Problem Of Incommensurability Research Articles

Eliminativist induction cannot be a solution to psychology's crisis.

Integrative experiment design assumes that we can effectively design a space of factors that cause contextual variation. However, this is impossible to do so in a sufficiently objective way, resulting inevitably in observations laden with surrogate models. Consequently, integrative experiment design may even deepen the problem of incommensurability. In comparison, one-at-a-time approaches make much more tentative assumptions about the factors excluded from experiment design, hence still seem better suited to deal with incommensurability.

MAXWELL’S UNIFICATION OF OPTICS AND ELECTROMAGNETISM AND THE INCOMMENSURABILITY TENET

It is contended that one of the promising directions for solving the problem of incommensurability of paradigms, coined by T. Kuhn and P. Feyerabend, can be associated with the trend of advancement of neo-Kantian epistemology, presented by the writings of Ernst Cassirer. According to Cassirer, the statements fixing connections and relationships between mathematical ideal constructs form a “neutral language” that can serve as a firm ground for comparing the “old” and “new” paradigms. A case study of the genesis and functioning of a neutral mathematical language related to the Maxwellian synthesis of optics and electromagnetism isprovided. It is elicited that its basis is constituted by the mathematical language of continuum mechanics. The main function of the neutral language was to project the consequences of all the unified theories onto the mathematical model, “rewrite” all known laws in this mathematical language, compare their conclusions with each other to eliminate contradictions and generalize the stuff in a self-consistent system of equations.

The Personal and the Planetary: Buddhism, Climate Change, and Anthropocene Time

Dipesh Chakrabarty describes the problem of climate change as in part one of temporal incommensurability. For most of human history, we have enjoyed the primacy of anthropocentric “world-historical” time. But as climate change becomes an increasingly dominant preoccupation in our daily lives, we experience a rupture in everyday world-historical time and the incursion of a new timescale: the inconceivably vast and impersonal scale of “planetary-geologic” time. The incommensurability between the personal scale of human time and the vast planetary scale of climate change has produced an affective crisis, confronting us with the very limits of our imaginative capacity. In this essay, I argue that although the specifics of climate change may be new, human imaginative engagement with deep time is not. Animated by the conviction that Buddhist literature and thought contain robust theoretical and conceptual ideas that can enrich philosophical and ethical thinking, I bring select Buddhist concepts to bear on the problem of temporal incommensurability. Rather than suggest any general “Buddhist” way of thinking about time, I argue that Buddhist sources can offer new conceptual points of entry into the problem of temporal incommensurability itself, specifically addressing how we might differently conceptualize the relationship between the personal and the planetary in order to address the affective crisis identified by Chakrabarty.

Incommensurability: an obstacle to the integration of psychotherapy and spirituality. the desert fathers as an overcoming epistemological paradigm

In recent years, the body of literature that deals with trying different ways of integrating spirituality into psychotherapeutic practice has grown exponentially. Probably the interest in this topic has arisen with regard to the inclusion in the DSM-IV of the new category "Religious or Spiritual Problem" (Code V62.89). Until then, religious or spiritual issues had been viewed in the clinical practice as symptoms of some mental illnesses like, for example, the delusions with religious content typical of schizophrenics. But with the fourth edition of the aforementioned manual, there began to be an interest in the study of spirituality as it expresses a fundamental aspect of personality. In this vein, various models of integration of spirituality and psychotherapy have been formulated. Our intention is to study the problem of incommensurability as one of the epistemological and methodological problems that supposes a project of this type. We present the writings of the Desert Fathers as an explanatory model that guarantees an epistemologically legitimate integration of spiritual traditions with psychotherapeutic practice. And for that reason, we argue that their writings could constitute a way to overcome the relationship of mutual incommensurability that apparently exists between scientific rationality and spirituality.

