I think so. Here is part 2. Hey they have another one where they have Tomasello himself!

Part 2: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2023/08/28/ep323-2-tomasello-chomsky-language/

Tomasello 1 and 2: seems to be about agency more generally…

https://youtu.be/R5VB72dVH7A?si=9oDsojDwJ8U35pUH

https://youtu.be/WL9UU0bqFzE?si=MwvEV9MuRnQW-E-w

Alright. Thanks

It is a long time since I read Davidson's article and I haven't read Wang's - yet. Putting that right will take a while, but, on the basis that I have dealt with this issue before and read various things, including Kuhn, I hope these interventions are not merely annoying.

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. — Apustimelogist

Perhaps we should consider the possibility that incommensurability is not as drastic as it seems. There are a number of ways in which we can see a bridge of some kind. 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. 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. 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. 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.

I think a strong case can be made for human linguistic ability being evolutionarily adaptive, on the basis that it does provide humans the ability to communicate truths to each other. — wonderer1

Adaptive, yes. But also so much more. Theoretical practices are important, but only to creatures that have values, wants and needs, doubts, questions, mistakes - and these need to be expressed, communicated and even discussed as well.
It is hard to know how to proceed further. The big problem is how far the practice of the relevant science should be taken on board here.

But then I have to admit that there is a solid difference between meaningful disagreement, which does seem to need agreement to at least continue, and silence or absurdity. So Davidson still has a point to me, and I feel, in reading all this, that I'm even more uncertain than when I started in spite of spilling so many words. — Moliere

Yes. The agreements required in order to disagree and, equally important, to reach agreement. seem particularly important to me. But I don't see that necessarily rules out incommensurability that prevents reaching agreement, there must be sufficient commensurability to recognize difference.

Observation, and empirical science generally, is insufficient when conceptual clarification is needed. — Banno

... and if only people would let philosophers get on with what they do best!

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.

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

I would say that if both theories are explaining the same data, reference has been maintained. And I never meant to say that all references must be maintained. Just enough to establish that they are both theories of the same things, or at least the same world.

I am not entirely sure it is *essential*. — Apustimelogist

I was trying to be brief, but in this case I was too brief. As I understand it, the point is that Einstein is more accurate that Newton, and the difference between them at "normal" - sub-light - speeds is negligible for many purposes.

Incommensurability is not inherently about some inherent sense of intelligibility or communicability, its about whether the concepts in different theories correspond to each other. — Apustimelogist

"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.

It seems to me that incommensurability is really quite vague. — Ludwig V

.

Perhaps that's why Davidson was so keen to equate it with nontranslatability; at least this is something you can demonstrate. But he also maintained that there is difference between concept and language, so the question doesn't quite resolve. A very non-Davidsonian way of putting the question might be, "Is it the 'concept' part or the 'scheme' part of a 'conceptual scheme' that's allegedly incommensurable?"

"Is it the 'concept' part or the 'scheme' part of a 'conceptual scheme' that's allegedly incommensurable?" — J

Now, there's a problem.

I have a dim memory that Aristotle characterizes the square root of two as "incommensurable". That would be a different sense again.

Perhaps we need someone to dissect out various uses and various problems.

Observation, and empirical science generally, is insufficient when conceptual clarification is needed.
— Banno
... and if only people would let philosophers get on with what they do best! — Ludwig V

So what, we are going to praise science and not look at the evidence in one fell swoop? Screw German Idealism but praise low key armchair language theories? If we are going off peoples armchair notions, give me some interesting shit at least.

What is the legitimacy of “conceptual schema” in the scientific literature or is it a neologism of an idea based on a thought of a persons notion of an idea…

It was a joke!

More seriously, the question where philosophy ends and science begins is not clear and is contested.

What is clear is that when conceptual clarification is needed, observation, and empirical science generally, is insufficient.

I share your irritation with low-key armchair theories, but am also irritated by over-confident (and over-excited) generalization from scraps of evidence.

