SalvagingIncommensurability

Syed A. Sayeed

I

The manner and the extent to which a phenomenon—I am not referring to the structure of a phenomenon but the phenomenon itself—is accessible to perception is determined by the extent of theoretical mediation and interpretation it requires. In extreme cases of theoretical dependence, the phenomenon may be all but a function of the theory in the sense that it is visible only when looked at through the lens of theory. In the latter case, we move from theory to fact in order to posit the phenomenon. When a theory that appears to be valid in other respects predicts the existence of a phenomenon, we begin to look for it in the expected region of reality. And if some flaw is discovered in the theoretical assumptions which prompted expectations of the phenomenon, and thereby the theory is invalidated, we refuse to be distracted by the apparent visibility of the projected phenomenon in question. On the other hand, if it is an ordinary phenomenon, we would expect the enquirer to start with an acknowledgement of the phenomenon and proceed towards a theoretical explanation for it.

With regard to the phenomenon of incommensurability, I think it is obvious that it is an ordinary phenomenon. It may not be a day-to-day phenomenon in the sense that the common man may not encounter it everyday. But whatever its infrequency, it is by no means an esoteric or theory induced phenomenon. In view of this fact, it is something of a puzzle that most discussions on this topic are conducted almost entirely in terms of the possible validity of the concept of incommensurability as if the existence of the phenomenon itself were a minor distraction. In the case of this phenomenon, one would expect the social scientists and the philosophers to begin by acknowledging the existence of this phenomenon and proceed to enquire about its possible structure and only then ask questions about the appropriateness, coherence, validity etc of the concept we might employ to refer to the phenomenon of incommensurability and describe its structure. And if we find that the concept we have employed is somewhat askew, we would try to revise the concept, that is to say we alter its relation to the other concepts together with which it constitutes the theory, until the structure of the concept approximates to what we believe to be the structure of the phenomenon. But this has not happened with the phenomenon of incommensurability. The reason probably lies in the fact that this phenomenon came to

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serious attention in a fairly complex theoretical context. But that really is no excuse to continue to debate the existence of the phenomenon of incommensurability on the basis of the supposed incoherence of the corresponding concept.

Therefore, I suggest that we must begin by explicitly recognizing the existence and the significance of the phenomenon of incommensurability and proceed to discuss the conceptual problems associated with it.

Whether or not it is obtained between two consecutive scientific frameworks, as Kuhn, at any rate in his early work, maintained, it definitely exists in many trans-discursive contexts across many domains—social, cultural and political. That is why it is a pity that the concept of incommensurability should have fallen into disrepute – at least into desuetude – following the rather ambiguous fate of most of Kuhn’s more interesting claims and concepts. I suggest that in the interest of some very serious pragmatic concerns, it is vitally important to restore some of its well-deserved respectability to this notion. One immediate positive consequence of this move will be that those who feel the need for such a concept while negotiating what one might call trans-discursive contexts but feel hesitant to invoke it due to its supposedly dubious status, will feel encouraged to use it without any undue anxiety. This alone, I should think, more than justifies any time and energy we might spend on recovering this valuable concept for the social sciences.

There might be misgivings about this attempt to take the concept of incommensurability out of the history of (natural) science and relocating it in the domain of the practice of social science. But the assumptions underlying such anxiety are, in this instance, quite wrong. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking a theoretical concept out of its original theoretical context and placing it in other discursive domains. What determines the legitimacy or otherwise of such an attempt is whether there is a sufficient degree of structural similarity between the original theoretical context and the context of application. Strictly speaking, no significant theoretical concept would be amenable to ready trans-theoretical application. It will need to be modified and taken to a level of structural generality (which implies theory, and in the context of literature, philosophy taken as the destination through writing – simply that one must not stop at writing if one is studying literature as method of using a certain medium). The only question in such a context would be about the extent of such revision. If it is generalised beyond a point, the new concept will become an empty caricature of the original concept, and it will then not be possible to draw from the revised concept any of the explanatory inferences that flow from the original concept. Since the whole point of such a move is this heuristic benefit, it then becomes a totally futile exercise, amounting to no more than a rather pointless rhetorical tactic.(Touche – the thin ness of the selection of material or theoretical structure for justification of the exercise is a lack indeed, but if philosophers are going to play hard to get what do you expect ? Sorry, that was a cheap shot, and yes, it fudges the issue. The trans-discurciev contexts for the application of the method of

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understanding can set up some sort of generality, if your argument must be that the theory will be applicable. It ceases to be about literature and remains strictly about method, however)

In the present case, I think the concept requires very little revision in order to be made applicable in a broader contextual range. I say it with some confidence since much discussion on this topic has been conducted on the assumption that the concept of incommensurability applies to the cognitive relation between any two genuinely distinct conceptual frameworks, and even critical interventions predicated on this premise, such as that of Davidson, have not provoked any objection on that count. In other words, we can safely take the notion of incommensurability as a basic concept and regard its origin or coming into prominence in a particular theoretical context as only a matter of the dynamics of the history of ideas.

II

We might begin by briefly glancing at the decline in the status of this concept before we discuss its salience and talk about the justification for reviving it. One of the reasons for the erosion of this concept’s theoretical respectability is Kuhn’s own reaction (who along with Feyerabend* is supposed to have more or less created this concept) to the criticism of his early work. He retracted most of his claims made in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions1 and did so at different times to different degrees, resulting in a general sense of ambiguity about the extent of his repudiation of his early views. Rationally, this need not have affected the fortune of this concept, at least to such an extent. But many people (even those who ought to know better) continue to entertain the rather strange assumption that the author or initiator of a theory must remain to the end the only or the best authority on its validity. The entire history of human thought constitutes a mountain of counter-evidence to this assumption. But mere fact never being sufficient to dislodge a prejudice, when a theorist abandons his own theory for whatever reason (sometimes, for all you know, out of intellectual fatigue), most people give it up without bothering to examine the evidence. At least in Kuhn’s case that is what seems to have happened. Generally in such cases, the theory is taken up by someone else at some temporal or theoretical distance from its point of origin and early development, revised, revived and restated, even if in a radically transformed version. However, with

* This parenthetical allusion may give the impression that I regard Feyerabend’s contribution to the notion of incommensurability as marginal or derivative. Feyerabend’s version of this notion was distinctive and in fact, in terms of extending the applicability of this notion beyond the history of science, I would be inclined to follow his lead rather than Kuhn’s. The only reason for my apparent priority to Kuhn is that most discussants of the incommensurability thesis have engaged with Kuhn’s version of it and therefore any defense of this notion must deal with those critiques.

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incommensurability this did not happen. There was a larger reason for this. It was no other than the bugbear of relativism. To accept incommensurability is to admit the possibility of two or more conceptual frameworks that are at variance with each other but “validly” claim to describe the same region of reality. This was thought to be an outrageous doctrine held only by mad revolutionaries (as Karl Popper in one of his more indignant moods expressed). As if this was not enough, unfortunately for this concept, the notion of conceptual frameworks (or paradigms in a general sense) itself came under severe attack, and any chance of survival after that offensive was supposed to have effectively been snuffed out by Donald Davidson who was thought to have conclusively demonstrated the incoherence of the very notion of a conceptual framework. The general consequence of all this has been that in some circles one’s intellectual sophistication even now continues to be measured by the disdain with which one treats such notions as ‘paradigm’ and ‘incommensurability’, not to speak of ‘paradigm shift’ which is supposed to evoke a delicate shudder in all right thinking people.

As I said, all this is very unfortunate since there is no other concept that can perform the function of the concept of incommensurability, that can quite capture the peculiar semantic, cognitive divide between certain pairs of discursive units. But the effect of the criticism on this and other related concepts was so devastating that its usefulness could not be offered as an excuse for retaining them. Of course, it can be nobody’s case that an invalid concept should be retained in one’s theoretical repertoire on grounds of its utility. Such a suggestion would be not only absurd but in some cases positively unethical since the application of an invalid concept or theory can only serve an obfuscatory purpose, no matter how noble the aims supposedly served by that application. I am only suggesting that, in view of the very useful even necessary character of this concept, we must make sure that it is indeed an invalid or incoherent concept before discarding it.