REVOLUTIONARY SPECTATORSHIP AND SUBALTERNITY: FOUCAULT IN IRAN

ABSTRACTIn this article, I offer a novel reading of Michel Foucault's Iranian writings and probe their unexplored linkages with longstanding historiographical debates. I argue that these writings run headlong into the conceptual aporias of political modernity by contesting the assumed parallelism between consciousness and history and between subjects of history and history as Subject. I take up this problem through the double frame of revolutionary spectatorship and subalternity. In the first instance, I analyze Kant's contradictory reflections on the French Revolution and Marx and Engel's response to the (failed) revolutions of 1848 to show how uprisings are made to conform to a theory of the subject. In the second instance, in conversation with subaltern studies (Guha, Chakrabarty, and Spivak), I focus on the problem of representing the revolutionary subject or insurgent consciousness. Foucault's Iranian writings problematize the particular way the revolutionary subject (the person who rises up [se lève], in Foucault's vocabulary) is represented, or historiographically phrased. I argue that the confounding factor in this phrasing, the hard object that resists integration, is religion. I build a set of relays between genres of writing—philosophical journalism, philosophy of history, and subaltern historiography—that are subtended by this problem of incommensurability in order to illustrate the double bind of phrasing a religious subject in revolt. Across these heterogeneous conceptual grammars of historical analysis, I track “religion” and the “colonial” as différends in relation to what counts as a subject of history or history as Subject, and I show how religious and colonial phrasings (of history and subjectivity) find themselves in a position that has lost the capacity to claim a position.

Translating Race on the French Stage

Translating Race on the French Stage

Paradigm as a Critical Analysis Tool in Education/Special Education

Familiarity with the concept and the essence of a paradigm allows for analysing a text and assessing the research intention of its author. In this mode, one can trace the correctness of theoretical and conceptual deduction in publications, the mode of combining paradigms by other researchers, including unauthorised borrowings and interpretations. Such knowledge is also necessary to plan research projects. The text draws attention to the problem of incommensurability of paradigms, errors in their application and difficulties with interpreting publications devoid of paradigmatic declarations. The author of the paper highlights the modes and risks of using several years of theoretical achievements of education and special education.

The problem of incommensurability and the crisis of foundations of the Ancient Greek mathematics

The subject of this research is the problem of incommensurability and the crisis of foundations of the Ancient Greek mathematics. The article describes that the crisis of foundations was caused by the discovery of irrationality by the Pythagorean Hippasus of Metapontum, which resulted in the theoretical instability of mathematics of the Pythagoreans, who believed that everything could be expressed through numbers. The discovery of incommensurable line segments demonstrated that the relations between rational numbers cannot express any variable, for example the diagonal of a square with one side equal to one. Analysis is conducted on the achievements of the Pythagorean School in the field of mathematics. Special attention is given to the role of a number in the philosophy of this school. The article explores the main ways for overcoming this crisis, philosophical explanation of the unfolded situation, based on which the Pythagoreans formulate the methodological ways out of the discovered problem of incommensurability. It is noted that the Pythagoreans were actively elaborating on their philosophy and mathematical apparatus intending to find the answer to the discovery of incommensurability. The author’s special contribution lies in the statement that the discovery of irrationality was not critical for the Pythagoreans: they continued working towards the answer to the problem of incommensurability, as well as refined the mathematical theory of proportions, reconsidered the representation of infiniteness as a certain numerical characteristic of the things and processes. This article is first to advance a hypothesis on the possibility of dividing the object into an infinitely large number of infinitely small parts, which is now understood as the limit of function, which contributes to the development and application of dialectics. The problem of incommensurability led to the creation of new, complex theories in the history of science, culture, architecture, and art.

Living in the Skin of a Theory

Abstract This essay argues for an imaginative reading practice in which the “trans” and the “study” of transgender studies are shown as coconstitutive. Arguing that the problem of incommensurability leads transgender studies to spend more time on the signifier trans than on the study of transgender studies, this essay uses the intuitive, ambivalent, and nuanced methodology of Toni Cade Bambara's Salt Eaters to open up space for a trans study that is more capacious, yet still tethered to the experience of living in one's skin as not only content but also form. Ultimately, this essay wonders how transgender studies can learn to live in the skin of a theory, in all its contradiction and strange negotiations, using the same imagination we use to make sense of our own embodied selves.

