Concept Of Incommensurability Research Articles

Structural Equations for Testing Nested Models in Interdisciplinary Research

Barriers to compare opposed or alternative scientific theories exist, based on diverse premises. One is the concept of incommensurability, the idea suggesting that different paradigms or theories cannot be contrasted since they do not share common tenets. This paper proposes the use of nested models for testing the efficacy of isolated disciplinary explanations of psychological and social problems versus the power of interdisciplinary explanations. According to this approach, such nested models would include alternative disciplinary theories competing against each other and against an inclusive model that combines these unidisciplinary explanations. This situation is illustrated with an empirical study using a questionnaire on predictors of precautionary behaviors against COVID-19. Data was analyzed using structural equations, considering a psychological and a health-science perspective, and integrated into an interdisciplinary model. Results from this study showed that the best model was the interdisciplinary model, thus providing some evidence for the use of nested models as a method to integrate different disciplines. The advantages of this approach are discussed in the face of the growing, complex, and serious problems that humanity is nowadays experiencing.

Incommensurability and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: taking Kuhn seriously

In this paper, we analyze the debate between the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis in light of the concept of incommensurability developed by Thomas Kuhn. In order to do so, first we briefly present both the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Then, we clarify the meaning and interpretations of incommensurability throughout Kuhn’s works, concluding that the version of this concept deployed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the best suited to the analysis of scientific disputes. After discussing incommensurability in Kuhn’s works, we address the question of whether the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis can be considered semantically, methodologically, and ontologically incommensurable, concluding that they can. Finally, we discuss three problems that arise from such a conclusion: firstly, what are the consequences of incommensurability; secondly, which mode of scientific change better explains this current dispute in evolutionary biology; and thirdly, whether rational theory comparison is possible given incommensurability. We suggest that the main consequence of incommensurability is profound disagreement, that the kind of scientific change that better explains the current dispute between the MS and the EES may be scientific specialization, and that incommensurability does not preclude rational theory comparison.

Incommensurability and Communication: To the Communicative Turn in the Philosophy of Science

The article shows that Kuhn's concept of incommensurability emphasizes mainly the objective dimension of communication. To the thesis about the incommensurability of the meanings of scientific concepts in competing paradigms, we oppose the idea of a three-dimensional space of communicative dimensions. We supplement the objective dimension of communication, within which the environmental evolutionary selection of the best knowledge is carried out, with equal social and temporal horizons.

Foundations of relativism by J. Margolis in the polemic of R. Rorty and H. Putnam

The polemic about the realism of H. Putnam and R. Rorty is a remarkable event of the 20th century for a number of reasons. Forming within the analytical philosophy, and using the most relevant concepts and ideas of this direction as arguments, this polemic for almost three decades of its existence balanced on the border with relativism, the least popular and admited direction of philosophy of the 20th century. Putnam's arguments against metaphysical realism reject any "point of view of God", entail "internalism", accept the concept of incommensurability of conceptual schemes and the relativization the reality described by the epistemic agent to his experience. Rorty's arguments reject not only relativism, but also realism, but his concepts of ethnocentrism and solidarity also take the view that the standards of truth correlate with the conceptual schemes, are "sociologized" and meet the interests of the majority. J. Margolis find in this polemic not only a retreat into relativism, but also recognized its pragmatistic potential, which gave him the opportunity to defend relativism, proposing its reliable (robust) version and building a neo-pragmatist philosophy on the development of the arguments of both sides.

From Hellholes to Hell

In this essay the author creates and discusses an interplay of two incommensurable concepts of evil: Hannah Arendt’s radical evil from The Origins of Totalitarianism, and David Lynch’s evil presented artistically as “the bad electricity” in Ronnie Rocket. The first concept is related to Hell which Arendt uses in a few essays and in The Origins... In her opinion the first step towards the pure hell of Auschwitz was made in internment camps for stateless refugees. Giorgio Agamben revisits this idea and shows the link between statelessness and superfluousness. For Arendt the road which started with the inability to solve the refugee problem in Europe ended up in a Hell on Earth created in extermination camps. Agamben believes that spaces of extermination which reappeared on the European continent during the wars in former Yugoslavia demonstrate the grim possibility of recreating Hell in Europe. In his extraordinary script for the unmade film Ronnie Rocket, David Lynch creates a fictional hellhole of a city in which the rulers torture the population with bad electricity. The author discusses these two dramatically different visions of hell in order to show how Arendt’s radical evil when compared to “the bad electricity” can be understood as a production of Hell, and how Lynch’s switching from the bad to good electricity represents a revolutionary change which is simultaneously political and cosmological.

