In any event, a counterargument would be that while Thomas Kuhn (if he were still alive) may be unaware of aspects of Greek culture in the 3rd century B.C. that would help him to understand things about Aristotle's writing, these aspects not being discernible in the historical record, he may well understand Aristotle's thought better than most or maybe even all of Aristotle's contemporaries in that he has available to him a large body of Aristotle's work that he can look at as a whole and make coherent sense of them* and he has the ability to discuss them with a wide number of colleagues, and also has available modern concepts of psychology to understand Aristotle with, these concepts not being available to Aristotle's contemporaries, etc.
I pick Kuhn because he's the fellow who understood that he had to go through a paradigm shift to understand Aristotle's ideas of physical motion, who realized that he was dealing with a different mode of thought that he had to learn as if it were a foreign language. But my point is that this was doable because a sufficient quantity of Aristotle's ideas could be reproduced for Kuhn to comprehend them, the ideas being reproduced by words and on paper (or something) and then the words being copied and then after Gutenberg mechanically reproduced hence brought closer to a lot of people.
So it seems kind of arbitrary to emphasize social distance.
Or, for instance, if you want to understand my ideas you may do better than someone here in Denver who knows me but doesn't have access to the internet; that person can ask me questions, and I can answer them and discover ambiguities in what I wrote owing to that person's questions, hence can make my ideas clearer to him or her. But you may well know more about my ideas because you can discuss them with a larger collective of other people on the internet - including me - who can bring up all sorts of questions and ideas about what I'm saying, and also you and not my local friend are closer to the context I say it in, since my ideas are a response to ideas of people like you more than ideas of anyone I've met in Denver, "mass" reproduction being the context in which I'm saying my ideas.
*well, I realize that a hunk of Aristotle's writing didn't survive either, such as dialogues he is supposed to have written (right?)
no subject
I pick Kuhn because he's the fellow who understood that he had to go through a paradigm shift to understand Aristotle's ideas of physical motion, who realized that he was dealing with a different mode of thought that he had to learn as if it were a foreign language. But my point is that this was doable because a sufficient quantity of Aristotle's ideas could be reproduced for Kuhn to comprehend them, the ideas being reproduced by words and on paper (or something) and then the words being copied and then after Gutenberg mechanically reproduced hence brought closer to a lot of people.
So it seems kind of arbitrary to emphasize social distance.
Or, for instance, if you want to understand my ideas you may do better than someone here in Denver who knows me but doesn't have access to the internet; that person can ask me questions, and I can answer them and discover ambiguities in what I wrote owing to that person's questions, hence can make my ideas clearer to him or her. But you may well know more about my ideas because you can discuss them with a larger collective of other people on the internet - including me - who can bring up all sorts of questions and ideas about what I'm saying, and also you and not my local friend are closer to the context I say it in, since my ideas are a response to ideas of people like you more than ideas of anyone I've met in Denver, "mass" reproduction being the context in which I'm saying my ideas.
*well, I realize that a hunk of Aristotle's writing didn't survive either, such as dialogues he is supposed to have written (right?)