Kuhn and Wittgenstein

For dropping the incommensurability idea elaborated at the time of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dismisses the concept of “revolution”. The incommensurability involved the incomparability of theories. In this new environment, the revolution is replaced by conceptual reformulation and the incommensurability becomes occasional. The linguistic turn in Kuhn’s thought involves conceptual changes whose aim is to get around the accusation of relativism that the former notion of incommensurability arouses. The most fundamental effect of these conceptual reformulations is the commitment to a traditional conception of semantics. It changes the comprehension of the historical and social nature of the foundations of the changes that scientific knowledge goes through. The comparison between the answer to the problem of paradigm priority attributed by Kuhn to Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein by himself shows that the basis of the normative nature of paradigm commitment is an essentialist concern. In the second half of this paper, I will evaluate Kuhn’s manner of getting around the problems of incommensurability in contrast to Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy dealing with similar issues in On Certainty. This enables one to essay answers to the problems of incommensurability without relativism or any commitment to a traditional conception of semantics. These contrasts show how far Kuhn’s new theory of science departs from the Wittgensteinian inspiration and abandons the point of view of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The development of these two halves makes it possible to indicate reasons to believe that questions concerning the theory and history of science can benefit largely from a grammatical exploration, which gives rise to a theory of science inspired by Wittgenstein’s thought, as Mauro Condé suggests.

Inconmensurabilidad: un obstáculo para la integración de la psicoterapia y la espiritualidad. Los padres del desierto como paradigma epistemológico superador

In recent years, the body of literature that deals with trying different ways of integrating spirituality into psychotherapeutic practice has grown exponentially. Probably the interest in this topic has arisen with regard to the inclusion in the DSM-IV of the new category “Religious or Spiritual Problem” (Code V62.89). Until then, religious or spiritual issues had been viewed in the clinical practice as symptoms of some mental illnesses like, for example, the delusions with religious content typical of schizophrenics. But with the fourth edition of the aforementioned manual, there began to be an interest in the study of spirituality as it expresses a fundamental aspect of personality. In this vein, various models of integration of spirituality and psychotherapy have been formulated. Our intention is to study the problem of incommensurability as one of the epistemological and methodological problems that supposes a project of this type. We present the writings of the Desert Fathers as an explanatory model that guarantees an epistemologically legitimate integration of spiritual traditions with psychotherapeutic practice. And for that reason, we argue that their writings could constitute a way to overcome the relationship of mutual incommensurability that apparently exists between scientific rationality and spirituality.

REALIST ARGUMENT BY J. MARGOLIS TO RORTY AND PATNAM POLEMIC

J. Margolis suggested constructing a version of realism that would be based on the conceptual scheme, which take into account the problem of incommensurability and be compatible with relativism. The paper examines the arguments of Margolis, allowing him to construct a way to reconcile realism and relativism.

An Economic Approach to Religious Exemptions

Externalities caused by religious exemptions have been getting the spotlight again in light a case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this term: Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. Some argue that religious individuals should be required to internalize the costs they impose on third parties and thus should be denied the right to practice that harmful behavior. These new progressive theories about harm trade on rhetoric and normative intuitions regarding externalities and costs. But curiously, these theories also largely ignore an influential theoretical movement that has studied externalities and costs for the last fifty years: law and economics. This Article thus poses a thought experiment: how would normative rhetoric and doctrinal assessments change if one viewed religious externalities through the lens of economic theory? Such a perspective offers three novel normative insights. First, the mere existence of a religiously caused externality does not provide a sufficient justification for government restriction of religious rights, as because externalities are always reciprocal. Second, the government should be cautious about coercing involuntary transactions where idiosyncratic valuation or high transaction costs are involved. And third, exploring outcomes that decrease net harm can highlight government policies that are themselves creating harm. In other contexts, this analysis can force decision-makers to confront more candidly problems of incommensurability, particularly when it comes to dueling claims of dignitary harms. An economic lens can also provide a positivist account of multiple aspects of a religious exemption doctrinal framework in the context of strict scrutiny. These include balancing competing harms in recognition of reciprocal externalities, requiring the government to have a justification for coercing involuntary transactions in a similar way that property rules would, and assessing carefully whether alternatives exist to avoid harm altogether. Indeed, this latter inquiry closely resembles the type of analysis courts engage in under the “less restrictive alternatives” element of the strict scrutiny analysis. While economic theory does not provide answers to all of the difficult questions in these religious exemption debates, it can provide a clinical method of analyzing hot-button issues involving seemingly intractable conflicts. And to the extent that harm is a relevant normative consideration, this Article asserts that an under-theorized reliance on harm on just one side of the ledger, advocated under the current third-party harm theories, is a normatively unpersuasive approach.

