My personal opinions:

1. For what evidence is there empirically for "conceptual schema" to be a "thing" as applied to language use itself (not necessarily as a meta-theory of differences in scientific frameworks aka "incommensurability"). — schopenhauer1

I don't think these schemes are necessarily a "thing" in the language sense you talk about. All that there is, in a physical sense, is our use of language. Different people will use language differently in different contexts which you could categorize in different ways. What is the consequence though? We more or less live in the same experiential worlds and the richness and flexibility of how we both use and learn languages make the obstacles of different language schemes like this temporary or trivial. No one is obliged to choose between different ways of using language. People regularly assimilate.

2. What role does Philosophy of Language play in understanding language as opposed to linguistic anthropology, linguistic cognitive neuroscience, psycho-linguistics, and related empirical, or scientific-naturalistic adjacent fields?

For example, when we talk about "forms of life" and "language games", yes that is indeed a neologism created in the Philosophy of Language, but have "forms of life" and "language games" and related neologisms (like "conceptual schema") just become runaway theoretical constructs? — schopenhauer1

I think philosophy always has a role in clarifying concepts but I do suspect that at some points in time natural philosophy formed the main basis for understanding certain topics. Over time, as empirical knowledge improved, natural philosophy would be overtaken by scientific areas like physics etc. I think that something similar could be the case with language where in the early 20th century, there was a heavy emphasis on forming theories of language, meaning, epistemology. With Later Wittgenstein, we hit the limits of these approaches. I agree "forms of life" and "language games" are vague and not that informative as terms, but they are enlightening in terms of the limits of philosophy in this area. I think they should be taken as stop-gaps not ends in themselves. They were introduced in the context of the inability to logically prescribe meanings to language and reference. Nonetheless, language and knowledge carry on and are used regardless in complicated ways which we give those labels of "language games" and "forms of life".

Why? Clearly, its the brain. The brain is mechanistic so it doesn't have to be driven by logic and rationality, just physics. "Forms of life" and "language games" are then stop-gaps for scientific, empirical theories of how people actually use language and why they behave (ultimately caused by the brain). That's not to say that science replaces philosophy here, just that a limit has been reached when Wittgenstein came upon these concepts. Similarly, I believe Quine talks about language being about people's practices which we would investigate scientifically.

That doesn't mean that philosophy still won't be important in other ways for clarifying concepts concerning language, just not necessarily in terms of grand theories trying to describe how language actually works. Perhaps more in helping to clarify concepts that scientists and other professions come up with, and their consequences.

Yes, I would agree with that. But one needs to tease out what counts as access. — Ludwig V

This is a very good point and one I have thought about a fair amount recently. From my intuition this may be a substantial reason for gulfs between realists and anti-realists - realists are much more permissive when it comes to access than anti-realists.

I don't think there is necessarily a rigid, neat, well defined line on what counts as access. It may be fuzzy and people think different things depending on assumptions, inclinations, topic under question. A realist may think the different perspectives we have on the world are different ways of viewing the same thing, an anti-realist may say those same perspectives block knowledge of the thing in and of itself. A realist may say theories are approximately true, an anti-realist may say the notion of "approximately true" is arbitrary and just highlights that the theory does not explain all of the data.

My intuition is that this threatens to make the division between realist and anti-realist something that is in some sense subjective and I am not sure how substantive concepts like "real" or "not real" really are if such dividing lines cannot be established.

Yes. There's an ambiguity about language. Most people seem to equate "language" with "conceptual scheme" or "paradigm". But I can't see that natural languages can be equated to a single conceptual scheme or paradigm, so I prefer to regard them as distinct. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think when it comes to Kuhn at least, his mention of translation is not talking about languages generically but about words thats constitute specific scientific theories.

But the point applies to conceptual schemes or paradigms as well as languages. — Ludwig V

Which point are you referring to?

Yes, that's clearly true. He's a bit like Hume, who demolishes the claim that logic or reason establishes causal powers or causal laws, and then turns to psychology to fill the gap. I'm doubtful about this, because it seems to reduce the issues to causality or subjectivity. Which misrepresents what's going on, I think. — Ludwig V

Obviously, Kuhn has no idea what is going on inside the head but I don't think this Humean line of thought misrepresents, because what is going on when scientists form beliefs and create theories is going to be directly related to whatever is going on in a mechanistic brain (and therefore psychology). And whatever a brain does is going to be complicated and difficult to scrutinise. Certainly belief formation does not have to be constrained by strict notions of logic or entailment and I think people's thoughts are definitely not constrained this way in everyday life. Such logical entailments are impossible if data is inherently underdetermined by different possible explanations, people emphasize different arguments / evidence, and people have different starting assumptions on how they view the world. Logical entailment then becomes intractable.

It is very rare I think that people totally follow some prescribed, unwaivering set of extremely detailed logical steps when coming to beliefs. And I think people can often have intuitive impressions of what they think is correct without coming to it by some transparent logical process. For instance, I reckon most people that are unconvinced by the many world interpretation did not need some logical steps to come to their impression that it is intuitively, unrealistically strange. People don't need to follow some set of logical steps to come to the conclusion that there are true moral facts - often people just have a blunt intuition that some things are objectively wrong. I'm sure such kinds of intuitive thought apply to various kinds of theoretical thinking in science. The existence of these kinds of phenomena are not to say that what the brain is doing is random, however. If you think of artificial neuronal networks as having an inherent ability to optimize their learning due to their design then its pretty realistic to say that similar things apply to the brain. Just because people have intuitive impressions doesn't mean that they are totally random or not driven by some process which has efficacy in learning. But as with artifical networks, more complicated, open ended problems gives bigger scope for error, ambiguity and coming up with different solutions (or theories) that may not even be compatible.

