on how the percipient conceives the world: two scientists who witness the same phenomenon and are steeped in two radically different theories will see two different things. According to this view, our interpretation of the world determines what we see. Jerry Fodor attempts to establish that this theoretical paradigm is fallacious and misleading by demonstrating the impenetrability of perception to the background knowledge of subjects. The strongest case can be based on evidence from experimental cognitive psychology, namely the persistence of perceptual illusions. Knowing that the lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion are equal does not prevent one from continuing to see one line as being longer than the other. This impenetrability of the information elaborated by the mental modules limits the scope of interpretationalism. In epistemology, for example, the criticism of what Fodor calls the interpretationalist hypothesis accounts for the common-sense intuition (on which naïve physics is based) of the independence of reality from the conceptual categories of the experimenter. If the processes of elaboration of the mental modules are in fact independent of the background theories, then it is possible to maintain the realist view that two scientists who embrace two radically diverse theories see the world exactly in the same manner even if they interpret it differently. The point is that it is necessary to distinguish between observations and the perceptual fixation of beliefs. While it is beyond doubt that the second process involves the holistic relationship between beliefs, the first is largely independent of the background beliefs of individuals. Other critics, such as Israel Scheffler, Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke, have focused on the Fregean distinction between sense and reference in order to defend scientific realism. Scheffler contends that Kuhn confuses the meanings of terms such as "mass" with their referents. While their meanings may very well differ, their referents (the objects or entities to which they correspond in the external world) remain fixed. Subsequent commentary by Kuhn In 1995 Kuhn argued that the Darwinian metaphor in the book should have been taken more seriously than it had been. Awards and honors 1998 Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction: The Board's List (69) 1999 National Review 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Century (25) 2015 Mark Zuckerberg book club selection for March. Editions See also Epistemological rupture Groupthink Scientific revolution References External links Article on Thomas Kuhn by Alexander Bird Text of chapter 9 and a postscript at