III

I propose to begin this salvage operation of trying to rescue the notion of incommensurability on an optimistic note. It may be the received view that this concept has been utterly demolished by Davidson and others. But, as attentive readers of the history of philosophy know, that demolition jobs in philosophy are rather inconclusive affairs. Theoretical frameworks—even weak ones—are not simple monoliths which can be demolished in one stroke with total finality. They are complex and heterogeneous entities endowed with considerable resilience, and therefore, no matter how decisive the attack, some constituent concepts of the framework survive the attack either by virtue of their own intrinsic indispensability to larger discursive contexts or/and (since there is overlap between these two alternatives) by virtue of their loose integration in the theory.

1 Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1997 third ed.), Chicago University Press.

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And often, as I mentioned above, precisely as remnants of a discredited and discarded theory, they acquire a new life, participating in the formation of new conceptual frameworks that are less vulnerable to similar attacks. Therefore, what happens to a particular concept belonging to a contested theoretical framework depends on its individual robustness and the extent of its integration and entrenchment in the total theory. (This is exactly the method one follows in reading literatures produced by two discursive contexts – what is your objection to this method then, when it is populated by literary units/concepts/themes/genres from those contexts ?)

Let me begin with a clarification of my precise agenda. My interest is not (as I have already indicated) in incommensurability as a feature peculiarly specific to scientific paradigms. I am concerned with this phenomenon as an attribute of the relations between conceptual or theoretical frameworks of any kind. Therefore, I shall operate with a definition of incommensurability that will constitute a tentative description of the phenomenon in terms general enough to exhibit its fundamental and broadly pervasive character. And here’s that definition: When two conceptual schemes are such that their lexical structures fail to be fully or partially isomorphic, and/or if neither structure can be grafted directly onto the other without disturbing the latter’s existing relations, and if the two structures cannot be held in any single frame of reference, we can say that there is incommensurability between them.(A good enough definition of reception as any : or if you want to say it in another way, the resultant of a situation of contact))

To put it in less arthritic but more prolix terms, what this description claims is that the phenomenon of incommensurability can be said to exist when, between two discursive units which refer to (and seek to describe or explain or engage with) the same part of reality in radically different terms, there are found to be concepts, theories, beliefs (and practices where the units are cultures) that cannot be made mutually intelligible except with reference to fundamental structural principles which govern the larger frames of conceptual reference of which they are elements, and as a consequence of which fact, there is no possibility of establishing direct equivalence or correspondence between these larger frames of reference except in terms of broad referentiality.

To say all this is of course not to suggest that in order to look for incommensurability we have to hunt among esoteric pairs of conceptual frameworks. On the contrary, as I have been insisting, the phenomenon of incommensurability is fairly common and on most occasions we are quite aware of its existence, though in a somewhat undertheorised sort of way—which basically means that incommensurability is an intuitively familiar notion.

Many of us, I am sure can recall occasions when we encountered a peculiarly basic sort of difficulty in making one particular discourse intelligible in terms of another discourse—the discourses could have been religious beliefs, cultural practices or theoretical traditions. And most of us can also recall feeling that the difficulty is, if at all, only partly psychological, that it has something to do with the concepts involved, even if we could not pinpoint the

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One other—rather obvious—point that one might find oneself called upon to clarify is that there is nothing about incommensurability as understood in this discussion (that is to say as a general trans-discursive phenomenon) which requires that it should characterize frameworks that are in a diachronic relationship. Kuhn was concerned with incommensurability as a diachronic relationship because he was dealing with the history of science. My interest here is not primarily historical but sociological. Therefore throughout this discussion I will assume, as the general norm, synchronic contexts of incommensurability. I don’t think this distorts the concept in question in any serious way. I might further clarify that when I say ‘synchronic’ I do not mean two conceptual frameworks necessarily with separate or simultaneous origins. Any two frameworks are synchronic if at any given time, regardless of their origin, both of them are in practice and claim to be coterminous in terms of the domain with which they are concerned. It is true that there may be no way to establish whether or not they are exactly coterminous since in such cases the boundaries of the discursive structures are bound to be indeterminate. But this fact only strengthens the plausibility of incommensurability.

Another important point concerns the extremeness of the definition of incommensurability. Some of the critiques of incommensurability are based on a rather extreme definition of this concept where it stands for absolute impossibility of translation or intelligibility. It is true that there are remarks in SSR as well as in the work of Feyerabend that would seem to warrant such an interpretation. But the notion of incommensurability need not imply such extreme conditions of (un)translatability. As many defenders of the incommensurability thesis have pointed out, incommensurability only implies impossibility of translation understood as one-to-one lexical substitution or something close to it. It might be objected that in this sense hardly any languages – even cognate languages – are mutually translatable. That only proves the point that inasmuch as languages are expressions of forms of life, there is bound to be a certain degree of incommensurability between them. One begins to treat it as an issue only when the obtained incommensurability reaches a critical proportion. But in the more immediate context, what is required is a distinction between direct translation and mediated, interpretive translation. How mediated/interpreted a translation will (have to) be, will depend on how divergent the paradigms are and how deeply embedded within the paradigm a concept is. To unpack this metaphor into more abstract terms, to say that a concept is deeply embedded in the paradigm means that it is a complex and abstract concept, and that in order to access that concept we need to invoke not only other

exact nature of that conceptual difficulty. What Kuhn did was to articulate this difficulty in a fairly clear and plausible manner and apply it to the history of science. In fact, as many perceptive observers have pointed out, the reason why Kuhn’s version of the notion became so popular and why so many people without any interest in the history or philosophy of science were attracted by his thesis was precisely because they recognised in this concept something they

had sensed in their experience of interaction between two referentially competing discursive domains.

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(simpler and sometimes more concrete) concepts which constitute it but also the principles that govern the particular way in which simple concepts are constituted into complex notions. To put it more graphically, it is a question of how large a portion of the object-paradigm around a concept or proposition we need to scoop out in order to grasp that concept or proposition from a position outside that paradigm (which would naturally imply a vantage point from within another paradigm; if the latter is an implicit, diffused or pre-theoretical paradigm like the paradigm of common-sense understanding or of life-world intuition, the difficulty of access is less, whereas the cognitive task becomes harder if the subject-paradigm is itself a complex, theoretically rich framework.** This explains why when a new theory emerges, those used to operating with an earlier theory have greater trouble in adapting to the new theory as compared to those unfamiliar with the old theory— who tend to be, as the physicist Max Born pointed out, thinkers of a newer generation.). To sum up this point, incommensurability is not an all-or-nothing affair. There are degrees of incommensurability which may be heterogeneously distributed across a paradigm, and from the pragmatic point of view, and it is this fact —and its sociological relevance—which justifies the effort (at least from our sociological/pragmatic perspective) to revive the concept of incommensurability. The value of our exertions here consists precisely in the fact that the phenomenon of incommensurability is a negotiable feature of trans-discursive encounters, by taking which into account if we will be able to facilitate mutual intelligibility as a means for conflict resolution and generally as a step towards generating greater understanding and tolerance. In other words, the larger goal of this discussion is to generate alertness towards certain critical areas of incommensurability so as to bring into play the necessary strategies to surmount it in such contexts.

So much by way of a preamble. Now comes the question of precisely what is at issue and how we can deal with it.

The structure of the issue as I see it is like this: for the phenomenon of incommensurability to be obtained even moderately and contingently, there must be pairs of conceptual frameworks which must have a common referential ground and yet must be fundamentally different in terms of their semantic organization. This in turn implies the existence of conceptual frameworks and further the possibility of their being relative to each other in some meaningful way. The critics of incommensurability would be sceptical about some or all of these possibilities. My effort here is to argue that though

** I can imagine the reader beginning to feel considerable uneasiness with the cavalier way in which I have delineated

the structure of paradigms in terms of simple to complex and concrete to abstract etc. However, I do not feel

particularly on the defensive about this since what matters here, is not how precisely a paradigm is structured but how different two paradigms are in the mode of their conceptual organization.

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the scepticism is in large measure well-directed, there is still room for entertaining a moderate notion of incommensurability.

In brief, then, there are three distinct issues for us to consider. First, the notion of conceptual scheme or paradigm#, second, the nature of relativism, and third—though somewhat residually—the implications of these two issues for the question of incommensurability. I believe that our position on all these related issues depends on our implicit view with regard to the structure of language. Therefore I will be concerned largely to critically examine the structure of language assumed by the criticisms of incommensurability in general. However, since it is Davidson’s criticism which many people regard as conclusive, I shall mainly refer to his arguments. Let this not be interpreted to mean that my aim is to refute Davidson’s arguments against conceptual schemes and other related views. I only want to point out how a different—and as I shall try to argue, more plausible—model of the structure of language can show that the notion of incommensurable paradigms is not incoherent in the way generally imagined.