One couldn't seriously argue that Newton's theory was not better (more comprehensive, more accurate, more coherent (?), simpler (?)) than Aristotle's. I hesitate about "more useful" because it isn't particularly obvious at the moment that Einstein is more useful that Newton. — Ludwig V

What Kuhn described in his "Structure of Revolutions" just tries to describe what scientists do I think, not justify them. From what he observes, it seems that different perspectives can arise in different people who then evaluate theories differently. What is the objective standard? This doesn't seem to fall out from anywhere. All there are are different people and their different perspectives which are not all the same, for various reasons.

I think you could very well say Newton's theory is better and most people would agree; but obviously this is still arguing from within your own perspective and assumptions. It may just happen to be that lots of people share many of those same assumptions, and probably for good reason; for instance, its difficult for people generally to motivate scientific theories without those theories explaining evidence. But then again, the more detailed you look at it, the more disagreement you might find e.g. about what simplicity is or what comprehensive means, what kinds of explanations are preferable, etc. It seems more trivial comparing Newton and Aristotle from today, but I am sure at the time it would have been not as clear cut when people did not know what a success Newtonian theory would become.

Well, yes. The new science (Newton, LaPlace) abandoned the Aristotelian idea of "matter" in favour of a different conception of what physical objects consist of. But it was pretty clear that both concepts were "about" at least some of the same thing(s). Is that what you had in mind? — Ludwig V

Sure, Newton and Aristotle both describe motion but Aristotle's worlds of four elements or whatever it was seems radically different to what we understand today. I don't think they can be construed as the same world. In terms of Kuhn's translatability one would not be able to give one-to-one correspondences between the elements in Aristotle and their supposed equivalents in modern science. Modern science paints a far richer picture of the world with relations which do not exist in the Aristotelian picture and making it impossible for those Aristotelian elements to be equivalent or matched to the modern ones in an interchangeable way - they play very different roles in the new scientific picture where they are not even fundamental anymore. There is no more one-to-one correspondence between the modern and Aristotelian notions of air, or the respective notions for fire. They exist in completely different networks of constructs. I assume you might be able to match parts of these notions but it will be a mismatch as a whole. I am sure Aristotelian fire occurs in the world in places where it doesn't occur in the Newtonian world while there are blatant phenomena in the Newtonian world which don't occur at all in the Aristotelian one even though they are related to Newtonian fire. The ontologies are fundamentally mismatched in an incompatible way, though I get that there generically may be no well-defined fine line between compatible and incompatible.

I think perhaps from Kuhn's perspective the real significance is simply that scientists have different incompatible claims about the world which are not easily settled by available evidence. From his point of view, the narrative that textbooks seemed to paint was a picture where instead, all that scientists did was just passively discover new things about the world that piled up. For him, these textbooks missed the combative clash of incompatible beliefs between different scientists.

Well I think its less about saying "we might as well kust give away the whole thing" and more that some people just genuinely don't believe in the "whole thing" in the firsr place.

It remains that we can and do commonly assign truth values to normative statements. We also use these truth values to perform deductions. The oddity here is the denial of all this because of philosophical ideology. — Banno

Well I would say that just because people seem to assign truth values doesn't mean that that is necessarily what they mean; I don't think there is even necessarily determinate what people mean when they use the word "true" in everyday scenarios. It may not even be determinate in philosophical conversations and people clearly have different explicit philosophical notions of what truth means.

I think maybe the central issue is that regardless of whether one has the prior belief that there is such a thing as moral facts or not, I don't see how the use of T-sentences can be a strong argument since people can just deny they use language in a certain way. Its difficult to see how what people say about their own language use can be rebutted just through this existence of this scheme. If people use language one way, and others use it another way, then how can language use in itself tell you anything about whether something is actually truth-apt in an objective sense? I think it's a framework for how people talk about truth but I fail to see how it can be an argument for truth.

I mean't stance-independent moral fact. If moral statements aren't about facts in the first place then they may not be amenable to the T-sentence thing. If they then think that "you ought to do this" it may not be obliged that they are saying that "you ought to do this is true". They may even find perhaps that "it is a stance independent fact that you ought to do this" is false of they want to.

I would say that if both theories are explaining the same data, reference has been maintained... Just enough to establish that they are both theories of the same things, or at least the same world. — Ludwig V

I just don't see why reference has to be maintained. Not saying that constructs from successive theories cannot be deemed the same or used in virtually the same way. I just don't see this as necessary.

To be honest, I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of referencing something in the world that one cannot access. To me, what seems to be a maintaining of reference is driven by the continuities in the empirical structure that successive theories predict or explain. I don't feel like there is an obligation to think of reference as always continued.

"Correspond" is a strong word. I would compare different languages (I'm not saying that "theory" and "language" mean the same thing). We can recognize that two languages are about the same world and even about the same things, so long as some (most?) references correspond; it helps if some (most?) concepts overlap, at least roughly. But we can recognize at the same time that that is not true of all references or all concepts.
It seems to me that incommensurability is really quite vague. — Ludwig V

Well, I think with different languages, people usually are not only literally in the same world, but living lives in similar ways with similar objects.

I think the closest thing to incommensurability when it comes to normal language would be describing things in peoples lives whether objects, customs or whatever that simply do not exist in another person's culture. But then again, languages are also flexible enough to describe the same object in many different ways by referring to different properties - and those novel customs and *objects of other cultures* can usually be described in corresponding words in that way. For instance, some tool that doesn't exist in your culture can be described in terms of materials and ways people behave using it that you are familiar with.

I don't know if scientific taxonomies are so much like this though. They don't have this kind flexibility and the worlds are not as rich as the ones we describe with language. If you come across a new concept like a wave function in quantum mechanics, you cannot simply re-describe that in terms from the taxonomy of Newtonian mechanics in the same way one might by re-describing a tool in terms of materials. Its a totally new object which means it is a world incompatible with the old Newtonian one with a different ontology and different possibilities, even if they also share many of the same things. I think, however, maybe there is no fixed, neat dividing line between what you would call two different worlds. But I also think in something like physics, they are usually talking on such a fundamental level of description that in well known examples like relativity, quantum mechanics, its not really ambiguous at all. If you think quantum mechanics is literally getting rid of classical particle trajectories then I think its very difficult to say that this is the same world as classical mechanics.