Ratnakīrti and the Extent of Inner Space: an Essay on Yogācāra and the Threat of Genuine Solipsism

Though perhaps a dubious honor, Dharmakīrti (fl. c. 550–650 C.E.) is the first philosopher in any tradition to explicitly recognize the epistemological threat of solipsism, devoting an entire essay to the problem—The Justification of (the very idea of) Other Minds (Santānāntarasiddhi). This essay revisits Ratnakīrti’s (990–1050 C.E.) Doing Away with (A Justification of) Other Beings (Santānāntaraduṣaṇa) as a diagnosis of Dharmakīrti’s attempt to reconstruct the very idea of other beings, with particular attention to Ratnakīrti’s sensitivity to the conceptual preconditions for a genuine threat of solipsism. Along with the diagnosis of the conditions for the emergence of a problem of genuine solipsism, this essay takes as its focus Ratnakīrti’s criticism of attempts to meet with the problem. In particular, I shall stress an insight Ratnakīrti adduces in the course of his diagnosis. Attempts to meet the problem of solipsism head on, Ratnakīrti shows us, obscure what the preconditions for a genuine problem reveal: the fact of our possessing two incommensurable conceptions of mind, one of which is intrinsically and entirely first-personal—in a sense to be clarified in the course of this essay—and the other not. I conclude this essay with an inconclusive sketch of the difficulties that remain when considering what Ratnakīrti would have us conclude from his own diagnosis.

Conceptual Theories of Law and the Challenges of Global Legal Pluralism: A Legal Interactionist Approach

One of the perennial discussions in legal philosophy is: What is law? I will call theories that try to elucidate the concept of law and provide definitions, conceptual theories of law. For such conceptual theories, global legal pluralism presents a number of major challenges, for at least four reasons. First, it recognizes a wide variety of types of law. Second, it recognizes a wide variety of law-producing actors. Third, the phenomenon of gradually emerging legal orders, such as those of international law, is undeniable. Fourth, the pluralism of global legal pluralism is not a loose collection of separate and sovereign legal orders; these legal orders overlap and are intertwined in many ways. We may discern three different strategies to deal with these challenges: monist, relativist and pluralist. Monist approaches stick to the search for one universal concept of law; they look for essential characteristics that define what makes a normative order to a legal order. Relativist approaches are on the opposite side of the spectrum. They state that as law is a highly variable phenomenon, the best thing to do is to refer to the views of the participants in a certain practice. I argue that we should reject both monism and relativism. Pluralist approaches are the third strategy to develop conceptual theories of law. For such a strategy we may find a starting point in American pragmatism, and especially in the work of Lon Fuller and Philip Selznick. In my book The Dynamics of Law and Morality, I have elaborated a theory of law inspired by those authors, which I call legal interactionism. Legal interactionism recognises interactional law as a source for legal obligations, but also accepts that contract and enacted law may constitute relatively autonomous legal orders in their own right. Legal interactionism implies a broad form of relative legal pluralism, accepting that there is a great plurality of relatively autonomous legal orders – orders that are partly autonomous and partly intertwined. In this article, I focus on how it implies conceptual pluralism and definitional pluralism, and then discuss how this enables it to deal adequately with the four challenges global legal pluralism presents. First, it regards the concept of law as plural, as there may be different, incommensurable conceptions of law that are all defensible and all provide important insights. Rather than accepting one criterion as the ‘distinctively legal’, legal interactionism emphasises that the concept of law is plural in character and can best be analysed in terms of a dynamic family resemblance. Because of this pluralist character, legal interactionism can do justice to both an enormous body of state-enacted law and the emergence of interactional law in various areas of law, including international law. Moreover, it can also do justice to the undeniable fact of global legal pluralism. Therefore, it is the most adequate conceptual theory to study law in the 21st century. Second, it defends definitional pluralism as a logical implication of conceptual pluralism. If there is not one unified concept of law, but a plurality of defensible, partly incompatible conceptions, there cannot be one general definition of law. Even so, we should be able to present reasonable arguments why we prefer one specific definition, referring to the purpose, the methods and the object of study.