What is the legitimacy of “conceptual schema” in the scientific literature — schopenhauer1

I agree that's one of the issues in the background of this thread.

What, then, do we want to say is the relationship between astrology and astronomy? “Asymmetrical” doesn’t seem to cover it. Any ideas? — J

Some thinking out loud:

Incommensurable is the word I'm tempted by :D

But then it seems to be too convenient, in a way. It depends upon just how radical is radical incommensurability, I think -- taking Kuhn's book sometimes it seems a matter of harsh disagreement, and sometimes it seems they inhabit different experiential worlds which in turn give the theories meaning which in turn explains their radical incommensurability.

Feyerabend made the claim that astrology could be a kind of research program, and it's for this reason that I often think through it as an example. It seems to me that one could, if they wanted, perform a scientific examination of astrology, but that this is not how we relate to astrology at present, be we believers or skeptics in its truth. They are at cross-purposes, and so rather than being incommensurable due to experiential difference they are simply trying to do different things entirely while having a superficial resemblance to one another. Astronomy, as practiced by science, is trying to do science with respect to the stars and planets and such, while astrology is trying to soothe people's fears about the future or their place within the world or what it is they ought to do with their life today: one is descriptive of the universe, and the other is therapeutic. And what Feyerabend would point out is that when astronomer's attempt to debunk astrology they end up looking like one another rather than looking like a proper scientific enterprise; appeals to authority and a general belief in progress from the primitive to the modern frequently substitute for a proper scientific or philosophical analysis of the concepts, where you can find some cases of the stars influencing life -- Feyerabend points to plants responding to solar flares, and oysters responding to the waves which in turn is the result of the moon. It's not what the astrologists say, but that's no excuse for the philosophical examination of astrology.

So minimally I think I'd say they are at cross-purposes, and so this gives a kind of incommensurability that's not conceptual, exactly -- if someone is trying to dance on a floor and another person is trying to tile that floor at the same time then they are incommensurable in the sense that they are working at cross-purposes within the same space.

If we have people working at cross-purposes does that then give us a reason to believe they are conceptually incommensurable? In a way it makes sense of Davidsonian charity as a requisite for intertranslatability --if we want different things then we have less of a reason to extend charity and then speech becomes interpreted in a manner which it's not being employed for, and if we aren't even aware that we're speaking at cross-purposes then we are in a kind of defunct communicative relationship. That at least gives some grounds for judging whether or not our respective "camps" are incommensurable. But it's not exactly conceptual anymore -- it's practical, in the sense of praxis, which seems to me to be a bit more mundane.

But perhaps this is just the result of finding an explanation: when we understand things they seem a bit more mundane. Wasn't that the point of explaining, to make it less surprising? To make it more understandable? So there's a sense in which this explanation dispells the belief in in principle incommensurability.

Though there's still @Banno's example of Dolphins, which I think it is a good example to think through with respect to intertranslatability too. Rather than martians we can just look to our large-brained ocean mammals as a kind of alien which is clearly social and communicating, but seemingly we are unable to translate theirs into our language.

The part that I'd still be uncertain about, at least, is whether or not they inhabit a different world or not. In fact it seems that we could set this as an aside entirely: insofar that we're able to tell that other humans inhabit different worlds so we'd be able to do the same if we are able to communicate with dolphins. But the Davidsonian argument against conceptual schemes -- insofar that conceptual schemes are what lead to different experiential worlds -- presents a difficulty in that by understanding incommensurable worlds we make them no longer incommensurable: what appeared to be radical difference was no more than simple human ignorance. But that does not then mean the Dolphins are in an entirely different world from us as much as it means they experience the world differently, just as you'd expect for any creature which has different capacities but is also social and needing to collectively understand in order to accomplish species-level goals. So in a way, due to this, here we are understanding the Dolphins even if we cannot talk to the dolphins (since we are not dolphins) in the sense that we see they are a species which relies upon other members, like ourselves, and so we interpret their songs and movements as a kind of language -- that is, we're already crossing the in principle level of incommensurability which Davidson speaks against as impossible.