IV

The general view about Davidson’s article ‘The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’2 in which he sets out to attack the notion of paradigm and related notions, is that it questions the notion of the plurality of conceptual schemes on the grounds of the impossibility of untranslatable languages, and proceeds to use that refutation as a basis for questioning the coherence of the notion of even a singular conceptual scheme. This is thought to constitute an argument against conceptual relativism, which in turn would imply a convincing rejection of the notion of incommensurability. The exact logical relation between these different aspects of Davidson’s position may be a matter of debate, but broadly it is supposed that his article succeeds in the totality of its objectives.

Now, as I said earlier, my aim is not to argue against Davidson’s arguments against conceptual schemes, as such. What I am attempting to do is only to show that the notion of conceptual schemes can be understood at many levels, or perhaps more accurately, that conceptual schemes are layered structures in a more significant way than Davidson seems to recognise, and that once we recognise the hierarchical structure of conceptual schemes we will be able to see how a conceptual scheme can be at certain levels incommensurable with another conceptual scheme.##

# There are a number of terms that have been substituted for ‘paradigm’ with how much semantic implication it is not always clear. Kuhn himself at various points used such terms as ‘exemplar’ ‘disciplinary matrix’, ‘lexicon’, ‘lexical structure’ and ‘taxonomy’. For our purpose, however, I don’t think their equivalence or absence of it presents a problem. I shall therefore treat all these terms rather indiscriminately as synonymous.

## At this point I am treating ‘conceptual scheme’ as synonymous with ‘paradigm’, although a more nuanced context would require a distinction, restricting the term ‘conceptual scheme’ to the ontological, categorical network of

concepts. I am permitting myself this liberty since Davidson himself uses this term in the former fashion.

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Let’s begin by asking in precisely what sense we are to understand the notion of conceptual schemes in denying their coherence. We cannot possibly be expected to deny the existence of concepts themselves. To say the least, one would not know how to begin to understand such a claim. We may not know what concepts exactly are, but we know that there are concepts and we know that thinking would not be possible without concepts. It is true that there are confusions in the way we sometimes refer to concepts, particularly to abstract concepts. Nevertheless, I know that when I say ‘liberty is essential to democracy’, I am employing concepts to make this assertion. Understood in this sense it would be absurd indeed to claim that concepts do not exist.

On the other hand, it is difficult to understand in what other sense one could deny the existence or meaningfulness of conceptual schemes. If there are concepts, then they would be related to each other in some way, and that would entail their being organized into some sort of a scheme or structure rather than float in individual isolation or be bundled together in some sort of an arbitrary jumble.

So, what exactly are we to make of Davidson’s basic position in his rejection of the idea of conceptual schemes? To understand this, I think we must go back to the notion of ‘concept’ and understand the precise way in which it becomes available to us. I use this last phrase advisedly. As all careful readers of Davidson know, a significant component of his general philosophical strategy consists of looking very carefully at the possible vantage point from which a given claim can be made meaningfully and consistently.

We speak of concepts in contrast to (and in relation to) two things: signs and objects. Signs, when they are names, point to objects in a simple way. They have no meaning (or at any rate their meaning is irrelevant). But when signs function as words, they refer to objects but this reference is mediated by our understanding of those objects, which is conducted by what we Frege3 called the sense. When we use the word ‘concept’ we usually mean the totality of sense and reference. However, the important question (particularly in the context of incommensurability) is the relation between sense and reference: as to how far sense mediates the determination of the identity of the reference and to what extent we can say that sense determines reference. Some theories such as those developed by Kripke4 and Putnam5 argue that the sense or description cannot determine reference and that the synchronic reference must diachronically invoke a moment of when a signifying/referential relation was posited between the sign and the

2 Davidson, D. (1974). ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (2001 ed.), Oxford University Press.

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object. However, what these theories fail to take into account is the fact that sense and reference do not just branch out from the sign in two different directions without any mutual relation with each other. Even when the reference is the product of a certain act and moment of naming, subsequently the sense and reference of a sign enter into a relation of mutual clarification and confirmation. And this relation is in turn mediated by several other signs that are related to the sign in question in many different ways. But more importantly, there are signs which are not connected, even in the originary moment of naming, with objects in the sense of things in the world. To take the statement I cited a while ago, if I say ‘liberty is essential to democracy’ the notions of liberty and democracy were not given to me through a diachronic chain of reference which ultimately can be traced to the moment when somebody pointed at liberty and uttered the word ‘liberty’. Even if we assume such a mythical occasion when it was so done (other than in the metaphorical sense – which might have great heuristic value but cannot be taken as a correct account of the event of semantic determination—such as Rousseau’s famous remark that property came into being when someone drew a circle on the ground around himself and said this is mine), liberty is not the kind of thing that could be seen—much less shown—independent of other complex notions so that there could be a simple gesture of ostensive definition. The point is that whether in the context of scientific theories or in the context of trans-discursivity in the domain of social reality (with which our discussion is concerned), issues relating to incommensurability arise essentially in connection with such notions. But more immediately to the point, concerning the issue of referentiality itself, abstract concepts of this kind (that is to say those not amenable to simple, unambiguous ostensivity), come to mediate the referentiality of the concrete concepts to the extent that the real test of the mastery of a language (such as in cases of second language acquisition) can be defined in terms of the sensitivity to the connotative but significant influence of the abstract or complex concepts on the relatively more

+ I came across a rather nice example from within ‘Western Culture’ (that is to say, without invoking the ‘Orient’ or ‘other cultures’) that serves well to illustrate this point. Edith Hamilton in her book Mythology mentions the classical Greek word ‘aidos’. ‘Aidos’ along with ‘nemesis’ represents a personification of emotions held in the highest esteem by ancient Greeks. Nemesis is usually (apparently unproblematically) translated as ‘Righteous Anger’ and in less rigorous allusions stands for justified retribution. But the word ‘aidos’ though in common use among the Greeks, that is to say not at all an esoteric word, is amenable to translation only in the most elusive and allusive fashion imaginable. In Edith Hamilton’s words, ‘It means reverence and the shame that holds men back from wrongdoing, but it also means the feeling a prosperous man should have in the presence of the unfortunate—not compassion, but a sense that the difference between him and these poor wretches is not deserved (Warner Books, 1969, p.38). It is no exaggeration to say that to get a sense of this word is to internalize a great deal of classical Greek culture and way of life.

3 Frege, G. (1892). ‘On Sense and Reference’. In A. W. Moore (Ed.), Meaning and Reference (1993 ed.). Oxford University Press.

4 Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity (revised ed.). Blackwell, Oxford.

5 Putnam, H. (1975). Mind, Language and Reality– Philosophical Papers, volume 2. Cambridge University Press.

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In short what I have been leading up to is the point that the sense component of a sign has a complex and variable relation with the reference component, depending on how abstract a concept it is. To say this is, however, not to go too far beyond what Quine said in his ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. If a concept can be exhaustively defined in terms of other concepts, then the concept is analytic and if it depends on a rigid and direct relation to the referent, then it is synthetic. And since this is entirely a matter of degree, the dichotomy of synthetic-analytic is misplaced. So far, this is Quine.++ But Davidson, as we all know, is concerned with what he calls the third dogma of empiricism, which is the dogma of scheme and content. What is that extra length we have to go to rid of the third dogma according to Davidson?

To understand this, we have to shift focus and look at the notion of reference more closely. So far we have pretended to be able to see the object directly and link it to the sense of the sign through a transparent, self-effacing relation called referentiality. But what exactly is this relation? Is there such a thing as pure referentiality untouched by the sense? The answer to this question is best approached through the structuralist notion of ‘referent’. Ferdinand de Saussure, as we know, posits the referential relation not between sign and object but between sign and referent. The referent is different from the object insofar as it represents the object. When two speakers from different languages point to an object, we may assume some neutral, ideally language-transcendent viewpoint from which the object as it is can be pointed at. However, in actuality, the object that each speaker is pointing to is not that ideal object but the object as it is conceived in his language, and perceived through that conception.