I think incommensurability, at least Kuhn's, is less vague than people think; it is just misunderstood. I *think* it is just about different scientific theories having different ontologies. Sometimes scientists talk past each other if they are not aware of their different assumptions but Kuhn isn't saying that different theories are inherently unintelligible from different perspectives.

My personal opinion is that Kuhn got misunderstood because in describing how scientists do things, he was essentially also trying to give descriptions of the psychological nature of how they come to their beliefs. Now, central to Kuhn's revolutions is that there is no logical entailment between evidence and the correct theories. There is then this kind of arbitrary nature in which scientists come to hold beliefs, going by intuition, going through "conversion" processes, having a stubbornness and talking past each other because they may work from different assumptions or reject each other's standards of evidence, etc. His account of theory change isn't about *logical entailment* like Popper, but psychological change in people's minds which is not constrained in a determinate, algorithmic way by evidence.

I think people have confused these very visceral descriptions of psychology with the idea that scientists live in different conceptual schemes which are inherently unintelligible. But I think Kuhn's idea is much closer to common scientific underdetermination than people think. He talks about translation I think initially in the sense of how scientists may initially misinterpret each other's theories purely out of naivety, and later he uses this as a kind of criteria for how different theories are incommensurable. But this notion of translatability Kuhn uses isn't about intelligibility, *intelligibility* incidentally very close to Davidson's notion which he comes to use in the "Very Idea Of" paper. Kuhn's translatability is instead just about if the structure of lexical networks match up and terms in one theory have a direct correspondence or interchangeability to constructs in the other so that they can be thought of the same thing. This has no bearing on whether someone can *or cannot* come to understand that theory.

But obviously all this is just my view of Kuhn, no one else.

Edit: clearing up for clarity, hopefully: marked by *...*

I confess, I think you've lost me here.

There are "non-stance-independent facts"? And these are not true? — Banno

Not necessarily. I am just implying that people may be able to use such sentences such as "you ought to do this" without necessarily meaning it in a way of expressing beliefs about stance independent *facts*.

Expressions such as *you ought to do this* may have other meanings or uses that do not have to be related to stance independent facts. I am skeptical that there are always determinate meanings behind the way that people use certain words in everyday life, let alone meanings that coincide with how philosophers might interpret those words in an academic setting. After all, people can use *words like truth* and concepts of right and wrong without any kind of formal training or education. I think people can plausibly use sentences like "you ought to do this" or even use the word "true" in ways that are not as strict as what is being talked about with more rigorous philosophical frameworks.

I therefore don't think that just because someone can say "you ought to do this" or "it's true that you ought to do this" has to imply the kind of T-sentence framework you are using *because people are not necessarily expressing a fact*.

Edit: some mistakes and added clarity **

But for some reason, folk refuse to apply this to statements counting "ought". Special pleading. — Banno

If saying that *a moral statement* is true means that they are saying *that such a statement* is a stance-independent fact then why should they *apply T-sentences* if they don't think *that the moral statement* is a stance-independent fact? Doesn't seem to follow. To apply the T-sentence is to assume the phrases make sense in the first place, which some might *not* believe *to be the case for moral statements*, if they have a reason to.

Those who deny this usually claim either that moral statements are not truth-apt; or that they are, but are all false. Which path will you choose? — Banno

I don't think I really have a strong opinion on that particularly right now.


Edit: Some housekeeping on comment just for better clarity (hopefully); additions marked within * ... *.

Seems arbitrary. I don't see what going out of your way to prevent something entails about dtance independent moral facts. At the same time, many bad things happen which you do not or would not necessarily go out of your way to prevent. I'm sure there are examples too of people imposing their preferences on others if they feel strongly about it.

How does your previous claim about preferences follow from this? — Leontiskos

Because you can talk about someones ethical beliefs as opinions or preferences like that.

I don't see an inherent difference between a preference such as " I don't think my favourite sports team should play in such a manner " and an ethical statement like " people should be nice ". Both are framed normatively in terms of what should be done but I don't necessarily think the idea that my favourite sports team should play in a particular way is an objective fact. In the same way, just because someone thinks torturing babies is wrong, doesn't mean they think it is an objective stance independent fact.

But moreover, if you think folk ought not keep slaves, how could you not be committed to concluding that "One ought not keep slaves" is true? — Banno

I mean, there are lots of moral anti-realists across the world who would disagree with this sentiment. This rhetoric is not really more than question begging moral facts.

Uhh yes, I think you are implying exactly this when you say...

No, I don't think that makes any sense. If it is not objectively wrong for others to torture babies then you should not get angry at them when they do. You get angry and intervene because you believe it is wrong for them to torture babies. Moral anti-realism is too often — Leontiskos

You are implying that someone saying that torturing babies is not a stance independent moral fact also believes that torturing babies is not wrong.

First, not only is it possible to for someone not only to learn both Newton and Einstein, but also to use one or the other as appropriate in context. — Ludwig V

Yes, definitely, I agree.

Second, it was essential for the acceptance of Einstein that it explained all the old data (already explained by Newton) as well as the new anomalous data. — Ludwig V

I am not entirely sure it is *essential*. Maybe acceptance may have been unlikely in the Einsteinian case - who's to say - but it doesn't strike me as impossible that there is a shift in preference to a new theory without it having explained everything the old one did. But obviously, this kind of thing really depends on the specific scenario.

. This suggests that while reference may break down in some areas, it must be maintained in others - at least if the new theory is to compete with the old one. — Ludwig V

I don't agree reference must be maintained. I think its plausible one could explain the same data with very different constructs.

Third, the practices must be recognizable as the same (similar) or different if incommensurability is to be identified at all and when practices are not purely verbal (even if theory-laden), the possibility of sharing references across the divide becomes essential. — Ludwig V

I go through this topic in some previous posts in the thread that Kuhn's incommensurability does not preclude mutual intelligibility either of theory or practise and I don't see how shared reference is required for that mutual intelligibility in any way, in terms of scientific theories themselves. Incommensurability is not inherently about some inherent sense of intelligibility or communicability, its about whether the concepts in different theories correspond to each other.

