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

What do you mean?

What do you mean? — Apustimelogist

The later part explains it more.

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

Can I point to Carlo Rovelli, Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look, which I think @Moliere pointed out to me. It is a quite excellent example of where Kuhn and Feyerabend go somewhat astray.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4057.pdf

I show that Aristotelian physics is a correct and non-intuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids), in the same technical sense in which Newton theory is an approximation of Einstein’s theory. Aristotelian physics lasted long not because it became dogma, but because it is a very good empirically grounded theory. The observation suggests some general considerations on inter-theoretical relations. — Rovelli

Rovelli shows Aristotle is not at all incommensurate with Newtonian physics, by translating him.

Brilliant.

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

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

All of this is grounded in nada unless empirical when discussing real human language. If humans are animals, which I believe they are, then it should be empirically based research that the theories are deriving and I mentioned some more theoretical biologists/anthropologists/psychologists that might have a theory more grounded in that. Why should it be taken on a priori grounds that are not tied to research. We don't do that with other processes that derive from nature. Language is for sure a higher order evolutionary trait, and tied with general cognitive evolution, but that is still the sciences.

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

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

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

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

I'm sorry, something must be lost in translation between us - both ways presumably — Apustimelogist

Perhaps incommensurability :D.

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

I'm writing on Davidson's theory on language, not on his theory about Kuhn, so I guess I meant to refer to that, or thought you were referring to that more directly. Davidson was using incommensurability also on language with conceptual schemas, etc. I am saying, rather than theories of language that are not based on empirical research, we should be looking more at what empirical avenues say about language, not a priori theories of it. Michael Tomasello or Terrence Deacon would be more empirically based, for example. It is theoretical because it is putting multiple empirical models into a cohesive whole, but it is based on empirical models more-or-less. Being that human language is derived from human capacities as a certain animal, in a certain environment, that seems to be appropriate.

Its very clear that Aristotle's world view is totally incompatible with the world views of later physicists. — Apustimelogist

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

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

The heart of the incommensurability thesis after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the idea that certain kinds of translation are impossible. — SEP, Thomas Kuhn

Hmm.

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

You've made this claim a few times now. What do they have to say about incommensurability? What's the evidence?

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

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

I think Kuhn means more like establishing a one-to-one correspondence between concepts. — Apustimelogist

This would indeed be the best way to salvage Kuhn’s argument. I’m sure Davidson’s insistence on the co-variance of concepts and language was, in part, meant to moot the point. But do you agree with this statement from Davidson?: “If conceptual schemes aren’t associated with languages in this way [that is, strict co-variance], the original problem is needlessly doubled, for then we would have to imagine the mind, with its ordinary categories, operating with a language with its ordinary structure.” What do you think Kuhn might reply to this?

So incommensurable schema would be incommensurable sorting of the same stuff. They must be about the very same stuff. — Banno

Yes, that’s the key issue. Davidson says it very simply and effectively: “Strawson’s many imagined worlds [the first, relatively harmless metaphor] are seen or heard or described from the same point of view; Kuhn’s one world is seen from different points of view.” And the argument is that you literally can’t conceptualize “one world,” aka the very same stuff, in this way.

Very helpful analysis. A lot of people do seem to overlook or forget that Davidson doesn’t dispute conceptual relativism on the grounds that conceptual schemes can’t be relative, but rather on the grounds that the “very idea” can be shown to be either incoherent or contradictory. He’s not trying to fall back on some traditional/foundationalist One True scheme/content distinction.

I’m not sure I’m with you on the T-sentence interpretation. Why does the translation have to be “IFF”? Wouldn’t a more modal understanding be closer to what Davidson means?: “s can be true if p” We arrive at the same conclusion – that it’s incoherent – but without claiming that only being p renders s true.

The section in Wang on WMT vs CMT is by far the weakest in the paper. We could exercise charity ourselves here and agree to ignore it!

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

Isnt the upshot here, the concept so difficult for many to grasp, that conceptual schemes don’t represent a pre-given world but enact a world? That is to say, the reason we can’t link different schemes back to the one ‘same’ world is because schemes introduce new elements into the world. Rather than funneling back to a unitary source, they are themselves the sources of new differentiations, new objects and worlds of meaning.