The question sort of becomes: is this what was ever meant by incommensurable theories? Probably not, given how little dolphins feature in Kuhn's or Feyerabend's work ,at least to my knowledge. But, all the same, it's a good point to bring up about truly alien conceptual thinking: if it were, then we don't understand it, by the very notion of "alien"; however, this might be a bit of a bulldozer in the face of the seemingly incommensurable between human beings, which requires a bit more nuance to see in what way it's not incommensurable.

It was a joke!

More seriously, the question where philosophy ends and science begins is not clear and is contested.

What is clear is that when conceptual clarification is needed, observation, and empirical science generally, is insufficient.

I share your irritation with low-key armchair theories, but am also irritated by over-confident (and over-excited) generalization from scraps of evidence.

What is the legitimacy of “conceptual schema” in the scientific literature
— schopenhauer1
I agree that's one of the issues in the background of this thread. — Ludwig V

No problems! :smile:

I guess what it comes down to is how much should philosophy be the handmaiden of science. The continental philosophers, and less-empirically-tied philosophers in general don't have to justify this. Oddly, since they don't have to make commitments to science (what they might call "scientism"), they don't have to justify why they aren't working off that framework for their metaphysics/epistemology.

However, traditions stemming from scientific naturalism (modern empiricisms, logical positivisms, OLP, or anything that stems from that Frege/Russell/Analytic tradition really), then has to justify why it is that it would armchair philosophize anything over and above the scientific data/research/studies. It can perhaps save a bit of space for itself with its obsessions with logic and math and symbolic logic in general, but that just becomes highly technical jargon, and not necessarily "what is the case". You then have quasi-theories of language that are kind of emergent from debates around debates of debates of former philosophers, but are these just epiphenomenal to the field, or actually the case? Well, if you are committed to empiricism, then I would suppose what is closer to "actually the case" is the scientific evidence, not journal articles leading back to neologisms from various early analytic philosophers.

So my own idea I guess is that philosophers of the empirical bent have to be committed to where the evidence from science takes them, otherwise they are not in the empirical camp anymore. And if they do this, they can help clarify various results of the findings into meta-theories, or offer the very frameworks for which hypotheses can be framed to do the experiments and observations.

Now, I do think that commensurability is an extremely important thing- not only for history of science, but between the sciences and even intra-findings within the same field. That is to say, philosophers can help make sense of the findings and help scientists with interdisciplinary ways of finding seemingly disparate findings that are using different techniques but are investigating the same phenomena. Otherwise, as I stated in an earlier post, science just becomes a noisy room of various disparate findings that don't necessarily go together or create a meta-theory of the smaller ones.

Sorry, I used findings a lot.. :D.

joint attention — schopenhauer1

Starting from Tomasello you are rather assuming there is just one account of joint/shared attention. But there are a number of philosphical options. Among armchair folk, that is.

There is a more individualistic approach from Michael Bratman, who's written a book about it. For him a shared intention can be adequately represented as a combination of individual intentions to do the same thing, more or less. This doesn't require a conceptual leap in the justification of language to the sort of 'cooperative' purposes Tomasello assumes, or regards himself as uncovering.

The cooperative approach favoured by Tomasello was pioneered by Margaret Gilbert, whose work was neglected for a long time then was re-examined. Her classic example is about walking together: her emphasis is that there is a 'collective' intention involved that can't be filleted out into individuals' intention to undertake a joint project. She argues that this is because certain extra obligations arise through joint action.

I'm abbreviating here, obvs.

There is a substantial literature that has evolved from these ideas over the last 30 years.