No, I don't think that makes any sense. If it is not objectively wrong for others to torture babies then you should not get angry at them when they do. You get angry and intervene because you believe it is wrong for them to torture babies. Moral anti-realism is too often — Leontiskos

The fact you have an opinion or preference does not mean you are expressing a belief about something being objectively correct. Saying ice cream is delicious doesn't mean that it is objectively correct. Saying you want your local sports team to play a certain way doesn'y mean it is objectively correct. Wishing people were more interested in art doesn't mean it is objectively correct to like art.

When I first heard someone say they were a moral anti-realist I also had the reaction of sonething like: "what... how can you not think certain things are wrong" but its not that they dont believe things are wrong. Every antirealist has ethical opinions. They just don't think their opinions have an objective basis.

So it makes good sense for physics to decree optical redness and maryredness to be incommensurable by fiat. — sime

But what if the object of translation was not optical redness but brain states?

It seems then that the context problem doesn't apply because Mary's perceptions are always present alongside her brainstates and correlate so much that many suspdct that they are identical.

Well I would say I am more of an anti-realist generally so I think the shapeshifter thing might be apt.

I think you "information is what its like to be information" is probably taking what I am saying a little too literally. i mean, i think given the original statement was:

"subjective experience is what its like to be information"

then surely, the substitution should be

"what its like to be information is what its like to be information"

The world is full of structure, clearly what I experience is what it is like to be that structure if I am indeed part of the world. Specifically, information transmission. My experiences are also trivially information.

Interesting article, will have to take a look.

Theres one article I havent actually given more than a glance but the idea has stuck in my mind:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9689906/

its not actually *that* novel of an idea and I think they even themselves note the similarity to IIT at least superficially. But the notion of non-separability seems quite thought provoking for me in the context of the hard problem.

Is there any kind of fact that doesn't suffer the kinds of ambiguities that moral facts do? The notion of a 'fact' is a cognitive tool. Language is idealization. We can plausibly partition the world in any number of ways so that objective facts are underdetermined and how we do it is conntected to prior assumptions too. Even our notions of truth is underdetermined by various competing stances. Even the notion that one 'ought' to belueve in some objective fact is undermined by epistemic indeterminacy because if the evidence we use to asses facts is consistent with many different kinds of facts then how do we choose between them and what standard or cutting off point decides when we should turn that evidence into belief in a fact (e.g. how many white swans before we conclude all swans are white - there is determined point to make the decision) ? Such things are underdetermined. Even when realists try to amend things with notions of "approximately true" ... well that is arbitrary too and has to make use of constructed heuristics to decide. Its almost always possible to construe similar things as different or different things as similar depending on how much you want to ignore the noise, ignore the errors.

You can say it is difficult to imagine what makes a moral fact true but arguably similar might be said for modal facts about possibility and necessity which do not seem to be about actual events in a way that is not totally disimilar to moral facts.

Can we make sense of regular facts when ultimately these might be made meaningful by perceptions? Phenomenal experiences are completely ineffable, immediate, incommunicable. Neither is there any clear, determinate, linear relationship between experiences and facts about the world. Their status isn't any better than the difficulty in characterizing 'should-ness'. Ultimately, because these things don't have clear, articulable foundations it makes it difficult for these things to be much more than about agreement. Moral realists happen to agree with each othet about this intuitive notion of shouldness which is either objective or we have some perception of which is about something objective. Is this much different from perception where we just have this immediate uncharacterizable information put before us and everyone just happens to agree about it? When we establish a fact that some people like schizophrenics are wrong about their perceptions, we can only do this because there is some agreement amongst many other people that those schizophrenics are wrong. But then what happens when the whole tribe is deluded? Everyone then suggests that magic, god, reptilian aliens are facts and the perceptual events underlying them are valid. All is this to say that facts about the world which we look at through perception ultimately come to the same difficulties of substantiation as moral facts do.

So what does this all come down to? Just scrap it all. If you want to scrap moral realism, scrap all realism. Objective "Truth" and "facts" in its entirety is a biological artifact that is constructed and enacted. These are essentially a product of a biological organism's metacognitive or perhaps metaperceptual abilities in the sense of being able to track its own predictions generated from its own biological architecture / functioning. The workings of these predictions are irreducibly complex as would be expected of a brain with trillions of degrees if freedom. That is not to say that there isn't a world that exists and has some structure, but its absolutely impossible to talk about this in a way that is objective. I have appealed to biology here but I am not pretending that what I say also isn't just articulating models which are idealized, depend on prior assumptions, depend on a mind, a brain. Nothing is to say that I cannot organize the world and predict things about it, just that it is not objective.

Obviously, this clearly isn't an argument for moral realism but it is an argument against the case that moral realism is inherently different to any other kind of realism. If you drop moral realism you should drop all of it. And most people are unwilling to do that it seems.

Throw out your prohibitions against kicking puppies, executing the innocent, treating people unjustly, etc. I think the reason it is so hard to take this step is because, among other things, it is highly irrational. — Leontiskos

In all fairness, I don't think the question of deciding 'what one should do' is necessarily the same as the question of whether 'what one should do' is a stance independent fact. Throwing out moral realism doesn't require throwing out prohibitions.

I’m inclined to say that for Kuhn it’s not a question of a theoretical scheme, or an aspect of it, being beyond the limits of direct observation, but of direct observation being in itself an element of discursive practice. What we observe cannot be divorced from methods of measure and apparatus of observation — Joshs

I would say you could argue that they are somewhat equivalent, the ambiguity of the latter implying the former.

While it is certainly true that for Kuhn scientific practices and theories organize their subject matter, the content they organize does not consist of such stuff supposedly external to discourse. — Joshs

“The "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant “objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. The practice itself, however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted

Can you elaborate on what this means?

