In a sense I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction (1962/1970a, 150).(19Remarks such as these gave some commentators the impression that Kuhn was a strong kind of constructivist, holding that the way the world literally is, depends on accepted scientific theory. Kuhn, however, denied any constructivist import to his remarks on world-change.
The closest Kuhn came to constructivism was to acknowledge a parallel with Kantian idealism.
Paul Hoyningen-Huene (1989/1993), as a result of working with Kuhn, developed a neo-Kantian interpretation of his discussion of perception and world-change.
We may distinguish between the world-in-itself and the ‘world’ of our perceptual and related experiences (the phenomenal world). This corresponds to the Kantian distinction between the noumena and the phenomena.
The important difference between Kant and Kuhn is that Kuhn regards the general form of the phenomena not to be fixed but instead to be changeable.
A shift in paradigm can lead, via the theory-dependence of observation, to a difference in one's experiences of things and thus to a change in one's phenomenal world.
Kuhn likened the change in the phenomenal world to the Gestalt-switch that occurs when one sees the duck-rabbit diagram first as (similar to) a duck then as (similar to) a rabbit, although he himself acknowledged that he was not sure whether the Gestalt case was just an analogy or whether it illustrated some more general truth about the way the mind works that encompasses the scientific case too.
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