Kuhn was never able to solve the paradox within his idea of sciences: if his "language of incommensurability implies that we cannot understand another's scheme or paradigm" (Dasenbrock, TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES pp. 49), how can we then know that we can't understand this? Other people's sciences are so radically different from "our" science that we can never understand theirs or they ours and, yet, Kuhn can know that: he understands that; the rest of us don't.
Kuhn's appeal to fallacy pervades all of his work in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Reflections on my Critics, and The Essential Tension. Basically, Kuhn alleges that we cannot even begin to understand other people's paradigms; we understand only our paradigm. Yet Kuhn understood enough to "see" this. He can use the "historical study of scientific development" to argue that Popper is wrong, but he also wants the rest of us to see that we cannot understand the science paradigm of previous centuries: Kuhn can use history and its language to attack ideas that punch holes in his idea (or to tell us about Aristotle's concept of science); the rest of us cannot use history because, you see, we cannot understand other paradigms.
If Kuhn were right, then his theory would be nothing but a fad, a "paradigm" that will pass and be replaced by some other fad. In a sense this has happened, but only in the social sciences because Kuhn was "adopted" by a particular group of philosophers and literary critics who saw the usefulness of a theory that claimed that science, this spawn of the modernism, reason and humanism that Heidegger and more recent characters such as Foucault and Derrida have relentlessly attacked, was nothing but an opinion held by an old boys network. Now that such a philosophical fad has lost much of its appeal in France and the US, Kuhn's theory is seen for what it is: an opinion by a man who protected his opinion with fallacies. This opinion was interesting to many philosophers. These philosophers are either dead now, or interested in their next flavor-of-the-month.
This is a good book if you believe, as Popper did, that the clash of ideas and opinions was the best way to get results. Kuhn confesses early on that he does not agree with this position: he has found "the" truth regarding science. Why can't everybody just accept it? Popper is excellent, Kuhn is unintentionally funny, Feyerabend is way out there (no news).