Now Davidson, I think, would object to the notion of referent on the grounds that in order to invoke such a concept, we had to assume some vantage point from which describe the relation between sign, (possible ideal) object and referent. His question would be how we could ever know that two languages are different enough to posit two different referents for the ‘same’ object? When the other speaker points to an object, I see the object. That’s all. I cannot see the gap between the object and his referent. Nor—and this is more significant—can I see the supposed gap between the object and my own referent. That is to say, I do not see it as having been constituted by my language. So, Davidson would say, where is the referent? Or more accurately, from where do you see it? In other words, I do not see any gap between the world and my language. Any ‘gap’ would have to be of the nature of some discrepancy, and there is nothing that could show me that discrepancy. If there could be anything, it has to be either a neutral, language-free perspective from which I could see the object and then see how my language is distorting

++ This is strictly speaking not correct. Quine talks, not in terms of concepts but propositions. I will return to this point later. At this point, I am attributing this view to Quine on the assumption that Quine need not reject the extension of his claims about propositions to concepts.

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it, or it has to be another language by contrasting whose distortion with mine I could get an idea of the actual distortion. But as Kuhn et al would themselves admit, there is no such thing as a neutral language or a neutral perspective. As for the second possibility, even for this second language to serve me as a contrast, I need to be able to understand it (or translate it into my language). But if I can translate it, then it is really no different from my language in its conceptual structure, and if it cannot be translated into my language, then it is not a language, at least as far as I am concerned, since I would not even know whether it is a language.

It is a persuasive argument. However, there is one important point that constitutes a lacuna in such a position. It is the assumption that language is a homogeneous, two dimensional structure in which the relation between sense and reference and consequently between sign and object have the same structure. This, as I am trying to argue here, is a mistaken assumption. At the level of objects or aspects of objects which are a matter of simple perception, such an isomorphism may apply. But there are objects or aspects of objects, in whose case a great deal of language is gathered in the sign or the referent, and in those cases it is possible to see how a certain object is constituted by a language (or by a theory). In one well-known passage in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation Davidson asks what sense it makes to say that the ancients believed that the earth was flat since it is doubtful whether the ‘earth’ referred to by the ancients is the same as the earth as we know it (since the latter is a part of the solar system etc which clearly was not part of the ancients’ concept of the earth).6 Without going into the larger debate about this issue involving the views of Kripke, Putnam and others,* we can respond by saying that the difference between the two concepts of ‘the earth’ is precisely a matter of how much of language in the form of a theory is packed into the concept.

This matter can be better described in terms of concepts as points of intersection of propositions. In the final analysis, a concept is a way in which a number of propositions are gathered. Even when a concept is unpacked into a simple definition, it can be seen to be a structure comprising a number of propositions. Now, Davidson would accept this point but would draw a different conclusion from it. He would say that what we take to be concepts are actually propositions seen, so to speak, in cross-section. Therefore what we take to be a conceptual scheme is only a set of propositions which embody assertions or beliefs about the world. These assertions must be true or false, and

* We can in fact point out that this example quite nicely illustrates the way in which incommensurability manifests itself. There is sufficient overlap in terms of the denotation to indicate that competing conceptions are involved and the description of the component concepts shows that they cannot be reduced to a simple true-false relation since they are engaging with different aspects of what they are describing.

This is a view Davidson shares with Quine. As I mentioned earlier, the latter’s notion of conceptual scheme as a field assumes it to be a set of propositions that are true relative to that field. His rejection of the absoluteness of the analytic-synthetic distinction retains this assumption, while relativising the distinction by suggesting that the propositions at the periphery are synthetic and those relatively closer to the center are analytic.

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they cannot be false since they represent our relation with the world. This must be so since language cannot function if our basic (that is to say defining) assertions about the world were not largely true. And in any case, to posit a plurality of conceptual schemes is to posit alternative possibilities for the truth-values of these assertions. But that, as mentioned above, is impossible. This again is a very persuasive account but as we shall see, once again its plausibility depends on treating language as a homogeneous structure with a direct, unmediated relation with the world at all levels. Let’s look at this matter in some detail.

V

First of all, the relation between concepts and propositions must be understood in less reductive way than Davidson and others do. We cannot treat concepts as optical illusions generated by propositions. Concepts constitute the relations between propositions, and propositions in turn constitute the relations between concepts. Second, the number and kind of propositions that constitute a concept vary with the complexity and level of abstraction of the concept. Davidson assumes that the propositions that constitute a language are all assertions about the world. But they are not. There would be propositions in a language that would articulate the relation between two concepts without being mediated by assertions about the world.

That Davidson’s does not take this important point into account becomes obvious when we look at his (version of the) principle of charity which plays a significant role in his theory of language. According to this principle, the only way to begin to understand a new language is to assume that most of the assertions made by the speakers of that language are true. This principle has invited misunderstandings partly because of the way it is formulated and partly because of its name. There is nothing “charitable” about implementing this principle, and in doing so one does not ascribe excessive truthfulness to the linguistic community in question. What Davidson is implying here is simply that the concepts which constitute a language are distilled from beliefs about the world entertained by the speakers of that language. For example, if there is a concept of whiteness W in a certain language, if I want to learn this language or translate it into mine, I must assume that most of the sentences (used by speakers of that language) containing W must be true. If it were not so, the speakers of that language themselves could not have got a grasp on that concept. Here the word ‘true’ is also somewhat misleading. The notion of ‘truth’, as Davidson himself would insist, does not have a ground outside language. When someone says that a certain assertion, say, ‘milk is white’ The question here is whether all our basic assertions are necessarily defining assertions. Davidson assumes them to be so but I think it is a problematic assumption. I shall return to this point later.

6Davidson, Donald, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford University Press, 1984, p.168.

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is true, all he can imply is that, given the meaning these words have in his language, his assertion about this sample of milk is using the words in that very sense and no other. That is to say, in this assertion, ‘milk’ and ‘white’ mean what they are supposed to mean in that language. What this means is that the ‘truth’ of the assertions in a language as seen from outside turns out to be nothing but consistency of meaning. Truth and meaning are in a sense just a matter of perspective: if someone points to a can of milk and says ‘it is black’, either he is using the word ‘black’ wrongly or he is telling a lie. This is the sense of the statement that in order for a word to be a part of a language at all, speakers of that language have to use that word consistently and make true assertions about the world using it. This becomes clearer if we take the situation of first language acquisition rather than second language acquisition. When a mother teaches the native language to her child, she cannot tell him that milk is black without getting him totally confused about both milk and whiteness. If the word ‘white’ is to have any meaning at all in language E, an E speaking mother must say ‘milk is white’,’ snow is white’ and so on. The child will not be able to learn the concept of whiteness if she were to get whimsical and say ‘milk is white’ but ‘coal is white, too’. Davidson’s point is that we must envisage the same condition for others seeking to learn that language. To this extent Davidson’ position is quite unexceptionable. And in any case, it is a corollary of Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’.

The main problem in this, as I have tried to point out, lies elsewhere. It relates to the fact that all the propositions of a language are not assertions about the world. A significant number of them are about each other in the sense that they illuminate each other’s meaning. Or more accurately, their function is to fix the relation between concepts. When the concepts involved are abstract concepts, the propositions might in an indirect way presuppose true beliefs about the world but they would not themselves embody those assertions. The point I am trying to make here (if I may be forgiven this repetition) is that when we learn a language or try to translate from it, we learn the concepts from their worldly assertions. But what happens is that when we progress in our understanding of that language, we gradually also learn the more abstract concepts which might organise the world at more complex levels in a different way. But in learning the latter, we move into that language and internalise it. It is in fact only then that we develop a sense of understanding that language. However, when we need to translate a complex proposition from that language, we realise that there is a need for interpretation—for a circuitous representation. This is the point critics of Davidson have sought to make in arguing that he conflates understanding of a language with its translatability. Davidson

With the important proviso that we are looking at the defining or paradigmatic assertions. If we extend it to all uses of propositions by the speakers of a language, we would be entering into the domain of unwarranted charity by assuming that every time they make an assertion about the world, they are speaking the truth.