I love that paper. It's so incredibly good.

But also note how in talking against incommensurability Rovelli does not shy from "conceptual structure" -- that's still a working metaphor in trying to describe knowledge. So he's not exactly a friend to Davidson either.

It's been a minute since I've read that Davidson paper, and I'm finding myself more able to respond this time around. So I'm going to post first my response to Davidson, then go through Wang as a way of participating.

Feyerabend is quoted by Davidson:

Our argument against meaning invariance is simple and clear. It proceeds from the fact that usually some of the principles involved in the determinations of the meanings of older theories or points of view are inconsistent with the new . . . theories. It points out that it is natural to resolve this contradiction by eliminating the troublesome . . . older principles, and to replace them
by principles, or theorems, of a new ... theory. And it concludes by showing that such a procedure will also lead to the elimination of the old meanings.

I'd say there is such a thing as Kuhnian loss through meaning change as the scientific practices change -- "phlogiston" doesn't have the same meaning now that it used to because we don't use it as a serious scientific concept, but rather we use it as an example of how science undergoes changes and abandons concepts. We don't need to go along with Davidson's rendition of conceptual schemes as intertranslatable languages, and treating language meaning as something an individual can "check" strikes me as the wrong way since language is a collective practice. But I can't help but note that this "wrong way" is a common way of thinking so there's still something good about the paper's argument -- it forces a person to make sense of conceptual relativism while making the distinction explicit (be it scheme-content, or something else).

I find historicism adequate to the task of understanding concepts -- it's the historical method, as applied to texts, which allows us to differentiate between concepts, at least (I'm less certain about "schemes", though -- I'd rather talk about the structure of an argument or a philosophy than a conceptual scheme). And rather than Saturnian and English I'd just note that even German and English have problems of intertranslatability, and that this is commonly known among translators as a kind of irresolvable problem. Against the extensional emphasis I put forward poetry translation as a case where we are able to differentiate meanings such that we can partially translate one language into another language, even if we don't know how it is we do this. But then if we have an example of partial translation (and so the case against partial meaning translation can be set aside as being factually wrong), and a method by which we can differentiate concepts, then the question of how it is we're able to make the claim for conceptual-relativism is made explicit and doesn't rely upon an implicit scheme-content dualism: Just as we can learn English and German and translate meanings between languages so we can learn concepts which differ, and it is through that knowledge, rather than a criterion or a duality, that we are able to judge the meanings of sentences. Then it's just a matter of being acquainted with more concepts -- having more knowledge -- which would allow one to make a judgment -- one that could be false! -- that scientists are at least using different concepts (if not inhabiting different worlds -- being-in-the-world, perhaps, but even that doesn't follow by necessity).

And if we can do that then it seems that Davidson's objections are addressed, albeit not with the conceptual tools he chose to set it out with. We abandon scheme-content, and make the heady and exotic doctrine explicit. The question for me would be whether this still counts as a conceptual relativism, or not? In addressing Davidson's concerns do I, by that addressing, make conceptual schemes and relativism to conceptual schemes moot, or at least reducible to the predicate "...is true"?

The problem I feel is that while I doubt schemes, I don't doubt it on the basis of a criteria for translation due to even mundane examples of translation being known to not be able to fully translate meaning. In a way I'm accusing Davidson of having a philosophically pretentious theory of meaning in relation to how we actually use these words.

But I also doubt our ability to tabulate schemes very effectively such that we can make the relations between the elements of a scheme explicit. It seems to me that each time we try to render such a scheme it comes out slightly different -- or, at least, the meanings of sentences we use in describing such a scheme changes with each iteration, and so the task of articulating a scheme becomes incompletable, or at least artificial as we decide to hold some meanings constant in order to specify relations between them. At which point I begin to wonder-- why even call it a scheme if we are unable to articulate a structure without fiat? Why not just "a set of concepts", rather than a scheme, with the attendant difficulty of specifying what "concepts" means?