Keynesian Uncertainty Can Only Be Represented by Imprecise, Non Additive, Interval Valued Probability or Decision Weights Like Keynes’s C: Ordinal Probability Can’t Represent Keynesian Uncertainty

J M Keynes’s two logical relations of rational degree of probability, α, 0≤α≤1 and Evidential Weight of the Argument, w, 0≤w≤1, where w measures the degree of completeness of the evidence, can’t be represented or associated with ordinal probability, although Keynes’s theory of probability can easily deal with ordinal probability with the aid of Keynes’s principle of indifference if symmetries are present. α can be, in some limited instances, represented by a numerical, precise, definite, exact, additive probability if, and only if, w=1, although, in general, for w<1, it must be represented by an non additive interval estimate of probability or by a decision weight, like Keynes’s original, path breaking innovation of his conventional coefficient, c. Nowhere in Boole’s 1854 The Laws of Thought is any concept of ordinal probability discussed analyzed or applied in any detail. This is because ordinal probability can never deal with overlapping estimates of probability, which creates problems of non comparability, non measurability or incommensurability that Boole and Keynes solved with interval valued probability.

Processual Thinking in the Ontological and Epistemological context of Quantum Mechanics

The problem of commensurability/incommensurability of different cultural codes is a key problem of modern civilizational development. This is the problem of the search for communicative unity in the world of cultural and biological diversity, which has to be protected, and the search for the cohesion of different Umwelten, of semiotically-defined artificial and natural environments, of ecological and cognitive niches, taking into account that each of them has their own identity and uniqueness. The purpose of the article is to draw attention to the fact that the question of the so-called incommensurability of different conceptual schemes, paradigms, language consciousnesses is widely discussed not only in cross-cultural studies and philosophical problems of translation but also in connection with the problems of incommensurability (untranslatability) between the language of classical physics and the language of relativistic quantum physics. Attention is drawn to the problem of the incommensurability and correlation of different languages that are used in debates about the foundations of quantum mechanics, its interpretation, comprehension and ontology. Two approaches stand out in this debate. The first approach is based on the language of the formed being, on the language of things localized in time and on the logic of Aristotle. The second approach is based on the language of the becoming, process and nonlocality, on the search for various processual-oriented temporal logics. In this regard, we discuss the processual approach to understanding quantum mechanics, proposed in the philosophical and physical works of D. Bohm. The authors argue that (a) the experience of constructive understanding of the metaproblems of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, (b) the critical reception of the legacy of such philosophers of the process as Peirce, Bergson and Whitehead, (c) the deep reflection on the problems of commensurability/ incommensurability of linguistic consciousnesses of different cultures – will eventually create a common synergetic-interdisciplinary space of cooperation for the solutions of the above-mentioned issues.

Developing Physical Axiomatics: Results and Outcomes

The ideology and scheme of physical axiomatics are proposed, the initial postulates and axioms are formulated. The essential principles of axiomatics are based on scientific statements and concepts that reflect the fundamental properties of the physical world. One of the obtained outcomes is the statement: “In the physical world, all homogeneous quantities are commensurable, and every real physical property is limited by a certain , The analysis of the problem of incommensurability of radius and circumference leads to the conclusion about the existence of a fundamental property of the physical world, different from space and time. This property is manifested in the forms of electric charges, electric and magnetic fields, electromagnetic waves and fields. Given the nature of its manifestation, this property is called the “electromagnetic property”. The developed axiomatic system and the obtained consequences are the basis of the working model of the physical vacuum. On the basis of this model there have been derived the equations connecting parameters of basic interactions. The components of the internal energy of the physical vacuum are determined. One of these components determines the phenomenon of the Universe expansion. characteristic for this property, minimum nonzero value”. Homogeneous quantities are quantities of one and the same nature, relating to the manifestation of one and the same physical property.