(Nie)Koherencja sankcji penalnych. Prezentacja wyników badań empirycznych

The incoherence in judicial punishments, if it exists, may be considered as a form of injustice. The legal system in which the similarly situated cases are not treated similarly may be criticized especially from the point of view of the public understanding the justice idea. The conception of incommensurability of values has a substantial impact on the law application process. Because the judges typically assess cases in isolation, there is no common measure to evaluate the cases and the human way of thinking is category-bounded the judges are susceptible to producing incoherent patterns. However it is believed that if the risk of incoherence is brought to judicial attention, the judges might well be likely to do better, on this count, than non-lawyers (Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, Ilana Ritov 2001). The article presents an empirical analyses carried out on the judgements that were performed by the unselected group of judges in one of the district courts in Lodz.

Paradigm shift in religious education? A reply to Gearon, or when is a paradigm not a paradigm?

This article responds to Liam Gearon’s reply to my article Misrepresenting Religious Education’s Past and Present in Looking Forward: Gearon Using Kuhn’s Concepts of Paradigm, Paradigm Shift and Incommensurability. In maintaining my critique of Gearon’s use of Kuhn’s terminology, I question his claim that ‘incommensurability’ does not necessarily imply ‘incompatibility’, and challenge his view that ‘faith-based’ approaches to religious education and ‘inclusive’ approaches are incommensurable and deeply incompatible. I also question Gearon’s placement of particular scholars within his constructed paradigms, noting that those identified by Gearon with specific paradigms do not necessarily share the same views concerning the nature of religious education and its pedagogy, and that various scholars, associated by Gearon with particular paradigms, draw on a variety of disciplines in their work. I argue that Gearon’s construction of paradigms is a device he uses for ‘separation’, leading to his misrepresentation of the work of researchers. I argue for the benefits of collaboration, in research, teaching and policy development. Finally, I give reasons for writing the article, which do not result from any engagement in ‘paradigm wars’, and I draw attention to pressing issues relating to the future of ‘inclusive’ religious education which are not addressed by Gearon.

Understanding Queer Normality: LGBT+ Representations in Millennial Flemish Television Fiction

Queer television studies scholarship tends to construct “queerness” and “normality” as incommensurable concepts, defining queer “against the normal rather than the heterosexual.” In this article, we show how this construction is specifically intertwined with highly liberalized media contexts, and generates a fundamentally static understanding and operationalization of the concept of normality in queer television studies. Turning to Flemish television fiction of the late 1990s, we point to a dynamic and open-ended approach toward sexual and gender diversity, and illustrate how televised normality itself can be a queer phenomenon. In doing so, we offer a framework to understand the proliferation of LGBT+ characters and storylines in twenty-first-century Flemish television fiction, and contribute to a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of normalization and television fiction in a western European television industry.

The Incommensurability of the "Transnational" in Queer African Studies

The Incommensurability of the "Transnational" in Queer African Studies Ashley Currier (bio) and Thérèse Migraine-George (bio) Queer studies in the global North has inspired growing research on gender and sexual variance in the global South, yet it has framed issues in the language of post-industrial societies that does not address African needs. Queer African studies has emerged since the early 2000s. Scholars have not only contested the "homosexuality as un-African" myth; they have also documented indigenous same-sex sexual practices throughout the African continent and adopted Afrocentric perspectives in their works, resisting the imperialism of Eurocentric and US-based queer studies.1 However, there are tensions between queer African studies and queer studies that need to be articulated. Many publications in queer African studies remain anchored in national case studies that, while helping generate organic knowledge about African gender and sexual dissidence, can become mired in descriptions of lived experience and politics instead of theorizing African gender and sexual diversity in a continental, pan-African, or transnational-comparative context. In addition, queer African studies is institutionally and geopolitically dislocated. In this short essay, we address the question of the transnational, or rather of the "transnationals" in queer African studies, [End Page 613] which traverse the back-and-forth trajectories linking "Africa" and the "West," the local and the global. Through the concept of incommensurability, we grapple with new ways of representing queer African subjects and communities as subjects rather than objects of transnational discourses. TRANSNATIONAL (DIS)LOCATIONS: AFRICAN STUDIES AND QUEER STUDIES Poised at the shifting intersection of queer studies and African studies, queer African studies constitutes a nexus of crisscrossing and often competing discourses. In their investigation of queer modernities in Asia, Howard Chiang and Alvin Wong advocate for queer regionalism in an attempt to "recalibrate the uses of transnationalism as an unquestioned dominant framework within queer studies" (2016, 1645). Chiang and Wong's project to reconceptualize "queer regionalism as crisscrossing temporality and spatiality that emerge from within transcolonial encounters" echoes Achille Mbembe's description of the "postcolony" as "a period of embedding, a space of proliferation" that escapes historical and geopolitical confinement (2001, 242). The transnational in African studies itself still needs further development. Indeed, the US system of racialization and racism confined African studies to the African continent, whereas Africana and black studies became invested in exploring diasporic identities and formations, both real and symbolic. Divisions between African scholars and Africanist scholars (both African and Western-based) have been exacerbated by regional, linguistic, and disciplinary divisions in African studies and proliferating avatars of "Africa," "Africans," and "African-ness." A renewed conception of Africa as "people" foregrounded in the works of writers, artists, and critics has fostered kaleidoscopic views of Africa. Moreover, diasporic articulations of Africa have been propounded by critics who challenge the notion of race as seen mainly through the prism of the transatlantic slave trade (Arondekar and Patel 2016, 157; Macharia 2016, 184–85). The motivation to decenter Western categories stems in part from postcolonial feminist theorizing, which challenges the dominance of white Western feminist perspectives in transnational discussions about feminism, gender, and sexuality. Queer of color critics, anthropologists, and feminists of color engage with the [End Page 614] global south by working at the crossroads of race, gender, sexuality, and nationalism and by challenging the narrow parameters of Western-based identity politics.2 For example, some feminist scholars of African descent interpreted the practice of woman-woman marriage in some African societies in markedly different ways. In a woman-woman marriage, an affluent woman paid bride-price to an unmarried woman's family and married her. The female husband claimed her wife's children as part of her lineage. In social interactions, men usually treated the female husband as a man. It is important to note that after the colonization of different African societies, the introduction of a capitalist cash economy transformed intimate relationships, marriages, and family arrangements. As a result, woman-woman marriages declined in frequency. African feminist Ifi Amadiume (1987) claims that woman-woman marriages never entailed same-sex sexual contact. In contrast, African American feminist theorist Audre Lorde contends that same-sex sex "has existed for...