***

But now onto Wang's paper, which I've never read until now. So it's fresh, and therefore more of a first reaction to the paper (but I didn't want to post before having read the paper, so here it is)

I'm pleased to find Wang's statement:

A radical conceptual relativist can respond to Davidson on two fronts: either to defend the translatability criterion or to separate conceptual relativism from the Quinean relativism as Davidson construes it by removing the translatability criterion out of the equation. The first route is a well-worn path that I will not belabor here. The second route, for me, is more effective and will be discussed in detail in section 3.

Mostly out of vanity as it gets along with how I've managed to think through relativism in light of Davidson, and we seem to agree that separating conceptual relativism from Quinean relativism is an effective strategy for making the case.

I found this paragraph to be similar to my strategy above talking about English and German:

However, neither natural languages per se nor scientific languages construed as sentential languages can be identical with conceptual schemes. A natural language per se such as English or Chinese is in no sense a conceptual scheme. Does any conceptual relativist really seriously think that all Chinese would inherit a unique conceptual scheme different from the scheme that all English speakers are supposed to possess simply because they speak different natural languages? A natural language is not a theory. A natural language like Chinese or English does not schematize experience, nor even metonymically predicts, fits, or faces reality. Although part of a natural language, i.e. its grammar, does in some sense determine the logical space of possibilities (Whorf, 1956), it is the theoretical assertions made in the language that predict and describe reality and in so doing assert that which logical spaces are occupied in the world. Furthermore, a natural language is not even a totality of beliefs. It is absurd to assume that people who speak the same natural language would have the same belief system.

And this line of argument to get along with my notion of historicism being adequate to the task of differentiating concepts:

My major reservation with the Quinean notion of conceptual schemes is not just about many theoretical difficulties it faces, but rather with its basic assumption QT; for it does not square with observations of many celebrated conceptual confrontations between opposing conceptual schemes revealed in the history of natural sciences and cultural studies, especially those under the name of incommensurability. Examples include: Ptolemaic astronomy versus Copernican astronomy; Newtonian mechanics versus Einsteinian relativistic mechanics; Lavoisier's oxygen theory versus Priestley's phlogiston theory of combustion; Galenic medical theory versus Pasteurian medical theory; and so on. These familiar conceptual confrontations are, to me, not confrontations between two conceptual schemes with different distributions of truth-values over their assertions, but rather confrontations between two scientific languages with different distributions of truth-value status13 over their sentences due to incompatible metaphysical presuppositions. The advocate of an alien conceptual scheme not only does not hold the same notion of truth as ours, but also does not agree with us on the truth-value status of the sentences in question. These scheme innovations, in the end, turn not on differences in truth-values (different truth-schemes), but on whether or not the sentences in the alternative conceptual scheme have truth-values (different truth-value schemes).

I'd say that these arguments highlighted here are well and good enough in that they highlight an underlying assumption which a relativist does not need to accept, which in turn gives room for the defender of conceptual schemes to come up with a different way to speak about conceptual relativism -- but Wang goes on to articulate a competitor all the same to give some credence to the idea that there are other ways of talking about conceptual schemes.

I found this potent:

. On the contrary, it is exactly due to the abandonment of the concept-neutral content and the denial of a fixed and absolute scheme-content distinction that turns Kantian conceptual absolutism upside down and thus makes conceptual relativism possible.

A good bit of philosophy is accepting the conclusions of another philosopher, but then working out a different or opposite set of implications for that conclusion. His use of a thick/thin-experience distinction is good in that it gives a believable basis for thinking through concepts as relative: it's our thick experience of the world, the very one Davidson seems to care about in his closing remarks, that gives rise to the belief we are "in different worlds" due to the beliefs or concepts which shape our thick experience.

And I found this insightful:

Although Davidson realizes correctly that scheme-content dualism could well survive after the fall of the analytic-synthetic distinction, he is wrong to allege, ‘giving up the analytic-synthetic distinction has not proven a help in making sense of conceptual relativism’ (1974, p. 189). On the contrary, it is exactly due to the denial of a fixed, absolute analytic-synthetic distinction that makes alternative conceptual schemes possible. Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction (Quine, 1951) leads to abandoning the rigid distinction between concept, meaning, or language on the one hand and belief, thought, or theory on the other. It is no longer a novel idea today that all concepts themselves are empirical and none a priori; concepts we deploy upon experience are themselves the products of empirical inquires. In other words, concepts are theory-laden, fact committal, and change with theories. Accordingly, conceptual schemes change and evolve with corresponding theories. Thus, the Kantian absolute conceptual scheme gives away to relative, alternative conceptual schemes.