Davidson quotes Benjamin Whorf about linguistic relativity and comments that according to this theory ‘the failure of intertranslatability is the necessary condition for difference of conceptual schemes’. This is puzzling since one would

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has a two dimensional view of language and imagines that all concepts and propositions have the same distance from (or the same structure of referentiality with) the world. To put the matter in a slightly different way, Davidson fails to see that languages are heterogeneous structures with different degrees of theoretical thickness. To adopt a broadly Husserlian terminology, language has an interface with life-world but this interface is not uniform. There are parts of a language where we can find layers of theories, both those that currently constitute the worldview of the speakers of that language and those that represent vestiges of earlier beliefs. Modern languages exhibit this heterogeneity to an extraordinary degree due to the fact that modern, ‘commonsense’ discourse is a patchwork of innumerable theories originating from domains ranging from astronomy to zoology. The concepts that derive from those theories cannot be related to the world except through the mediation of the principles of abstraction that govern those theories.

In other words, languages have a dimension of thickness in the sense that in addition to (and of course in complex relation with) the concepts and propositions that directly refer to the world, and whose collective sense constitutes our commonsense about the world, there are also concepts and propositions that are mediated by other concepts and assumptions whose origin could be our imaginative and speculative faculties, rather than simple perception, and which are the product of man’s ability and inclination to understand all that exists in all its complexity, without reducing it to its cognitive atoms. It is these latter sorts of propositions that are actually the source of the richness of a language, the source of its religion, its art, science and philosophy.

To sum it up in schematic terms, the argument I am criticising here holds that: concepts are embedded in true propositions about the world and since there cannot be conflicting or even varying sets of true propositions about the world, there cannot be different set of concepts constituting different conceptual schemes, which means that whatever there is by way of conceptual scheme is nothing but our sense of the world in which we live. This schema, as I have tried to show, is not straightforwardly tenable.

be inclined to assume that failure of intertranslatability is a consequence of conceptual difference.

I am not suggesting a hierarchy consisting of perceptual statements at the bottom and abstract statements at the top. My point is that there is a hierarchy of language structure. The hierarchy of language is essentially one of complexity. Even among abstract concepts, there would be simple concepts which are basic and universal, and several levels of increasingly complex concepts and propositions which are derived from them. The most crucial point is that the principles of hierarchisation can be different for different languages. That is to say, each language—and culture too, in the sense that the input of imagination plays a large role in this—has its own sense of how the basic concepts can be and ought to be integrated into more complex conceptual and propositional units. I will try to elaborate this idea in the rest of the article since it forms the fulcrum of my defense of incommensurability which in the final analysis is a defense of a variety of conceptual relativism.

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Peter Hacker has pointed out (in the context of his critique of Davidson) that part of the problem with this view on conceptual schemes is that it tends to treat a language and a theory as structurally identical, as if a language is just a large umbrella theory. A theory can be described as a set of true statements or claims about the world, whereas a language would have negations of those statements too.7 I think this is an important point. But, to just say, as Hacker does, that languages are not theories is not enough. In fact, in some ways it is misleading. The reason is that languages must be understood as discourses and as discourses they contain theories, and the way in which theories are embedded in language contributes to what I have called the thickness of language. However, the point implicit in Hacker’s criticism which is that theories are in the final analysis generators of true assertions about the world or true descriptions of the world, whereas languages are the tools for enabling such descriptions, is well taken. This point can in fact be made even more persuasively in terms of Ian Hacking’s notion of ‘styles of reasoning’.8 Hacking points out that conceptual schemes are not really sets of assertions about the world which are either true or false, but represent (or perhaps one should say embody) styles of reasoning which organise reality in a particular way that generates assertible propositions that can be subject to truth-valuation. So, what is true in one conceptual scheme may not be false but unassertible in another conceptual scheme.

Therefore, the claim that the idea of conceptual schemes inevitably leads us into a vicious sort of relativism, in particular, a relativism of truth, is indefensible. In any case, underlying this claim there is an assumption with regard to relativism which is also very problematic. The assumption is that relativism is a generic category which is based on fundamental epistemological incoherence, and that all kinds of relativism – cognitive or normative – share the fatal flaw that characterises the basic doctrine. In other words, the claim is that all varieties of relativism can be conflated into one and that they are all based on one structural fallacy. That is why in the literature that is critical of relativism, one finds a good deal of reference to the ‘logic of relativism’ which is supposed to be in some self-evident way fallacious. This is reflective more of an attitude than a perception. It seems to express the sentiment that somehow relativism ought to be untenable since it is such a pernicious thing. However, even a brief look can show that it is neither so completely untenable nor so pervasively pernicious as its anxious critics imagine.

VI

The most shocking variety of relativism (to those who are shocked by it) is the relativism of truth. But the shock-value of this doctrine depends largely on a superficial

7 P.M.S. Hacker, ‘On Davidson’s Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, PhilosophicalQuarterly 46, (1996). Pp. 289–307.

8 Ian Hacking, ‘Language, Truth and Reason’, in Rationality and Relativism, ed., Maritn Hollis and Steven Lukes, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982.

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and rather distorted presentation of the doctrine. When examined closely, it shows itself to be a rather modest and largely harmless doctrine. This is not to suggest that anyone deliberately distorts this doctrine to make it look shocking. The problem is to do with the nature of truth itself or rather with the bafflingly diverse ways in which the notion of truth is presented in philosophical discourse. There would appear to be little connection between what, for instance, Davidson says about truth and what Heidegger seems to be saying about it. Even in quite ordinary terms, there is enough to confuse any discussion on truth. Take for example the statement ‘what is true for x can be false for y’. In all fairness, this appears to be— if you make allowances for the small, inevitable distortion induced by brevity—a faithful articulation of the relativistic notion of truth. But in this form, it seems to run so completely counter to our normal, commonsensical notion of truth that it looks calculated to provoke an immediate and vehement protest. The sensible thing to do is, however, not to launch into a loud protest but calmly ask what precise function the word ‘for’ is performing in this statement. If we interpret this statement as meaning that what x is rightly entitled to believe to be true can be with equal legitimacy held to be false by y, then of course we have every right to object. But no serious formulation of relativism says anything of the kind. What it says is that inasmuch as truth is a certain kind of relation between the knower and the known, when the knower is different and is differently situated cognitively, that relation also changes and therefore your truth in the sense of your cognitive relation with a certain object is not the same as mine. This is totally unexceptionable. What might be debatable is the notion of truth employed here, that is, as a relation between the knower and the known. Some philosophical traditions look at truth as a property of propositions. But within those traditions what gives a proposition the property of truth is an open question. Some thinkers answer that question in terms of correspondence with fact or something that can occupy the logical space of fact. Some others question the notion of correspondence as well as the notion of ‘fact’ and adopt a position that amounts to coherentism, and say that what makes a proposition true is its relation to other propositions. In other philosophical traditions, it is possible to look at truth in terms of the accessibility of reality, while yet other traditions ground the notion of truth in the relation between the subject’s perception and belief on the one hand and the object of knowledge on the other. Then again are traditions that treat truth in terms of the serviceability of belief. What needs to be noted is the fact that all these seemingly different ways of understanding truth are not as far removed from each other as they may appear. What separates these different views on truth is the specific aspect of truth they are concerned with. If we look at the theories of

Though, if truth be told, it happens often enough. Most of the glamorous innovations in philosophy or for

that matter in the entire field of humanities owe their attractive novelty to wilful exaggerations and distortions of perfectly ordinary doctrines, which are first presented with a breath-taking flamboyance and later tactically withdrawn into more sober versions by which time the sheer preposterousness of the new creed has won enough acolytes to constitute a fashionable movement.

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truth from this perspective, we can see that none of them—barring theories of extreme scepticism, which in any case do not (indeed cannot) have a theory of truth proper—can avoid implicitly assigning some role to the relation between the subject and the object. To put it another way, we must inescapably accept the notion of belief in the context of truth, on pain of reducing our theory of truth to an abstraction that is logically impeccable but philosophically vacuous and sterile (like solipsism). Truth must be at one level at least the property of beliefs. But what makes a belief true or false must directly or indirectly be the intentional object of that belief. This relation between beliefs and their objects determines the truth of those beliefs and must form the crux of any notion of truth. The rest – that is to say all the variations – is a matter of finding logically satisfactory ways of describing this fundamental fact. Now when we speak of objective truth, and maintain that that is the proper mode of truth, what we imply is that the relation between one particular object and one particular subject (in the strict sense of particularity, that is to say, singularity) can have only one correct value. The problems that cause so much vexation to philosophers when discussing the nature of truth do not arise from any ambiguity on this count. They arise from the fact that there is no way to identify or articulate that singular relation or the objective pole of that relation in a way that is not question-begging or viciously circular. However, this is not the issue in the context of relativism. The issue is whether the relativist claims that there can be different values for the singular relation of truth. The fact of the matter is that he does not. When he says, ‘what is true for you is false for me’, he is referring to the fact that two subjects imply two beliefs, and further that if a subject implies a viewpoint then there are also two intentional objects since phenomenologically one viewpoint can constitute only one (perceptual) object. In other words, the relativist is only rejecting the metaphysical assumption implicit in the absolutist claim according to which the intentional object must yield to a certain ‘real’ object, in the construction of which it should render itself an error. So, contrary to some characterisations of it, alethic relativism does not say, “‘snow is white’ is true for you, but it is false for me”. It only refuses to accord a metaphysically valorised status to the general statement ‘snow is white’ and insists that it is an abstraction of no consequence in the context of truth. It demands that we must speak of beliefs, and if beliefs are held by particular subjects from particular viewpoints, then there are as many beliefs as there are subject viewpoints (metaphysical objectivism will of course call them subjective viewpoints), which results in as many truth relations, each with its own correct value.

