Two Dogmas of Empricism” and Kuhn’s incommensurability in his “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, to express such affinities.