Paradigm shift in religious education: a reply to Jackson, or why religious education goes to war

This article provides a defence of my theoretical analysis of paradigm shift in contemporary religious education, particularly in light of Robert Jackson’s (2015) article published in this journal: ‘Misrepresenting religious education’s past and present in looking forward: Gearon using Kuhn’s concepts of paradigm, paradigm shift and incommensurability’. The core of Jackson’s concerns is my adaptation of Kuhn’s concepts of paradigm, paradigm shift and incommensurability to religious education. Defending in turn my use of these concepts – of paradigm, paradigm shift and incommensurability – I conclude that Jackson’s critique is in and of itself an apt demonstration of the position he seeks to attack. Drawing wider parallels with the methodological ‘paradigm wars’ in the social sciences I argue that the paradigms are why religious education too goes to ‘war’.

A Reconsideration of the Relation Between Kuhnian Incommensurability and Translation

ABSTRACTUp to the introduction of the term and concept of incommensurability by T. S. Kuhn and P. K. Feyerabend in the early 1960s, scientific texts were supposed to pose no problem as regards their translation, unlike literature, which was thought very difficult to translate. After the introduction of the term, translation of scientific language became equally problematic because, due to conceptual and perceptual incommensurability, there was no common observation basis to ground linguistic equivalences between languages of incommensurable paradigms. This article highlights the presuppositions that link incommensurability to dramatic consequences (impossibility of communication, translation, and comparative evaluation of paradigms) and tries to sketch an alternative way of understanding incommensurability and translation drawing on Kuhn’s work. From this perspective, translation is not an all-or-nothing affair for either science or literature and becomes a problem to be solved for each particular set of circumstances.

Foucault, Ferguson, and civil society

In contrast to those who trace civil society to “community” per se, Foucault is keen to locate this concept as it emerges at a particular moment in respect of specific exigencies of government. He suggests that civil society is a novel way of thinking about a problem, a particular problematization of government that emerges in the eighteenth century and which combines incommensurable conceptions of the subject as simultaneously a subject of right and of interests. This article takes up Foucault’s discussion of the Scottish Enlightenment in The Birth of Biopolitics to trace the distinctiveness of his discussion of civil society, but also in order to suggest that we ought to pay closer attention to the tensions between commercial-civilizational and civic republican themes in the literature of the late eighteenth century than does Foucault. It is my tentative suggestion that Foucault’s account leaves out significant aspects of these debates that offer counter-valences to the dominant models of the subject available to contemporary political discourse.