The relation with empiricism seems to me more complicated than you're saying. Researchers go to a prescribed portion of the world already armed with ideas, looking to confirm or refute them; the ideas come from the armchair or from previous researchers. Certainly for instance Gilbert and Searle's speculations long preceded Tomasello's work in the field (though I really like his fieldwork too, I'm a cooperative-minded person). And Chomsky's initial arguments in the 1960's were taken by some as justifying *not* engaging in certain kinds of empirical linguistic research, since variation between people and their languages was not relevant to his overarching theory: the philosophical presumption dictates what empirical research you undertake, and the reasons for it.

Some thinking out loud:

Incommensurable is the word I'm tempted by :D

But then it seems to be too convenient, in a way. It depends upon just how radical is radical incommensurability, I think -- taking Kuhn's book sometimes it seems a matter of harsh disagreement, and sometimes it seems they inhabit different experiential worlds which in turn give the theories meaning which in turn explains their radical incommensurability. — Moliere

There are lots of degrees and levels of agreement within science, and just as many degrees and levels of incommensurability. Among participants in a scientific paradigmatic community, there need mot be unanimous agreement on conceptual definitions in order to work
productively together. I do think it can be helpful to conceive of normative discursive communities in terms of shared worlds, as long as we treat the idea of world as something like form of life or language game. In a shared world, my behaviors and your responses are mutually intelligible enough to allow for each of us to anticipate the other’s next moves in the game. Now let us say my scientific community undergoes a paradigm shift. Is our new shared world incommensurable with our old one, and if so, how are we then able to go back and forth between the old and new paradigm? I suggest what happens here is that in formulating the new way of thinking, at the same time we subtly reconstrue the sense of meaning of the old concepts such that we now see that old vocabulary in a different light. It is not as if we are able to make the old theory and the new one logically commensurable, but our redefining of the old terms in themselves makes it possible to form a bridge between the old and the new concepts. The old scheme becomes an inadequate or incomplete version of the new one as we retrospectively look back at it. Much the same thing happens in religious conversion. When look back at our old thinking, we implicitly reshape what the old notions were through the filter of the new ones.

Now let’s say we encounter someone who remains within the old way of thinking. We can share their world with them, maybe even consciously taking into account that we no longer conceive of the particulars of that old
world exactly in the way that we used to and the other still
does. But the bridge we created between the old and new doesnt exist for the other. Our new world is mostly invisible to them, at least as evidenced by the impossibility of sharing practices based on that new thinking.

But there are many other ‘worlds’ of practices that we CAN share with the other. We can participate with them in shared recreational activities, for instance. We can do the same with ‘alien’ species like dogs, when we play fetch with them. Whether we are ‘really’ understanding each other is not a question that need be asked as long as the game is flowing smoothly. Given that astrology makes use of concepts that are loose enough to be amenable to a wide variety of interpretations producing different practices among disparate communities, one can find those who consider themselves to have undergone a ‘conversion’ form astrological belief to astronomy, where for others astrology and astronomy can happily co-exist as distinct but not incommensurable worlds.

I think it’s important to take seriously the reality of radically incommensurable conceptual schemes, worlds, forms of life. The often violent breakdown in communication that incommensurability between ethico-political communities produces cannot be adequately ameliorated by consultation of a presumed single real world, even Davidson’s indirect one One needs to recognize that these multiple worlds of practices cannot be reduced to a single correct one., even if we believe such reduction is only an asymptotic goal never to be reached.

What is the legitimacy of “conceptual schema” in the scientific literature — schopenhauer1

I think it is one way of articulating what is happening when normal ways of conducting arguments break down. That problem is not only found in science.

Well, if you are committed to empiricism, then I would suppose what is closer to "actually the case" is the scientific evidence, not journal articles leading back to neologisms from various early analytic philosophers. — schopenhauer1

I glad you put "actually the case" in scare quotes. It is the crucal question. The great temptation for empiricism is to jump to conclusions. Too much focus on the data is not helpful. Too little is a waste of time.

So my own idea I guess is that philosophers of the empirical bent have to be committed to where the evidence from science takes them, — schopenhauer1

But that's the question. Where does this evidence take us? This question becomes acute when there is evidence pointing in different directions - or interpretations of the available evidence that do not agree on which way it points.