It is difficult to see what is outrageous about this doctrine. Pragmatic intersubjective considerations might require that we give some status to the constructions derived from these truth relations, but the relativist need not object to that adjustment. He will only insist that the product of such construction will only be an approximation and not really fit for the strict criteria of truth. With this caveat, he can heartily endorse any practical consensus on the acceptability of beliefs.

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If it’s all so simple, one might ask, why should there be so much confusion about alethic relativism. As I said above, the problem is one of articulating the position. It arises from the fact that what I have called the object-pole of the truth relation is difficult to represent in any coherent fashion. The easiest way would have been to invoke the notion of ‘fact’ and ask whether the relativist holds that the same fact is true for one and false for another – except that, as Davidson himself more than anyone else has shown, all talk about ‘facts’ is frustratingly problematic and in particular it is impossible to give any coherent meaning to the idea of ‘the same fact’. Facts do not have any locus independent of truth relations. So, if we insist on talking in terms of facts, all we shall be able to say is that every singular truth relation has one singular fact at one end of it, in which case there is no way we can talk about ‘the same fact’ available to two subject viewpoints. To put it in these terms, what the relativist is saying is that two subject viewpoints divided by two conceptual schemes cannot access the same fact. A Davidsonian may object to this formulation in terms of facts but he cannot say that if we must refer to facts, this is a valid way of describing the situation.

Whatever remains problematic after we have disposed of the matter in the way suggested here is actually a matter of semantic relativism, and that too in a rather trivial fashion. When semantic relativism is seen, focusing narrowly at the level of beliefs or propositions, it gives the appearance of truth-value relativism. If the meaning of the terms employed is different, then naturally the beliefs would also be different and so an appearance of relativism of truth can occur. For instance, if by ‘death’ one group means brain death and another group means the cessation of all vital activities, the statement ‘x is dead’ may have different truth-values. This is hardly a matter worthy of serious debate, as Davidson himself has said somewhere. What would be in fact a matter of serious debate and will take us to the heart of the incommensurability issue is the relation between semantic relativism and conceptual relativism. To delineate the structure of this relation, it might be useful to refer to the structuralist discourse again.

As I said in the context of Frege’s sense-reference distinction, if we accept the analysis of signs in terms of signifier, signified and referent, the signified stands for meaning understood as sense. However, when we look at a concept, we must look at it both in terms of its location within the network of signifieds as well as its relation to the referent. When seen in this fashion, it will be observed that shifts in either of the two aspects will displace the concept and rearrange its location in the totality of the sign-system. Therefore, when conceptual change occurs, if we are looking only at the change in the sense of a sign, it will appear as meaning change in the rather trivial sense. On the other hand, as I pointed out a while ago, if we look at the referent as well, we will realize that it is a conceptual change. But the analytic tradition does not invoke this concept and consequently it tends to conflate conceptual change with semantic change in the trivial sense. Even Davidson’s discussion gives evidence of being handicapped by the absence

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of the concept of referent. When we look at his use of the example of mental terms in the ‘Conceptual Scheme’ article, we can see that the absence of this concept prevents him from clearly grasping the full implications of meaning change. In this example, he refers to the alternative conceptual schemes represented by physicalist and mentalist languages and asks: if someone drops his mentalistic vocabulary and adopts a physicalistic vocabulary, how can we be sure that he has changed his theory and not just the vocabulary? He may now say ‘neural impulses’ but he may still be referring to ‘mental events’. In other words, he may have just replaced the words and retained the meanings. In a limited way, it is a valid enough point. But the question here is whether such an assumption can be generalised.

It is true that if somebody is operating with a theory of unambiguous, ontological psycho-physical parallelism, and believes that for every mental event there is a corresponding physical event, and he believes that his mental and physical vocabularies are sufficient to cover the respective events, he may switch from one vocabulary to the other without its making any difference. He has (as Davidson rightly points out) only changed the words. But meaning-change in the sense of conceptual change is not like that. When conceptual change occurs, there will emerge some inconsistency between different terms that were mutually consistent before the change. That in turn will show to which conceptual state of affairs a particular vocabulary is conforming. In other words, Davidson assumes a situation where the structure of the two theories is identical. In such a case, to put it in structuralist terms, if the structure of the signified remains the same and only the signifiers are replaced, there is no difference. It is like using a new script for the same language. But the entire point of relativism is that the two paradigms would be structurally dissimilar in a significant fashion.

The other point that becomes clearer when we see the matter in these terms is the relation between concept and world. As long as we see the relation between language and world in terms of only sense and reference, the issue of conceptual change remains unclear and problematic. But, to refer back to one of the points I made at the beginning, once we introduce the notion of ‘referent’, things can be seen in a clearer perspective. The referent corresponds to the object in the world but it is not a replica of the object since such a notion makes no sense. The referent is internal to the sign-system in the sense that the field of referents represents the way the world is organized by the sign-system. In other words, referentiality cannot break through the confines of the sign-system although it constitutes the interface between the world and the signified. Some of the confusions in the discussions on conceptual relativism arise from the fact that the referent is conflated with reality. This is not to imply however that the referent should be regarded as an impenetrable screen between the subject and the world. The fact is that human cognition is sometimes capable of breaking through the settled field of referents and registering new aspects of reality which then are taken into account by reorganizing

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the field of reality. Original observations in science and art represent this violent, disruptive phenomenon of referential displacements in the inter-subjective pool of accepted reality.

To conclude this part of the discussion, if we properly distinguish between alethic, semantic and conceptual relativism, we will be able to see that the issue of paradigmatic difference is a matter of conceptual relativism although it may have implications of the other two kinds as well. However, to give substance to this point, it will be necessary to see how exactly conceptual schemes are constituted.

VII

The most important thing to be observed in the context of the relation between two paradigms is to look at what exactly constitutes a conceptual scheme or an ontological scheme. Part of the problem in this connection, as I pointed out citing Hacker’s view, consists in treating languages and conceptual schemes as the same thing.

If we look at language as a multilevel entity, theories and the conceptual schemes they embody represent only certain levels of language. A theory in nuclear physics for instance represents a level of language quite removed from the level that relates to our ordinary perceptions of and interactions with the world. At the level of such a theory, language involves descriptions of abstractions (understood as conceptions that have been derived from concrete realities through certain systematic principles) and their mutual relations. It will involve descriptions of the world, but in a very indirect way mediated by a series of abstractions that are relatively closer to our ordinary understanding of the world. It is in this sense that we can say that a significant part of the propositions that constitute a language are not descriptions of the world but are descriptions of concepts. These latter descriptions are governed by structural principles of the framework which basically comprise constitutive and regulative assertions which are definitional and stipulative. A system of classification, as Kuhn himself emphasised, represents a good example of this. In a very significant sense, a scheme of classification is not a description; rather it is a decision about possible modes of description. In saying this, I am going beyond citing classification as an example of the plurality of conceptual schemes. I am, in other words, talking about treating language as classification in the sense of treating classification in its essential sense as a constitutive principle of language. By the essential sense of classification I mean classification understood at the ontological level as the play of identity and difference through the category of This actually amounts to a blindness to the existence of ‘discourse’. This, however, is a different though enormously important aspect of the issue.

Somewhat along the lines of Lévi-Strauss who in his early work, inspired by the ideas of Marcel Mauss, used this idea of language as arising from the drive for classification, and consequently as being governed by it as a constitutive principle.