In that he's making way for a post-Kantian conceptual relativism that makes sense in light of Quine. That's a great way of rendering the very idea at least coherent.

... I find this bit at the end relying upon evolutionary theory odd:

We can safely assume, based on Darwinian evolution theory, that there are some basic experiential concepts shared by human cultures and societies.16 In this sense, they are global or universal.

Because I don't think we can safely assume that, nor should we assume it, and even more so I don't think we need this assumption to make the case for a fuzzy distinction between scheme-content. And, even more, it would seem we'd have less reason to believe in conceptual relativism if we had some basic experiential concepts which are shared! If, in articulating a relativism we end up saying there's something the same between us it almost sounds like we're conceding the point to Davidson, that we do share concepts, and its this basis of shared concepts which makes it possible for us to articulate difference? Perhaps the difference here is one of degree, though -- which shouldn't be downplayed because sometimes the degree can at least be intense, and perhaps intense enough to want to use the word "radical" -- but it's at least similar to the notion that we have some kind of agreement from which we can articulate disagreement, putting the conceptual relativist in a shakey position if we want to express ourselves in terms of criteria.

The section in Wang on WMT vs CMT is by far the weakest in the paper. We could exercise charity ourselves here and agree to ignore it! — J

I'm not so sure, here. One of the things that's nice is that it's an actual example. And differences or changes in meaning are frequently the way this thought works out, and here what's nice is that Wang points out that the difference of meaning isn't one of distributing "...is true" across sentences, but rather is a different kind of difference. Whether we ought to call this a radical or incommensurable difference I'm still on the fence about -- but I can at least recognize that the kind of meaning Wang is talking about isn't the same as Davidson's project of translation through truth. It's whether a sentence counts as truth-functional at all to a practice that marks the difference, rather than a distribution of truth-values.

I find historicism adequate to the task of understanding concepts -- it's the historical method, as applied to texts, which allows us to differentiate between concepts, at least (I'm less certain about "schemes", though -- I'd rather talk about the structure of an argument or a philosophy than a conceptual scheme). And rather than Saturnian and English I'd just note that even German and English have problems of intertranslatability, and that this is commonly known among translators as a kind of irresolvable problem. Against the extensional emphasis I put forward poetry translation as a case where we are able to differentiate meanings such that we can partially translate one language into another language, even if we don't know how it is we do this — Moliere

I'm a historicist too.

Translators of poetry roughly divide, in my mind, between literal translators; partial translators; and those like Robert Lowell who provide 'imitations'. The last of these seem to me to be on the edge of saying that a language is a conceptual scheme.

A case-study outside the history of science would be Brian Friel's play 'Translations'. In the early 19th Century in a village in Ireland, there's a confrontation between the Irish, including the learned Irish, and English surveyors who have come here to 'map' the area. In performance, while the actors mostly use English (with a sprinkling of Latin and greek by the Irish), it is understood by the audience that the Irish and English are speaking separate languages and don't understand each other.

Conceptual problems involve recognition of a language: when the Irish speak in Latin, the bluff English don't recognise that it's a learned, separate-from-Irish language; they don't recognise that the native 'hedge-school' is even a school because it's not official.

The problems also emerge in the naming of places in two interlinked ways. One is that for the mapper, each place can only have one name, so they can't accept the fact that (as in any place, informally) most places have more than one name, plus that the area defined by that name is variable. Two is that the English are imposing an English or Anglicised name on a historically-derived Irish name, and insisting on it. The imposition of the supposed requirements of a technology, and the imposition of simple political power, create a different conceptual set of spaces: I'll be honest, I'm uncertain here whether 'scheme' is a useful or discardable word to express the basis of the supposed concepts involved.