Otherwise, as I stated in an earlier post, science just becomes a noisy room of various disparate findings — schopenhauer1

Well, from the outside, it all too often looks as if that's exactly what it is. Given time (maybe a century or so), the community usually sorts itself out - and then finds something else to disagree about.

That's a very helpful analysis. Thanks.

What you describe seems to me to come down to working out ways to get along in the world that we share. (And we must be sharing it because we know that the others radically disagree with us.) It is more demanding that "toleration", because toleration is compatible with non-communication - which will often break down because we must co-exist or fight.

Thank you for expressing so much more adroitly the view I had attempted to set out previously.

I've re-read Feyerabend - Against Method and Science in a Free Society - with a view to tying down his notion of commensurable and incommensurable, and decided that his view changed over time. I think he started with something like Wittgenstein's language games in mind - he had gone to England with the intent of studying with Wittgenstein, but the latter's illness and death led him to Popper. I think he carried something of "language games", or perhaps a "forms of life", into his dealings with Lakatos. In Against Method Feyerabend emphasises incommensurability, but plays it down in later writings, even I racal, denying that incommensurability meant that there could be no comparison.

The part that I'd still be uncertain about, at least, is whether or not they inhabit a different world or not. — Moliere

Seems to me that, that we understand dolphins to be social and communicative shows us that they inhabit the same world we do. If their songs are showing rather then saying, then they are not subject to Davidson's considerations of sentential language.

Contrary to , if we commence by assuming that there is no possibility of communication on important issues, then we are throwing out the possibility of "ameliorating" the "violent breakdown in communication".

Again, we can come to understand that the rabbit is a duck-rabbit, and hence to see the point of view of those who only see the duck. Only where there is some potential for agreement is there also potential to avoid violence.

Contrary to ↪Joshs, if we commence by assuming that there is no possibility of communication on important issues, then we are throwing out the possibility of "ameliorating" the "violent breakdown in communication".

Again, we can come to understand that the rabbit is a duck-rabbit, and hence to see the point of view of those who only see the duck. Only where there is some potential for agreement is there also potential to avoid violence. — Banno

The impossibility of communication on important issues is a historical fact, which is to say, it is a product of historically
situated philosophical assumptions concerning the necessary preconditions for agreement. If, for instance, it is stipulated that agreement must be grounded in pre-existing states of affairs (i.e. that all individual points of view look out onto some aspect or other of the same pre-existing field which already contains ducks and rabbits), then agreement on many important issues will be impossible.
We have to allow that one point of view sees a rabbit, another a duck, a third a duck-rabbit, and a fourth a new form whose sense of meaning may not be available to the other three because it brings a new form of life into existence whether than representing a pre-existing form. To agree about the meaning of this new form, one must first enact it intersubjectively rather than simply discover it in the world. If we are having trouble enacting some other community’s new form of life, we can still respect its validity and legitimacy for them.
Requiring agreement to hook onto a same world for all forces outliers into the position of error and falsity.

I think you said that we need agreement in order to proceed.

Well, that's what I said.

And I'm happy to add respect, where appropriate.

She argues that this is because certain extra obligations arise through joint action. — mcdoodle

:up: Thanks for the historical context on Margaret Gilbert's original idea.

The relation with empiricism seems to me more complicated than you're saying. Researchers go to a prescribed portion of the world already armed with ideas, looking to confirm or refute them; the ideas come from the armchair or from previous researchers. Certainly for instance Gilbert and Searle's speculations long preceded Tomasello's work in the field (though I really like his fieldwork too, I'm a cooperative-minded person). And Chomsky's initial arguments in the 1960's were taken by some as justifying *not* engaging in certain kinds of empirical linguistic research, since variation between people and their languages was not relevant to his overarching theory: the philosophical presumption dictates what empirical research you undertake, and the reasons for it. — mcdoodle

Well yeah, it seems he just wants us to accept his theory on strong belief from the armchair. Being this thread also revolves around commensurability, I am waiting for the disparate ideas to be brought together in a more integrative way whereby the fieldwork is repeatedly determined as more-or-less "true" the extent it can be deemed as the current theory as to language origins and the like. There are so many ideas about human uniqueness, language, and the like, that it's hard to make some meta-theory.

