There's currently no public method to set the thermocouple type, this can be worked around with calls directly into i2cdevice.
For example, here's how we might set the type to 'R':
from mcp9600 import MCP9600
mcp9600 = MCP9600()
mcp9600._mcp9600.set('THERMOCOUPLE_CONFIG', type_select='R')
This should really be something like:
mcp9600.set_thermocouple_type('R')