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‘sameness’. Saussure’s principle of differentiality as governing the structure of language articulates basically this very fact—that language is constituted by the movement through which the substantive concept of sameness is distilled by recursively juxtaposing the formal notions of identity and difference. Quite simply, this is to say that different (rival) classifications—and by extension conceptual schemes—can be distinguished by the criterion of whether and to what extent the difference in one scheme parallels a difference in the other. Incommensurability is the accumulation and complexfication of this structural movement. In any case, returning to the immediate context, what I want to emphasise is that inasmuch as classification can be understood as a proposal consisting of a schema and definitions of the different concepts that constitute it, it admits of a plurality of proposals. It may be argued that not all such proposals (classifications) can be equally valid, or that they cannot capture the structure of the plant kingdom adequately. But that is a different matter. What is pertinent here is the crucial fact that the (onto)logical structure of classification as an organisation of sameness/difference determines the ultimate relativity of its basis, and consequently the possibility of its plurality follows from that structurality as a corollary. This fact, in my view, offers sufficient basis to hold the distinction between scheme and content. As I mentioned earlier, in saying this, I am not necessarily implying that Davidson’s rejection of the scheme-content dichotomy is totally wrong. There is a level of language where his position is correct. That is the level of ontological categories.

Beneath its linguistic and cultural diversity, mankind is one species and has one particular cognitive relation with its environment. Its epistemology including its language must be, as Quine pointed out, grounded in that natural unity. At that level, our language is singular, in the sense that the basic ontology in terms of which we can see, know, understand or imagine, not only the world but being itself, must be one. Our sense of the basic units of reality, our sense of the furniture of the world, our grasp of the basic constitution of being, as well as our cognitive equipment along with its attendant epistemic software are singular, and since all this is built into our very consciousness, there is no way we can hold it at a distance from our cognitive selves so as to be able to see it or meaningfully describe it. What it is for something to be ‘true’ or for something to ‘be’, for something to be a ‘thing’ or an ‘event’, or for something to be a ‘part’ of something else: these kinds of things are part of our fundamental cognitive structure. To say even this is already misleading because it implies a distinction between our cognitive structure and the world whereas such a distinction is not possible at this level. That is why at this level there cannot be different conceptions of these things, no matter how different our conceptual frameworks may be at other levels. Mankind can have only one concept of ‘truth’, only one concept of ‘being’ and so on. This also explains why there is a vague but distinctive sense of deep circularity about philosophical engagements with these concepts. It is at this level that it is absurd to imagine the scheme-content

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dichotomy. We just cannot create enough of a gap between the two to even refer to them clearly. This is the level at which Davidson’s claim is totally correct.

But obviously, when Kuhn or anyone else is talking about alternative paradigms or conceptual schemes, particularly in the context of incommensurability, the reference is not to the basic ontology but to the discursive structures we forge on the platform of that fundamental ontology.

There is another important aspect of the emergence of differences of conceptual scheme on what I have called the platform of fundamental ontology. How we understand this aspect depends on what we conceive to be the concepts that constitute our fundamental ontology. Davidson’s statement about ‘the close relation between language and the attribution of attitudes such as belief, desire and intention’ is correct if taken in the sense of representing the categories. In that sense, we would not know how to recognize a language devoid of representation of these attitudes. But, it would be a mistake to conflate the categories of belief, desire and intention with particular beliefs, desires and intentions. For instance our ability to understand particular beliefs is not a necessary condition for our recognizing a certain behaviour as linguistic. What we need to recognize in a language are the categories. It is perfectly possible to recognise something as a belief without being able to apprehend what sort of belief it is. Therefore, Davidson’s claim that an untranslatable language is not a language or that there is no sense to the statement ‘it is a language but it is not translatable into our language’ is correct only with reference to language understood as an ontological scheme. In other words, if by language we mean the structure of ontological categories and the descriptions immediately constructed out of them, certainly we cannot even imagine in what sense something is a language if it is untranslatable, that is, if its categoreal structure (including perhaps the notion of categoreal structure) bears no resemblance to ours. I think this is what Wittgenstein had in mind when he said, in the context of forms of life, that if tigers could speak a human language, even then we could not understand them.

What I am trying to say here is that our fundamental concepts comprise the tools, procedures and criteria used, not for describing the world, but for organising our sense of the world. In other words, the kind of constitutive, regulative categories that comprise the software of the mind are not of the same level as differences of language—understood as conceptual frameworks—which represent different organizations of reality using the same species-specific categories. If this view is correct, then there is no question of deciding primacy between mental categories and modes of linguistic organization. The Davidsonian objection to this view however would be that this distinction itself is invalid. But this objection is, I think based on a mistake about the structure of conceptual schemes.

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According to Davidson, the main problem is that of describing precisely what conceptual scheme and reality are, and to delineate their mutual relationship.9 This is the crux of Davidson’s objection to the idea of conceptual schemes.

He begins by stating that we can see the relation in question in terms of 1. Conceptual scheme organizing reality, 2. conceptual scheme fitting reality, 3. conceptual scheme organizing experience and 4. conceptual scheme fitting experience (or variations of these relationships). His claim is that in none of these cases can we get a coherent notion of conceptual schemes, particularly in the form favoured by conceptual relativists.

I think Davidson is right with regard to the incoherence of the formulation of the last two relations. However, these four kinds of relation are not interdependent. The invalidity of the last two relations does not invalidate the first two relations. So I shall not discuss the latter but confine myself to the first two relations.

As for the first relation, Davidson’s point is that ‘organization’ means rearrangement of the contents of something, and therefore we can make sense of a difference of arrangement only against a background of agreement on the objects that comprise the contents. There seem to be two points here. First is the point that if there is no commonality at all, then we cannot even identify the object as that under consideration. It is like someone in Lewis Carroll saying that the poem is wrong from beginning to end. If it is ‘totally wrong’, then it is just a different poem. If everything about something is different, then it is not the ‘same thing’ for any purposes. But here too there can be ways of identifying the poem, may be through its title, which will enable us to say that it is wrong from beginning to end. Similarly, our intuitive sense of sharing the same world gives us the purchase to say that someone is organizing the world altogether differently.

The other sense, perhaps a less important sense, in which Davidson finds this relationship trivial is on the basis of the assumption that when there is agreement about the identity of the objects being organized, organization is only a matter of rearrangement. But in the case of the formation of concepts ‘organisation’ does not mean rearrangement. It implies integration and the resultant emergence of more complex entities.

Next Davidson takes up the relation between language and ‘experience’, and says that similar difficulties arise there also, pointing out that language cannot possibly organize only feelings, sensations etc and not organize physical, external objects. This seems to assume an unnecessarily narrow notion of experience. If we take a phenomenological view, for instance, we can talk about the field of consciousness whose contents will be sensations and feelings as well as stones and trees. Their mutual

9 . Ibid., 137.

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organisational relations could be complex, but they all are part of the contents of consciousness. It is not clear why we should not employ such a notion of experience (even without recourse to the other aspects of the phenomenological view). In fact, the field of consciousness or frame of experience understood in this way offers the additional advantage of making it easier to locate the field of referents to which I referred a while ago. The organization of the frame of experience represents the field of referents. And as I said above, how much overlap there is between a referent and an object (that we can identify through ordinary perception and common-sense organization of the world) depends on how complex and abstract the referent is and how complex the phenomenon to which it refers. In other words, the higher a concept is located in the hierarchy of a paradigm, the more it is defined increasingly in terms of its relation to other concepts rather than its referential relation to objects. Therefore, I think a more correct way of conceiving of paradigms would be as hierarchical structures with vertically increasing levels of complexity and abstraction, by virtue of which the concepts and propositions at the more complex levels are mutually closer than they are to the ordinary reality that is available to simple perception. Another way of putting this matter could be to say that as we move up towards the more complex levels of a paradigm, we find that coherence rather than direct correspondence constitutes the criterion of truth and validity.

As must be evident by now, I have been making a set of assumptions about our cognitive relation with the world in my account of the diversity of paradigms, and I have invoked some of those assumptions at various points in the discussion. Now let me state the entire set of those assumptions in the form a model of our cognitive relation with the world. It is a simple—though probably problematic—model, and stated in the form of a set of proposals, would be, briefly, as follows.