Multi-methodology research and democratization studies: intellectual bridges among islands of specialization

ABSTRACTThis article offers an assessment of recent research employing multi-methodology approaches, both of the triangulation and integrative varieties, in the field of democratization studies. I argue that the major contribution of multi-methodology research (MMR) to the field is to bring into dialogue different research traditions. Because different scholarly communities tend to converge around specific methodologies, the tendency is for scholarship to become fragmented. Within this context, works employing MMR act as “intellectual bridges” bringing into dialogue research from the different traditions. This is a significant contribution in that it enhances the collaborative nature of scholarship without compromising methodological rigor for the field at large. Problems of incommensurability, uneven use of methodologies, and general analytical messiness still plague applications of MMR. However, despite these problems (and in some cases because of them), MMR works are able to speak to more diverse audiences. Thus, while single-methodology research (SMR) still accounts for the bulk of scholarship in the field, MMR also serves an important role in the advancement of scholarly ideas and debate.

Placing plants on paper: Lists, herbaria, and tables as experiments with territorial inventory at the mid-seventeenth-century Gotha court.

Over the past several decades, historians of science have come increasingly to focus on the role of so-called "paper technologies," reorganizing and transforming information through the use of paper and pen, in the emergence of modern science. Taking as a case study an effort by administrators in the seventeenth-century German princely state of Saxe-Gotha to enlist foresters and herb-women to catalog the medicinal plants of the territory, this article analyzes the varied forms of paperwork produced in the process, including an extremely unusual table, and argues that the table represented an effort to produce a synoptic visualization, akin to but not identical to a map, of the location of the territory's herbs. While this table may not have ultimately succeeded as a viable paper technology, due to problems of incommensurability, it demonstrates the role of administrative practices and state actors in experimenting with information about the natural world during the early modern period.

Pentecostal Epistemology, the Problem of Incommensurability, and Creational Hermeneutic

Abstract This article expounds James K.A. Smith’s pentecostal epistemology, analyzing its characteristics as affective, pretheoretical knowledge and its ambiguous relationship to cognitive, theoretical knowledge, and then correlating this relationship to Smith’s exposition of the problem of incommensurability between pretheoretical transcendence and theoretical immanence. I argue that Smith’s epistemology is partly rooted in Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as being-in-the-world in order to clarify the relationship between the affects and cognition. I then address the problem of incommensurability and argue that Smith’s creational hermeneutic eliminates the problem altogether, healing the ambiguous relationship between affective, pretheoretical knowledge and cognitive, theoretical knowledge that affects his pentecostal epistemology.

Intercultural Discourse, Critique, Emancipation and the Inclusion of the Other

This paper critically engages contemporary discussions in intercultural philosophy and critical theory in light of achieving a profound critique of grand ideological schemes, propounding a model for an emancipatory praxis and the inclusion of the other in the dominant discourse. Intercultural philosophy tries to deconstruct the Eurocentrism of the philosophical tradition and in return introduces a reconstructive project centered on the embedded nature of cognition and the culturally oriented nature of philosophy. Critical social theory constitutes a critique of grand metaphysical systems that divorce theory from praxis and the transcendent from the transient. In return it tries to introduce an emancipatory praxis inspired by Hegelian-Marxism, is dialectical, reflexive, analyzes the contradictions of modernity and is interdisciplinary. Intercultural philosophy and critical social theory share a common interest in standing against grand metaphysical systems and centering on everyday centers of learning. Through such a critical exposition of the confines of intercultural philosophy and critical social theory, this paper argues that both approaches, (1) fail to go beyond the Eurocentric grand narrative of modernity that legitimizes Western ideology and is antithetical to the lived experiences of the other, (2) both approaches ultimately run into the problem of value incommensurability and (3) both approaches fail to introduce a quasi-transcendental foundation that both translate contending worldviews while simultaneously affirming the place of the other. Finally I will introduce an alternative model founded on the idea of multiple modernities which situates modernity as being situated in diverse cultural backgrounds. Keywords : Otherness, Interculturality, Critique, Emancipation