Yea, I think I agree with this; I just use terms like 'qualia' and 'phenomrna' etc interchamgeably.



ah alright, fair enough

No, the theories are incommensurate because they don't have matching directly translatable terms but because they are incommensurate doesn't prevent someone from one background learning the other in a way that is intelligible, or perhaps reconstructing an interpretation of it that they find intelligible.

Can a scientific theory talk about the notion of truth though in the way Davidson does? Can science tell you about translatability in the sense a philosopher like Davidson is interested in? I think this kind of theorizing still has role alongside the more scientific stuff, looking at stuff the science doesn't directly look at, even if its more about analyzing our prior intuitions.


Not sure I interpret you correctly, but I think what you say may be correct in the case of Kuhn's incommensurability /"conceptual schemes". Scientists construct models of how the world may be beyond the limitations of direct observation. Its not just about fitting labels to observations; scientific models operate in the opposite way too in the sense that they stipulate what can and might happen in certain situations. We try to make sense of observations by constructing models of worlds which is not directly observable. Different scientists may happen to be drawn to different models that say completely different things about the world.

It seems to be something like that words can be translated between incommensurate paradigms, but that interpretations cannot be...? — Banno

Precisely the opposite, aha!

(Quoting myself quoting IEP)

"Incommensurability, then, does not mean that a theoretical term cannot be interpreted, that is, cannot be made intelligible; rather, it means that the term cannot be translated, that is, there is no equivalent for the term in the competing theoretical language." — Apustimelogist

Theories can be interpreted and made intelligible, just there cannot be translation between the terms of incommemsurable theories.

I am not really sure I understand this bit at all but my intuition is probably yes it would make more complicated but I don't know how much difference it would make to Kuhn's perspective. I'm finding it hard to imagine exactly what Davidson means here though.

Maybe have a read of the section in that article on Incommensurability. It's far from unproblematic. There is something very odd about being forced into saying that we cannot claim Einstein is no better than Aristotle. — Banno

I am not really convinced by the referentialism talk there. I find it hard to believe that what we refer to wouldn't have a meaning that is itself theory laden to a some degree; otherwise, it seems difficult for me to see how you can always carry on maintaining these kinds of reference through very different theories or meanings without possibly trivialising what is being referred to and making reference very cheap. After all, plausibly very different things could produce the same empirical structure. You can't be totally sure what will be retained and what will change in the future so nothing is assured.

That said, I don't think that concepts cannot be retained in theory change, I am just not a big fan of that kind of referential talk and don't find causal theories of reference convincing or complete, nor especially any particular kind of theory of reference.

For some Kuhnian scenarios like mass, I think the retention is possibly indeterminate or underdetermined which makes it plausible or very reasonable to retain the same concept for mass; maybe you can also argue the other way but it doesn't seem to reflect how scientists have continued to talk about mass.

At the end of the day though, no matter how you want to gerrymander concepts or what is being referred to, Newtonian and Special Relativity are very different and imply fundamentally different ways that the world behaves. I think things like time dilation, energy-mass equivalence and relativity of simultaneity are radical enough to come under the notion of different worlds when compared to Newtonian. Even if something like mass can be said to have been retained, something else in the theory must radically change or be different to produce these effects. In other words, if the incommensurability is not in the mass, it has to be from somewhere else otherwise it would just be Newtonian mechanics again. While something can be said to be the same, something has changed fundamentally so I don't think it stops incommensurability without coming to the conclusion that SR and NM are identical.

Totally? Do you really want to use that word, particularly after saying "It does seem that [Aristotle] can be reconstructed as a mathematical approximation of Newtonian mechanics for particular domains"? — Banno

Well, I wasn't using it in the sense you think I meant - as in wholes in contrast to parts. I was instead using it as a way of emphasis about how different Aristotle's world view really is.

"Kuhn doesn't think that incommensurable paradigms are necessarily not mutually intelligible..."

"The heart of the incommensurability thesis after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the idea that certain kinds of translation are impossible." — Banno

I didn't mean to say that Kuhn's ideas were not about translation, but that people have exaggerated what he means by translation into something about unintelligibility rather than simple one-to-one correspondences of words.

Kuhn definitely did think that incommensurable paradigms don't necessitate unintelligibility. If that article looks like it suggests that, it is because it is being vague. I suggest that that quote about "certain kinds of translation are impossible" is talking about translation in the weaker sense I mentioned before: one-to-one correspondenxes between words. This doesn't preclude intelligibility, and I think the rest of that section that the quote is from seems to talk about translation in the one-to-one correspondence sense I mean. They seem to suggest that when they go into more detail about the loss of translation being due to re-alignments of lexical networks and things like that.

A different online encyclopedia is more explicit about Kuhn's later incommensurability views:

https://iep.utm.edu/kuhn-ts/#H4

For instance:

"Translation for Kuhn is the process by which words or phrases of one language substitute for another. Interpretation, however, involves attempts to make sense of a statement or to make it intelligible. Incommensurability, then, does not mean that a theoretical term cannot be interpreted, that is, cannot be made intelligible; rather, it means that the term cannot be translated, that is, there is no equivalent for the term in the competing theoretical language."

"Kuhn noted that although lexicons can change dramatically, this does not deter members from reconstructing their past in the current lexicon’s vocabulary."

"Although there may be no common language to compare terms that change their meaning during a scientific revolution, there is a partially common language composed of the invariant terms that do permit some semblance of comparison."

So from these quotes, we might say that Kuhn is employing a stricter definition of translation in terms of word-for-word substitution. In the absence of such, this doesn't mean that intelligibility can't be had, either by learning the new "language" or perhaps even reconstructing it in terms of your own (though if you don't learn the new concepts maybe this isn't so true to what the new theory means). Kuhn suggests different taxonomies may have terms in common which could aide interpretation (and comparison). On top of this, incommensurability is in terms of taxonomies of scientific theories which completely ignores the rest of human language. There is therefore nothing stopping someone from the outside trying to construct an intelligible interpretation using language outside of the scientific taxonomies being talked about; I'm sure this occurs a lot in popular science.

