#incommensurability

[chrisengel]

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[gocrazydelusionstudent]

Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism

Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism argues for realism as a mode committed to depicting the imperiled ecological system of soul and society.

Thanks to him [Karl Kraus], I started realizing that each individual has a linguistic shape distinguishing him from all others. I understood that people talk but fail to comprehend one another; that their words are thrusts ricocheting off the words of others; that there is no greater illusion than thinking that language is a means of communication between people. ... Seldom does anything penetrate the other person, and if it does, it is usually twisted awry.

Elias Canetti (1962–1974) The conscience of words

[dlittle30]

Paradigms, conceptual frameworks, and denkkollektive

Paradigms, conceptual frameworks, and denkkollektive

Image: Ludwik Fleck as prisoner / scientist in Buchenwald An earlier post opened a discussion of the “historical turn” in the philosophy of science in the early 1960s (link). This innovation involved two large and chiefly independent features: deep attention to the social and institutional context of scientific research, and the intriguing idea that research communities give rise to specific…

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[itsmightyfunny]

Supposing we met people who did not regard [the observations and axioms of physics] as a telling reason. Now, how do we imagine this? Instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it? - If we call this "wrong" aren't we using our language-game as a base from which to combat theirs?      And are we right or wrong to combat it? Of course there are all sorts of slogans which will be used to support our proceedings.      Where two principles really do met which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic.      I said I would "combat" the other man, -but wouldn't I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives).

Wittgenstein

[vasilinaorlova]

Incommensurability

What do I do with incommensurability and singularity of my experience? I do not call it unique, for there were many people, hundreds of thousands, who shared late Soviet childhood, in its different versions, more or less happy. My happy childhood was by no means exceptional. It was common. So I do not call it unique but I do call it untranslatable, unrenderable in the parallel universe of another language, culture, and time. Yet engagement with it might help us to understand what practices of belonging children develop in the epochs of transition. Reality might be brutal at times, but children are being shielded by loving parents. They are indoctrinated into ideologies that fall apart.

I had my own Utopian dream, a vision of the future where the universe of three musketeers paradoxically coincided with supposedly more realistic expectations.

[preteritions]

Think of two consciousnesses, which are like two worlds impenetrable one to the other. By what right do we strive to put them into the same mold, to measure them by the same standard? Is it not as if one strove to measure length with a gram or weight with a meter? And besides, why do we speak of measuring? We know perhaps that some fact is anterior to some other, but not by how much it is anterior.

Henri Poincare, "The Measure of Time"

[papertigerlily]

"Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.¹"

- An old Chinese ontology, purportedly as discovered by Borges, and quoted with amusement by Foucault

[thedailykopter]

If everything is incommensurable, then everything is seen through the lens of the present, the lens of now ... There is no history. There is no truth, just truth for the moment, contingent truth, relative truth. And who is to say which version of the truth is better than any other, if we can't look beyond the paradigm in which we find ourselves.

Errol Morris, "The Ashtray", New York Times 2011