You've made this claim a few times now. What do they have to say about incommensurability? What's the evidence? — Banno

The way forward from there then seems to be learning empirically, scientifically exactly why and how people behave, use language, learn, perceive, how brains work, etc. I've actually always thought these philosophers (Kuhn too) feel like they resonate amicably with the brain and mind sciences. — Apustimelogist

Kuhn's theory about paradigm shifts and incommensurability is a meta theory about scientific revolutions. It is philosophy of science in that sense that it is about science. However, it is not a theory of science. Davidson's theory of language seems to be an attempt at something that should be in the realm of science. That is to say, how much does Davidson's theory conform to scientific understanding of how language evolved? By scientific I mean, observable, experimental, and fits in with previous scientific framework of genetics, anthropology, neurobiological, and the rest. If it doesn't, it can be considered an interesting a priori theory of language, but is that the right approach? I am saying, for language - why it exists, how it exists, and the like, it should be tied to those empirical approaches. The more we get away from that and talk about things like "concepts" in a vacuum or "correspondence" in a vacuum, we are getting away from ways to tackle the question to mountains built on mountains built on sand. Chomsky is a good example of this in many ways. He doesn't seem to care about the empiricism except as an afterthought to he his premade ideas about "minimalist project" or anything else.

I do get the point that philosophy can be used as tools for scientists to enhance their hypotheses, but that still entails engaging with the science itself. Here is a good example of someone who does take some ideas from philosophy of language but uses empirical research to test hypothesis and refine theories, creating a more grounded understanding in situ of language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tomasello

So in regards specifically "incommensurability" as far as it is a problem (is it? or is it Davidson's problem), the research should guide the way to how translatable people's "schemas" are, what "schemas" (conceptual schemes), would even truly "mean" in any evolutionary, biological sense, and how to resolve such problems. The science would guide the way. It would be the starting point, the substance of the debate, and lead to more ideas about how to find better conclusions within that scientific framework. More theoretical, but possibly more satisfying, would then synthesize various findings from the scientific disciplines and make a more comprehensive, if yet more theoretical framework for which could possibly be the case, with the caveat, that at a future point, the science can always destroy this theoretical framework. That is to say, the framework has to be concrete enough to be disproven, but comprehensive enough to try to answer the "big questions". If it is so abstract and lofty as to never be disproven, then it is not a framework, but an elusive moving target that can always encompass anything, and thus says nothing meaningful.

And the argument is that you literally can’t conceptualize “one world,” aka the very same stuff, in this way. — J

Yep.

Why does the translation have to be “IFF”? — J

Mostly because that is what Davidson uses elsewhere, generating a theory of meaning.

A lot of people do seem to overlook or forget that Davidson doesn’t dispute conceptual relativism on the grounds that conceptual schemes can’t be relative, but rather on the grounds that the “very idea” can be shown to be either incoherent or contradictory. — J

Thank you. it's a missed subtly. Well, not all that subtle, since it is explicit in the last few paragraphs. Perhaps folk don't read that far?

...the reason we can’t link different schemes back to the one ‘same’ world is because schemes introduce new elements into the world. — Joshs

Yes, or rather,

...what is said in one scheme is incommensurable with what is said in some other scheme, since any standard that might be used to relate one scheme to another is itself part of one scheme or another. — Banno

Schema include the standard by which they are to be assessed.

Thank you for your substantive and thoughtful contribution. I'm not sure I've followed your case, so I'll make a few more general points, in order to "test the water", and see how far apart we are.

It may be true that "phlogiston" doesn't have the same meaning now that it used to". If so, it is worth drawing attention to our realising that this is the case. We've moved beyond the incommensurability of the duck- people versus the rabbit-people to the "transcendental" realisation of the duck-rabbit.

This capacity for "transcendence" (I don't like that word...) permits one to take on an historicist approach. So either one is parochial in taking on the mantle of one conceptual scheme in order to asses other; or one takes a position outside of the various conceptual schemes in order to assess them - an impossibility; or one agrees with Davidson in rejecting the notion of conceptual schema.

If we adopt the historicist perspective, then we must look at the situation at the time Davidson was writing. Davidson's philosophically pretentious theory of meaning was necessary in order to break through the wall built by Feyerabend and Kuhn by providing a formal backbone to his argument.

Further, if we take an historicist approach we must deal with the differing situations not just of Kuhn and Davidson, but of Davidson and Wang. Wang will not be addressing the same paper that Davidson wrote.