That being said, are these theories here in some way different than the kind of armchair philosophies of a Wittgenstein or a Davidson or (put language philosopher here) or are they part-and-parcel of the same kind?

I do notice Quine and and Searle in there.

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Astronomy, as practiced by science, is trying to do science with respect to the stars and planets and such, while astrology is trying to soothe people's fears about the future or their place within the world or what it is they ought to do with their life today: one is descriptive of the universe, and the other is therapeutic. — Moliere

This charaterization of astrology seems insignificant; I'd say astrology imagines a magical relationship- a correspondence between the cosmos and the human psyche, which is captured in the ancient hermetic principle "as above so below".

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 *...*

To be honest, I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of referencing something in the world that one cannot access. — Apustimelogist

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

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

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

His account of theory change isn't about logic like Popper, but psychological change in people's minds which is not constrained in a determinate, algorithmic way by evidence. — Apustimelogist

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. 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.

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. — Apustimelogist

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?

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

Yes, well put. By introducing the idea of reasons, or reason as a faculty, rather than causes or preferences, we enter a different way of thinking, one in which (as your next sentence shows) we can start to use concepts like "better," "more accurate," etc.

There are lots of degrees and levels of agreement within science, and just as many degrees and levels of incommensurability. Among participants in a scientific paradigmatic community, there need mot be unanimous agreement on conceptual definitions in order to work
productively together. I do think it can be helpful to conceive of normative discursive communities in terms of shared worlds, as long as we treat the idea of world as something like form of life or language game. In a shared world, my behaviors and your responses are mutually intelligible enough to allow for each of us to anticipate the other’s next moves in the game. Now let us say my scientific community undergoes a paradigm shift. Is our new shared world incommensurable with our old one, and if so, how are we then able to go back and forth between the old and new paradigm? I suggest what happens here is that in formulating the new way of thinking, at the same time we subtly reconstrue the sense of meaning of the old concepts such that we now see that old vocabulary in a different light. It is not as if we are able to make the old theory and the new one logically commensurable, but our redefining of the old terms in themselves makes it possible to form a bridge between the old and the new concepts. The old scheme becomes an inadequate or incomplete version of the new one as we retrospectively look back at it. Much the same thing happens in religious conversion. When look back at our old thinking, we implicitly reshape what the old notions were through the filter of the new ones.

Now let’s say we encounter someone who remains within the old way of thinking. We can share their world with them, maybe even consciously taking into account that we no longer conceive of the particulars of that old
world exactly in the way that we used to and the other still
does. But the bridge we created between the old and new doesnt exist for the other. Our new world is mostly invisible to them, at least as evidenced by the impossibility of sharing practices based on that new thinking.

But there are many other ‘worlds’ of practices that we CAN share with the other. We can participate with them in shared recreational activities, for instance. We can do the same with ‘alien’ species like dogs, when we play fetch with them. Whether we are ‘really’ understanding each other is not a question that need be asked as long as the game is flowing smoothly. Given that astrology makes use of concepts that are loose enough to be amenable to a wide variety of interpretations producing different practices among disparate communities, one can find those who consider themselves to have undergone a ‘conversion’ form astrological belief to astronomy, where for others astrology and astronomy can happily co-exist as distinct but not incommensurable worlds. — Joshs

I like this exposition. I think it surprisingly gets along better than I would have predicted with the Davidsonian picture -- perhaps we could treat Davidson's notion of incommensurability as a kind of high-standard, truly alien incommensurability, but that this is a bit off from the sort of incommensurability which Kuhn and Feyerabend are talking about, or what we ourselves may distinguish.