So Kuhn, needs a one-to-one correspondence and so is much stricter. On the other hand, Davidson seems more interested in intelligible interpretation than trying to find words which have one-to-one correspondences: from Davidson's essay -

"We can produce a theory that reconciles charity and the formal conditions for a theory, we have done all that could be done to ensure communication. Nothing more is possible, and nothing more is needed."

"It would be wrong to summarize by saying we have shown how communication is possible between people who have different schemes."

"how then are we to interpret speech or intelligibly, to attribute beliefs and other attitudes?"

He also claims:

"yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability."

Which seems only to be true when it comes to interpretation but not necessarily one-to-one correspondences.

Both the Stanford and he IEP articles on Davidson's philosophy also suggest that his interpretation / intelligibility view is a general feature of his philosophy.

https://iep.utm.edu/donald-davidson-language/#SH2b

"Thus, unlike a Quinean radical translator, who does mention sentences of his home language [i.e. 'she tentatively translates “Gavagai!” with her own sentence, “Lo, a rabbit!”'], a Davidsonian radical interpreter adopts a semantical stance: she relates speakers’ sentences to the world by assigning them objective truth conditions describing extra-linguistic situations and objects. It is in this sense that a Davidsonian linguist is an interpreter, and Davidson calls the project undertaken by his linguist the construction of a theory of interpretation."

To me this description seems more similar to someone learning the new language rather than just translating it into their own. Lack of translatability/interpretability for Davidson (where the interpreter cannot find the truth conditions for sentences) here implies one cannot relate the words to the extra-linguistic context, perhaps leading to Davidson's contention that an untranslatable language just doesn't make sense.

This part is relevant because in the partial translation part of his essay, Davidson is clearly viewing the situation partly in terms of radical interpretation as described in the quote.

Well I think I agree with you generally. From my perspective, what people like Wittgenstein and Quine seemed to do is take away the foundation out from underneath meaning and justification in both language and knowledge. Under these perspectives, everything becomes about practise but there becomes no fact of the matter about the reasons for people's behavior. The way forward from there then seems to be learning empirically, scientifically exactly why and how people behave, use language, learn, perceive, how brains work, etc. I've actually always thought these philosophers (Kuhn too) feel like they resonate amicably with the brain and mind sciences.

As an aside, I think Kuhn was actually doing that kind of flavor of research I mentioned just noe but for the science - rather than looking for prescriptions about what scientists should do or are justified in doing (like Popper tried to do), he tries to look at how they actually do it, regardless of whether they are doing it in a way that seems correct or not.

I'm sorry, something must be lost in translation between us - both ways presumably - because I still don't understand exactly what you are contesting in this paragraph. What I have written there is more or less about what I believe Kuhn thinks his own theory of science implies, in contrast to Davidson.

If you're saying Kuhn is non-empirical, I guess I would reply that he was more or less writing as a historian drawing on actual events and case studies in the history of science. I don't really know what other kind of language research would have a bearing on this.

Just went through this, very interesting and nice apologetics for aristotle, if you will. It does seems that it can be reconstructed as a mathematical approximation of Newtonian mechanics for particular domains. However, its actually still quite trivial to see the incommensurability of Aristotle's word view in the ontological baggage that contextualizes his physics of motion and is a consequence of his limited observations of the world. Its very clear that Aristotle's world view is totally incompatible with the world views of later physicists. You can even say the same about Newton's in contrast to a post-Einsteinian relativity where things like relativity of simultaneity and time dilation paint a picture of the universe which is just utterly metaphysically different to a Newtonian one where these things just cannot happen.

I also still think that the whole translation thing is completely exaggerated. Kuhn doesn't think that incommensurable paradigms are necessarily not mutually intelligible and he has explicitly mentioned the role of historians of science like himself in doing a form of translation of theories like Aristotle's. Seems unlikely to me that Kuhn's views of incommensurability imply the kind of incomparability that Davidson mentions.

I will be thinking about this but first impression is I like this a lot. A kind of Carollian regress. My intuition is that it makes sense and probably does echo sentiments of some anti-realists who might ask why they should care about the moral facts.... or rather, express their skepticism that there is anything at all to compel them to abide by the moral facts.

Well, yes but I don't know what you are addressing in my post.

None of this matters unless there is an empirical element. Studying child development, neurology, physiology, cognitive psychology, evolution, genetics, biochemistry, anthropology, and the rest. — schopenhauer1

What do you mean?

Yet the latter is literally unrealistic — Gnomon

What makes you say this, out of interest?

I will assume that your philosophical "reality beyond" is something like Plato's Ideality, or Kant's mysterious realm of the ding-an-sich — Gnomon

I am not too familiar with those, but the parts of reality we cannot directly access independently of our perception.

Mind is merely its operational Function, which is only a name for an abstract input-output process of Living & Thinking. — Gnomon

Does that include qualia?

I don't think its a contradiction to say that there is an objective world and I just don't have access to it.

The more I think about this the more complicated it seems to get in ways that ultimately might only be resolvable through neuroscience, cognitive perceptual science. But, and perhaps too simply put, I think there is something like pre-lingual, pre-theoretic experience which can be contrasted to knowledge which is enacted within that experience, including things like categorization, association, etc. I agree with Wang that conceptual schemes are fuzzy, non-fixed, and have various levels of abstraction at which we engage and between which, different concepts relate. The idea that commonalities and differences makes complete sense to me, like in the sense that different cultures may have different language concepts but presumably have very similar color perception capabilities. Even when we look at something like the duck / rabbit illusion, ultimately the differences we interpret coexist with the fact we are looking at the same picture and nothing has changed about those perceptual aspects of it. After all, the job of the cortex is to capture information at sensory receptors (e.g. in the retina ) which we all share in common to a significant extent, and process signals that have a basis in object outside of us in the world which are common to us. Equally, I agree with idea that people can have something like different conceptual schemes but with substantial commonalities, like Wang seems to say.