Cross-cultural Translatability: Challenges and Prospects

In our quest of a new paradigm for cultural or cross-cultural understanding, we must first take a look at the very concept of a paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn expounded in his celebrated book,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the related concepts of incommensurability and untranslatability. Kuhn’s concepts have a significant influence on social sciences and the humanities, and they put an overemphasis on the difference and the impossibility of communication among different groups and cultures. Such a tendency has led to the fragmentization of the social fabric and the resurgence of a most tenacious tribalism. This essay launches a critique of such concepts and argues for the possibility and validity of cross-cultural understanding, and proposes world literature as an opportunity to embrace cross-cultural translatability as the first step towards a new paradigm in the study of different cultures in our globalized world today.

De la inconmensurabilidad al mito de la escritura: Rancière y las retóricas del disenso

This paper discusses the relationship between the concepts of politics and aesthetic regime in the Ranciere’s philosophy. First we interpret the opposition between politics and policy according to the concepts of incommensurability and mesentente. Just as the geometric rapport between incommensurable ratios underlies the policy and state administration, the rhetoric of misunderstanding becomes the model of a democratic politics largely sustained on an aesthetic consensus. Expelled from politics and confined to a representative ethical regime of art, classical rhetoric was replaced in modernity by aesthetical education. An essential part of the work of Ranciere explains how the modern aesthetic regime helped to redefine the political subjectivity and to propose new forms of consensus. To understand his argument we discusses Ranciere’s analysis of the concept of poeticity, directly confronted with the classical poetry, as well as its democratic reinterpretation of the myth of writing, which links to a democratic conception of the spirit and culture.

Misrepresenting religious education’s past and present in looking forward: Gearon using Kuhn’s concepts of paradigm, paradigm shift and incommensurability

In looking to the future, some writers on religious education (RE) have attempted to evaluate current approaches to the subject. Some have characterised any significant change in approach as a ‘paradigm shift’, a term derived from Thomas Kuhn’s work in the philosophy of science. This article examines the uses of the terms ‘paradigm’, ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘incommensurability’ in Liam Gearon’s book MasterClass in Religious Education. I argue that Gearon misapplies Kuhn’s concepts, that his own account of paradigms of RE is internally inconsistent, and that his discussion – partly through placing the views of others within a rigid framework of constructed paradigms – contains some misrepresentations of their work. The critique is pertinent to the debate about the nature and future of RE for, if evaluations of present and past models of RE are defective, their use in re-thinking the shape and content of the subject is highly questionable.

Banking on the Present: The Ontological Rhetoric of Neo-Classical Economics and Its Relation to the 2008 Financial Crisis

This essay performs a rhetorical criticism of neo-classical economics, with particular attention to its methodological influence on a number of faulty mathematical models that lay at the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis. Going beyond Goodnight and Green's mimetic conception of economic rhetoric, which positions rhetoric as a site of mediation between symbolic and material spirals, we argue that the rhetoric of neo-classicism is best understood as an “apparatus” that attempts to suture two ontologically incommensurable conceptions of time that we term intensive and extensive. We further argue that the hinge of this rhetorical apparatus centers on a kairotic tactic of arbitrage, which theoretically posits, at the same time that it negates, ontological market failure. We end by exploring rhetorical alternatives to neo-classical economics that take the internally contradictory structure of arbitrage to its emergent conclusions.

How far can we aspire to consistency when assessing learning?

How far can consistent assessment capture all the worthwhile features of educational achievement? Are some important components of learning necessarily open to a range of potentially inconsistent judgments by different assessors? I argue for a cautiously affirmative answer to this question, drawing on analogies with aesthetic judgments and a rehearsal of the holistic characteristics of some assessment criteria. I also employ recent treatments of moral particularism and of concepts of incommensurability to oppose the drive for consistency in assessment required by a high stakes accountability regime.

Thomas Kuhn et l’oubli de la pratique

Cet article examine l’œuvre de Thomas Kuhn au prisme du rôle que joue la notion de pratique dans le développement de sa théorie de la rationalité scientifique. Je commence par exposer les enjeux épistémologiques de la théorie de l’incommensurabilité. Je montre ensuite comment l’intuition originale d’une conception pratique et sociale de l’incommensurabilité en vient à être remplacée par une interprétation linguistique plus conventionnelle. Dans la deuxième partie de l’article, j’examine la solution donnée par Kuhn au problème de l’incommensurabilité et j’en montre l’insuffisance. Je montre ensuite que c’est l’incapacité à penser la dimension épistémologique de la pratique qui empêche Kuhn de donner une solution pleinement satisfaisante au problème épistémologique soulevé par La structure des révolutions scientifiques.