In a way we could read Davidson as providing some hurdles to the notion of incommensurability such that we have to be able to understand how it is we come to understand designating a scheme as such, and in so doing how it is it's not just something mundane, like disagreement or ignorance, when we do come to understand that.

It seems you and I have some agreement that it comes down to how people interact together, their practices and such , and I can get along with conceiving of normative discursive communities as participating in differing worlds when we understand these worlds as language games or forms of life, since I try to understand incommensurability in terms of what people are doing and noting how sometimes they are acting at cross-purposes.

And I think your description of changing beliefs makes a good deal of sense -- how the bridge beliefs between beliefs are mostly invisible to someone who still believes such and such makes a lot of sense. Isn't it this difference in beliefs, and the ability to understand someone else's beliefs, that gives rise to the notion that we have the ability to distinguish between concepts, or at least competing beliefs, such that we'd be able to make the claim to a schematism?

But also I think you're on point to say that as we move from a previous belief to a new one the old belief "morphs" to some extent. It's no longer the same belief, but a new one as defined by the web within which it sits. One thing here, then, might be that while there's a schematism it can never be articulated because the very act of articulation changes it. We come to understand that there's a scheme behind our belief formation, but in so understanding we also cut ourselves off from its constancy such that we can call it a scheme -- it becomes a bundle of beliefs that are ever-changing instead.

I think it’s important to take seriously the reality of radically incommensurable conceptual schemes, worlds, forms of life. The often violent breakdown in communication that incommensurability between ethico-political communities produces cannot be adequately ameliorated by consultation of a presumed single real world, even Davidson’s indirect one One needs to recognize that these multiple worlds of practices cannot be reduced to a single correct one., even if we believe such reduction is only an asymptotic goal never to be reached. — Joshs

I agree! But also note that this is why it's important that we get it correctly -- breakdown in communication and incommensurability can have some of the worst consequences for us. I agree that the temptation to reduce everything to a single way of speaking, My Way Which is Right, gets in the way of finding real strategies for understanding one another and coming to live together.

I think that we could be tempted to use Davidson to skip over what was ever meant by "incommensurable" -- but I think that it's better for understanding when we might go "off the rails" with the idea and become either incoherent or dogmatic.

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.

So I just want to summarize a few things I brought up earlier but haven't had a definitive answer for:

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").

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?

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.

I think I largely agree with all you stated there. I just want to emphasize that indeed, if discussion circles around neologisms like "language games" and "forms of life", without research and countervailing theories that might discredit them, or at least significantly elaborate on (and basically outgrow) the initial theory, they just become totems and fetishes of a particular field, as if sacred shibboleths to not be messed with. That would be poor philosophy indeed.

Of course, Schopenhauer's ideas need not be tested in this way, being non-empirical and highly speculative and all :wink:.

I'd also like to mention there is perhaps an inner tension already from analytic philosophy from the start, especially with "logical positivism". The logical part wants to retain its a priori status and the positivism part is committed to empirical observational studies. But language poses the problem that traditionally it is viewed as a priori, like a playground of various things you can manipulate into theories of this and that. However, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience might disagree that language is properly just there to be a priori arranged to various interesting theories of its use, function, origin, and acquisition.

So you have fields that discuss a languages phenomes and syntax and pragmatics, etc. and this starts looking more like the "logical" part. And then you have fields like anthropology, neuroscience, etc. and this starts looking like the "positivist" part. You can say they are coming at it two different ways, for sure. One is describing its formal aspect, one its functional, how it originated biologically, etc.

Contra the super positivism of people like Skinner, you had Chomsky with a super formalist approach. And then as I keep mentioning, you may have people more in the middle who understand the formalism, but put it in the context of the positivist setting of biology and anthropology. That would probably be the way to go I would think if we want to get a proper meta-theory of language, its origins, functions, etc. and how it related more generally to human cognition and cultural development.