Ultimately though, with regard to my interpretation of Kuhn, I believe that Davidson is attacking a strawman. The whole crux of Davidson's argument is that conceptual schemes are inherently untranslatable but referring to the same world of experiences. He seems to think that untranslatable implies incomparability and non-intelligibility but I think Kuhn means more like establishing a one-to-one correspondence between concepts, something which I think you can find in many languages - words that aren't necessarily beyond understanding to us but just don't quite match any kind of word we have or use, which can sometimes make them seem weird or even artificial. Because we are so unfamiliar, we may not even be good at using them in a way that comes across as natural when we try to speak that language.

Kuhn has a descriptive approach to science so I think he just says that often people do come across difficulties in understanding concepts in different paradigms, which then might make evaluating theories difficult; but that doesn't mean they can't be translated or understood in some way, after all, in the history of science we are talking about many scientists who probably do have lots of concepts in common and speak the same language. How could Kuhn have come to understand Aristotelian motion if he thought it was genuinely incomparable and untranslatable? You can probably look Aristotelian motion up on Wikipedia.

Another thing is that I think incommensurability is essentially just a generalization on scientific underdetermination which is roughly what is meant by his use of the phrase different worlds. This is more than translating words or rearranging meanings that refer to the same world but changing your theory about how you think the world actually is. Knowing how the world really is may be chronically underdetermined empirically, but I think it is also the case they will have completely different descriptions and counterfactuals about how the world would be if we had a perfect ability to observe it. Contrasts between something like Copernican and Ptolomaic views of astronomy is not about just changing meanings of the words but statements about how the world is which are completely different. The stars and planets exist on completely different trajectories in the two pictures which give different, contradictory facts about the world and how it would be if we were to observe it a certain way. It is just that from limited purviews, there may be practical difficulty in demonstrating those distinctions in empirical observation, or ruling out that the empirical demonstration might have been mistaken / faulty / misinterpreted, or that some other theory can account for that particular observation in the same way.

I think basically then that Davidson's notion of conceptual scheme here is fundamentally not what Kuhn was talking about, not and so a strawman is being attacked.

True statements are a mental evaluation, but what they represent isn't. A mindless world may have truths, but we cannot speak of them, which is no different from not having any truths. — Sirius

I don't see why stopping here wouldn't be the reasonable solution.

As far I can see you are just begging the question that there is no such thing as a mind-independent reality. I'm sure lots of people would say that: just because truths can only be evaluated by a mind, doesn't mean there isn't some kind of objective reality beyond it.

So, it depends on who's asking. Is the Brain or the Soul the experiencer of incoming Information? — Gnomon

Well, the way I view it, all concepts are ultimately constructs. Information to me is a very general and flexible one that can be applied to almost anything. For instance, in that 'Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness' article by Chalmers, that was posted a little earlier in the thread, he has the double aspect idea of both physical information space and phenomenal information space.

Now for me, double-aspect is a only in our models and not existing in reality beyond us. Also, when I try to break down what the notions of physical and phenomenal mean, they lead to dead ends. The phenomenal is fundamentally ineffable, indescribable and the physical is equally poorly defined, as many anti-physicalists attest to. Only concepts I have left to give tangibility are vague notions like 'structure' and 'information'. And as someone who is not necessarily a scientific realist, the fact that these notions are quite thin is not so bothersome since I believe we fundamentally cannot have access to lots of aspects of reality.

So, to answer 'Is the Brain or the Soul the experiencer of incoming Information?': for me, such a distinction is an artifact of our models of the world and limitations in knowing what the world is like. For me, the double-aspect (brain and soul) is in some sense illusory. Brains are in some sense constructed models enacted within our subjective states to explain empirical findings. We see them as representing something out there we cannot directly access as a third-person observer. Our own minds actually reflect part of that inaccessible stuff, but not all of it, and our own minds don't even have access fundamentally to everything about reality, what reality is like or about as a whole.

I don't think I am trying to make an especially deep metaphysical characterization of information, and it's certainly vague. It's closest to what you said before - differences that make a difference - or maybe just distinctions. Very vague, yes, but I think its just more being used as a kind of generic classificatory tool.

I think - in absence of any further possible way of explaining what phenomena exactly is or why - I am just saying that it is plausible to construe experiences as information. All I really know about my own experiences is that I am making or perceiving distinctions which are immediate to me.. which seems close to describing it in terms of information. Information seems to be one of the only property I can really ascribe to my experiences in a way that is articulable.

At the same time, the fact there seems to be a mapping or isomorphism to brain behavior suggests that if we can describe those brain interactions in terms of information or distinctions that brains can make about inputs, then phenomena seem to be what it is like to be those distinctions internally as it were. I do think though that the brains as we talk about them are still scientific constructs in our minds so I am not necessarily saying that there is an actual duality here between brains and phenomena. The duality is only in our models. This (lack of duality) can be naturally interpreted as panpsychism if one wants but personally this doesn't help me understand the world any further.

One thing I am dropping from my view is that reality - in whatever way you want to metaphysically theorize about it - is not like a set of objects that just permanently exist at one scale and can be arranged in different ways like marbles in a box.

Theoretical physics, from what I have read, seems to characterize particles and forces at the most fundamental level in terms of symmetries and invariances that possibly emerge and dissolve depending on the situation (maybe a good example in physics is that it is thought that during the development of the universe you had symmetry breaking where new forces, particles and even mass emerged where they did not exist before).

So maybe symmetries / invariances are fundamental.

However, symmetries are actually very generic concepts which can be applied to anything at all.
Symmetries can therefore be applied to any scale from small things in physics to brains and beyond; they would essentially emerge out of each other.

