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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 385 necessary to make this explicit in order to actually obtain for women the Constitutional protection to which they are already entitled. The criteria of inclusiveness I propose in Sections 5 and 6 below invite a similar line of reasoning. Consider what happens when a scientific theory fails to satisfy the requirement of theoretical inclusiveness. Thomas Kuhn does not charge its proponents with a failure of rationality. But he does argue that a crucial role in eventually subverting the authority of that theory and contributing to a paradigm shift is often played by theoretically anomalous data that the theory not merely fails to explain but also misguidedly relegates to insignificance. 4 However, the case may be made that what is involved here is, in fact, a failure of rationality - to wit, pseudorationality - of the kind described in Chapter VII. To advance a theory intended to, for example, explain the revolution of the planets that denied, dissociated, or rationalized away the importance of their axial rotation would be pseudorational because it would sabotage the explanatory power the theory attempted to claim, by rejecting available data that should influence the formulation, scope and application of its laws. Violation of theoretical inclusiveness undermines a theory's scope of practical application. 1.3. Comprehensiveness Of course no theory can realistically claim comprehensiveness for its explanatory paradigm, even in theory, even though it may be appropriate to aspire to it. I define a theory as comprehensive if it is a "theory of everything", i.e. explains all the data there is or could ever be to explain. The more a theory can explain, the more comprehensive it is. By contrast, I call a theory inclusive if it picks out all the data relevant to its domain of explanation. The more phenomena a theory's terms, concepts, laws, and theoretical constructs can identify, the more inclusive it is and the more candidates for explanation it offers. Whereas comprehensiveness, on this definition, is a function of explanatory success, inclusiveness is a function of explanatory scope. A theory can be fully inclusive without being fully comprehensive just in case it can identify more phenomena than it can explain. But it cannot be comprehensive without being inclusive, because its comprehensive explanations identify all the phenomena there is.5 Although greater comprehensiveness means more explanatory potency, complete and thoroughgoing theoretical comprehensiveness is Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), Chapters VI-VIII. 5 Surprisingly, Kuhn relegates the criterion of inclusiveness to a second-class status, along with simplicity and compatibility with other specialties (ibid., Postscript: 206). I find this surprising since the more inclusive in scope a theory is, the less vulnerable it is to the de-stabilizing effect of anomaly. 4 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