We must treat the (broadly Kantian) assumption of some sort of ontological grid built into the consciousness of mankind is inescapable. We must assume this grid to be constituted by a network of intuitions that are categoreal rather than substantive. That is to say, it would consist of concepts that fundamentally provide a cognitive grip on anything whatsoever. These concepts would be the basic categories in terms of which alone our species can think or perceive. We must further assume that all the primary cognitive activity necessarily occurs within the frame of this grid, and that the products of this primary cognitive activity comprise the intersubjective corpus of knowledge that constitutes the ‘world’. Even at this level of primary intersubjective knowledge, we must assume diversity to be possible since the categories that constitute the ontological grid are by way of rules of the game that permit different kinds of strategies. However, we must not imagine the intersubjective corpus to be a homogenous field but must assume it to be a heterogeneous as well as dynamic structure that enables the formation of complex concepts and theories. It would be useful to conceive this formation as hierarchical in the sense that there will be a series of levels of abstraction, at each level the abstractions

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integrating into new conceptual and perceptual units. We must understand the dynamism of this structure in terms of the frequent changes occurring in the entire framework due to new inputs which constitute the progress of knowledge. To envision this structure in terms of an image, we might think of the entire cognitive situation in terms of hierarchies of increasing complexity and abstraction grounded in the ontological grid. Then, we can imagine a number of such hierarchies such that at the base, close to the level of ordinary sensory perception and common sense ideas, there would be a great amount of overlap between different pyramids of knowledge systems. But as the abstraction and complexity increases, the possibility of diversity of knowledge systems increases. When we look across from the top of one hierarchy to the tip of another hierarchy, we may find a gap such that, we find no common ground or rather we find no conceptual bridge to connect the complex cognitive units of the two knowledge systems. We must assume translatability at that level to be a complex affair, where you cannot directly seek equivalence, the reason being that the concepts would be deeply embedded in the complex theoretical structures that comprise these levels. At these levels, any assertion would make sense only with reference to the theoretical structures of which it is an integral part. To put it in slightly different terms, the truth of assertions in such cases will be not a matter of simple, isolated correspondence but a matter of theoretical mediation. Further, adopting the language of structuralism, we might say that the referent retreats deeper into the sign-system at these levels. The simple identity or at any rate overlap between objects and referents that is obtained at the levels close to the intersubjective corpus is not obtained at the higher levels of complexity and abstraction. It is as if, at that level, the referent refers backs more to the sign-system than it refers to the object.

IX

Now, to recapitulate the main points of this discussion, we might say that it becomes necessary to invoke incommensurability when we are dealing with the interactions between conceptual frameworks that constitute the higher or complex levels of the hierarchy of language. Thinkers such as Davidson tend to imagine the cognitive field to be a homogeneous field made up of similarly structured concepts. To use a simile, they conceive of concepts along the line of bricks. But concepts are more like components of a machine: some are simple and some are complex, some are parts and some are parts of parts; and there are concepts that are substantive and some that are relational, some that constitute ontological categories and some that constitute the logical principles with the help of which theories are organised. Concepts form hierarchies and are embedded to different degrees in theoretical contexts. When we do not see this feature of concepts, we find the notion of a variably organized world implausible. But when we focus on the structure of language in the manner we have discussed here, and see the heterogeneous structurality of concepts, we can see how the possible plurality of organisation of concepts at different levels leads to plurality of paradigms or complex

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frameworks of description and explanation which are not coterminous with language but exist within it.

X

I began this article by insisting that the phenomenon of incommensurability is a common feature visible in trans-discursive contexts across many domains. I have tried to argue that we must acknowledge the salience of this phenomenon and try to develop or revive the conceptual apparatus necessary for dealing with it. To give just an idea of my perception of the importance of this issue, let me mention at random some instances of the situations when incommensurability is obtained in a significant fashion.

One of the most plausible and interesting instances of incommensurability is, I think, found among medical systems. It would be no exaggeration to say that they exemplify almost all the features relating to the question of plurality of paradigms and their mutual incommensurability to such an extent that they may very well serve as models for a study of the essential structure of this phenomenon. They exhibit descriptive as well as normative differences that are anchored in physical reality as well as subjective experience, so that they cannot be treated as arbitrary creations yet they display a degree of incommensurability that is striking.

Another domain where incommensurability is in evidence is of philosophy itself. Philosophical traditions exhibit a discursive divide that is nothing less than incommensurabe. In fact, in the domain of philosophy I think incommensurability cuts deeper than the discursive divide of different traditions or schools. It seems to me that the divide reaches down to the level of fundamental perspectives and not just a matter of chosen objectives or preferred methodology. I believe that the history of philosophy both of the West and the East exemplifies this fact. What divides Plato from Aristotle or Vedantins from the Charvakas cannot be understood except in terms of a fundamental difference of intellectual inclination which results in serious incommensurability. Not to see this fact is to miss the real dynamics of the dialectical development of philosophy. It would be a mistake to imagine this to be a matter of misreading understood in a certain sense. It is rather a matter of selective sensitivity to certain elements of fundamental ontology or the orientation of perspective on that ontology. The holism-individualism/atomism debates as they are enacted in different domains illustrate this point. Take the central proposition in these debates: ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts.’ This proposition is an example of the attempt to articulate a belief or axiom belonging to one ontological orientation in the language of a different orientation. The subject of this proposition comes from one ontological orientation while the predicate comes from the other orientation. As long as we are not alert to the kind of divide that is

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sought to be bridged through such propositions, we cannot hope to make sense of what is significant in different traditions of philosophy and integrate our understanding in a more meaningful way.

Take for that matter the divide between the expressivist and designativist approaches to language. As Charles Taylor has pointed out, the entire history of man’s efforts to understand language, up to and including contemporary theories of language, can be seen under these rubrics – language as expression and language as indication. Taylor draws attention to this very interesting fact as to how the divide between these two approaches is so fundamental as to preclude any dialogue, leave alone a reconciliation or synthesis10.

This constitutes one of the most significant cases of incommensurability in the history of ideas.

At a more specific level in the context of language itself—and not unrelated to the expressive-designative divide—we may take the notion of ‘referent’ and see how it constitutes the point of incommensurability between the Davidsonian view of language and the structuralist view of Saussure.

Similarly, given the fact that the difficult relation between religion and politics, between the secular domain and a domain which we might call in some sense the domain of faith, seems to determine the world situation today, I think it would be worthwhile to pay attention to the kind of incommensurability that is obtained, for instance between religion and what might be called the domain of Reason. To take a single but pivotal concept, the notion of ‘sacredness’ represents one of the crucial points of incommensurability between the two domains. It is easy to see how a complacency about the translatability of this concept into a secular language or a trivialization of its untranslatability has deep implications.

There are many other domains in which a similar sensitivity to the incommensurability arising from differences of situatedness or embodiment in the world is of enormous importance. We cannot achieve much harmony in the world by just pretending to ‘celebrate’ difference unless we are alert to the implications of that difference and develop the discursive tools to engage with them.

Let me conclude by drawing attention to the notion of ‘differend’ developed by the French postmodernist philosopher Jean-François Lyotard as one of the ways in which the

Those familiar with Derrida’s work will recall his engagement with this issue in the context of Husserl’s use of the expression-indication dichotomy, and can see how a major part of his work is concerned with deconstructing such dichotomies.

10 Charles Taylor, ‘Language and Human Nature’, in Interpreting Politics, ed. Michael T. Gibbons, Basil Blackwell,

Oxford, 1987.

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basic issue of incommensurability can come up in a significant way in socio-political contexts of great import. Let me give Lyotard’s own definition of this concept:

As distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a cause of conflict between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy. However, applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to settle their differend s though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if if neither side admits this rule)… A wrong results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse.11

I think it would be a mistake to treat Lyotard’s point as merely just another instance of normative relativism. Lyotard is drawing attention here to an important dimension of incommensurability with grave implications in all domains of our social existence. If we do not take this insight into account, we will never know in how many cases justice did not have a chance even to appear on the scene, even as the rejected option. If no other, this should count as sufficient reason to take the phenomenon of incommensurability seriously and try to re-theorise the concept as best as we can, in order to bring it back into currency. At any rate, that is what in a very sketchy way I have done in this paper.

Syed A. Sayeed

Visiting Professor

(Ford Foundation Fellowship)

Centre for Cultural Studies

EFL University

Hyderabad

11. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,

1988.

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