Interesting example here of someone applying it to perception:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2021.681162/full

(Some examples of use in biology: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/symmetry/special_issues/Making_Breaking_Symmetries_Mind_Life)

Another interesting example suggesting invariances as a way of unifying many different types of theories. (Note, he has chosen to express this in terms of the price equation from evolution, but the choice is more or less preference afaik)

https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/20/12/978

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2019.0351

And what is said in these articles applies to information in terms of relative entropy and fisher information, interestingly. A quote from second article:

"All of the ‘information’ results in the prior section arose directly from the canonical Price equation’s description of conserved total probability. No notion or interpretation of ‘information’ is necessary. In many disciplines, information expressions arise in the analysis of the specific disciplinary problems. This sometimes leads to the idea that information must be a primary general concept that gives form to and explains the particular results. Here, the Price equation explains why those information expressions arise so often. Those expressions are simply the fundamental descriptions of force and change within the context of a conserved total quantity. In this case, the conserved total quantity is total probability."

So maybe what I am getting at here is that, if theoretical physics symmetries are fundamental, maybe all types of symmetries that exist within the universe are fundamental entities of the universe, at whatever scale. Those kinds of symmetries or invariances might also be a good way of characterizing what we mean when we say brains can distinguish things (or have information), because these distinctions are clearly on scales above elementary particles and instead at the level of organization of these systems as wholes in terms of neuronal activity. Brain perception therefore involves higher order symmetries (perhaps like in the article on perception above) which are themselves superimposed on lower symmetries such as those at the microscopic physics scale. But clearly, the emergence of these symmetries on top of each other is something that can naturally pulled out of the mathematical descriptions of these things (in principle) and isn't somehow unexpected or strange.

Our perceptions, our phenomena are then just what its like to be these various higher order symmetries which are coalescing together I guess.

Now, I am not trying to solve the hard problem. I think experiences are irreducible. I don't think we can know anything about the world beyond our experiences (even if we were to say that everything in the universe is experiential - that doesn't give me any extra useful knowledge). When I am talking about symmetries, invariances, information, these are just tools for organizing my knowledge and conceptual schemes, knowledge which is enacted within my own experiences. So I am not trying to say that experiences are the math that is being used to describe symmetries and invariances or anything like that. Those are observer-dependent constructs we use to predict things. I don't think I can in principle even imagine whats going on in the actual outside world, but talk of symmetries and fundamental entities is just helping me create a coherent model of reality. Experience is irreducible and metaphysical ontology is deeply inaccessible imo.

But by saying experiences are what it's like internally to be some kind of symmetries, invariances, structure, information, distinction... whatever... I am just giving it a coherent connection to the rest of our physical models. I think this particular way makes the combination problem easier by making it easier for macro-experiences to just emerge. But again, I am not trying to give an explanation for particular phenomenal experiences. But if they are the internal what it's like of symmetries or information in reality as I just described, then I kind of lean toward the view that there is just a brute fact that experiences have this kind of vivid discernibility to them as a reflection of the distinguishable degrees of freedom of systems as a whole - I would actually just call that vivid discernibility information - even if some immediate, subjective kind.

Now part of the whole rollercoaster of all this is I am trying to give an account of the objective world which I believe is absolutely fundamentally inaccessible, but also explicitly acknowledging that I am using descriptions that are fundamentally observer dependent.

So I think paradoxes and natural limits to what I am trying to describe are a given.
I cannot explain experiences but I think I can still coherently map it to information. Experiences are all I have access to but also, scientific models in physics, biology, computer science, etc. give me by far the best way of giving a good explanation of my reality in so far that I am capable of doing so under my own limits as an organism.

Again, what I have said is completely compatible with panpsychism imo or even idealism in the sense of saying everything is just experiences but seems there are still many open questions if you do that under this perspective.

Note: My perspective on symmetries as fundamental is not dissimilar from structural realists like James Ladyman (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/) but I am not explicitly realist. Without realism, I think the need to explain phenomena with mathematical models becomes less acute; but at the same time, by not having a preferred scale for symmetries or invariances, then there is less combination problem issues. Symmetries and invariance may not be the only structural concepts but probably there is importance there. Structuralism seems to be just the latest generation of naturalist ideas and I'd say its probably not unfair to say it arose from the need to have looser conceptualizations of the natural world than physics, just as physicalism arose from the need for a looser conceptualization of the world than materials (thus superseding materialism). I'd say structural things in is about as poorly defined as physicalist ontology is. The vagueness of structure also makes me think that that notion has significant overlap with my notion of information which is just about distinctions. I also think the idea of invariances maybe overlaps with that too since invariance seems to entail the notion of regularity, patterns and perhaps how they are separable from other things and noise.

Yes, those 3 numbered sections outlining the theory pretty much outline the kind of central relationships I have about information, the brain and experience. The definition of information in 3. is also more or less the same kind of notion.

This part:

"An obvious question is whether all information has a phenomenal aspect. One possibility is that we need a further constraint on the fundamental theory, indicating just what sort of information has a phenomenal aspect. The other possibility is that there is no such constraint. If not, then
experience is much more widespread than we might have believed, as information is
everywhere."

was also a fundamental concern of mine where basically I was leaning toward the latter part on the basis of lack of reason to rule out other functional systems having experiences of some kind.

The biggest qualifier I would say is that the double-aspect part (whereby there is two different information ontologies - physical and phenomenal) is only a characteristic of our models and concepts (concepts and models which are embedded in, enacted in, function within our phenomena), and cannot be characteristic of reality itself inherently.

Ultimately though, I still have a skepticism that we can have some complete, exhaustive description or understanding of what reality is like... or that reality can describe itself effectively. There is inherent limitation in doing this and fundamentally you cannot explain experiential phenomena.

Sorry, but that is what reductionism is. — Wayfarer

You misread me there because that statement about boiling down was referring to what brains do.

But anyway, I don't think it is reductionism or eliminativist because I am not trying to explain experiences or suggest any kind of breaking down or explaining away of experiences into components of something else like that. In principle I don't think that kind of thing is possible.

But, saying that "Information is what it's like to be information" comes dangerously close to a tautology. — Gnomon

Well my notion of information here is even more basic than what you are talking about. Its just about distinctions. Experience and information are both primitive concepts in the sense that they cannot be further defined. So this tautology doesn't really add any danger that wasn't already there.