Candidly, that's all motherhood and apple pie handwaving. Can give us some substantive contribution from Tomasello relevant to this discussion?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For instance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He also claims:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've read that twice, and I can hear you thinking from here, but can you tell me were all this went? What have you decided? It seems to be something like that words can be translated between incommensurate paradigms, but that interpretations cannot be...?

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

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

Precisely the opposite, aha!

(Quoting myself quoting IEP)

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

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

So you end up with two commensurate theories yet with incommensurate terms? How?

It may be true that "phlogiston" doesn't have the same meaning now that it used to". If so, it is worth drawing attention to our realising that this is the case. We've moved beyond the incommensurability of the duck- people versus the rabbit-people to the "transcendental" realisation of the duck-rabbit.

This capacity for "transcendence" (I don't like that word...) permits one to take on an historicist approach. So either one is parochial in taking on the mantle of one conceptual scheme in order to asses other; or one takes a position outside of the various conceptual schemes in order to assess them - an impossibility; or one agrees with Davidson in rejecting the notion of conceptual schema.

If we adopt the historicist perspective, then we must look at the situation at the time Davidson was writing. Davidson's philosophically pretentious theory of meaning was necessary in order to break through the wall built by Feyerabend and Kuhn by providing a formal backbone to his argument.

Further, if we take an historicist approach we must deal with the differing situations not just of Kuhn and Davidson, but of Davidson and Wang. Wang will not be addressing the same paper that Davidson wrote. — Banno

Yes! And no! :D

Let's see... the historicist approach, as I understand the method, has no need for transcendence as much as situatedness. A historian is aware that they are coming from a perspective so much so that their are multiple theories of history and you choose one to write within. So rather than a transcendent view from outside of history the historian writes from where they are, at least in modern historiography. This is why multiple histories of the same event are important for understanding an event -- there are many points of view which must be elaborated upon in order to get a full sense of that event.

But, yes! I agree that in adopting the historicist perspective we must look at the situation at the time Davidson wrote, and I agree that Wang is not responding to the exact same paper which Davidson wrote -- the question I have is, why was it necessary to break through the wall of Feyerabend and Kuhn?

I think Kuhn -- perhaps sensing the possibility of Davidson-style objections about translatability -- preferred to compare the concepts rather than the language. Davidson's reply is that "the mind's ordinary categories" contain a structure which would then have to be paired somehow with the organizing structure of the language, hence "doubling the work." But if conceptual scheme and language do co-vary, then there's no need to say everything twice, so to speak.

BTW, thanks for all your interesting thoughts on this topic.

Moliere, I echo Banno's appreciation for your careful reading.

As Banno says, there’s a lot in your post to think about, so just a couple of initial reactions.

The question for me would be whether this still counts as a conceptual relativism, or not? — Moliere

I agree, you’ve managed to (in a good way) blur the distinctions sufficiently that this question is now key. My response is: I’m not sure, and I’m beginning to worry that this could lead to a merely verbal/historical dispute about how we ought to divvy up our terms.

The consideration of poetry translation is very good. I’d love to know what Davidson’s reply would be.

About “phlogiston” and meaning change: Really? This is a rather eccentric use of “meaning,” isn’t it? I’ll grant you that phlogiston now has vastly different connotations and employments than it originally did, but has the meaning actually changed? Or perhaps I’m not understanding you deeply enough.

On the Wang paper, you’ve succeeded in highlighting passages that do seem to further the conversation, for which I’m grateful. The point about the difference between truth-values and truth-value status still eludes me, though – I’d asked into it earlier in the thread, I think. Why would different assignments of “either-true-or-false”, rather than different assignments of “true” and “false”, make any difference to the question of scheme-content dualism? I don’t see why the one is more alien or difficult to translate than the other.

This is pretty similar to my objection to the WMT vs. CMT section. You write that the “difference of meaning isn't one of distributing ‛...is true’ across sentences, but rather is a different kind of difference.” And then you say, “Whether we ought to call this a radical or incommensurable difference I'm still on the fence about.” Exactly – Wang hasn’t convinced me. I’m off the fence, on the side of “no.”