Randy Allen Harris

From Rhetoric and Incommensurability

"Not only does incommensurability not hamstring sicence, it proves epistemologically wholesome in several respects." (5)

"The works of Boyle and Newton, not to say Bacon and Hobbes and Locke and Hume and Descartes, include strategic screeds against teh contaminating influence of fancy-Dan word-mongering, the lasciviousness of metaphor, the wheedling dishonesty of rhetoric." (15)

"Other reasons to believe simply come into or fall out of fashion, like gods and miniskirts." (16)

"[...] the lowest categorical reading on our incommmensurometer [sic]." (23)

"Or, I suppose (but how would weknow), it might be the case that humans and dolphins, or humans and ants for that matter, have an ongoing case of brick-wall incommensurability. Certainly, humans try to communicate with dolphins, but it clearly hasn't gone anywhere; and I've seen my son earnestly talking to ants, with even less results. The ants may be talking too, or pheromoning, and dolphins could be clicking epic poems to us, or superstring theorems, but, if so, they aren't getting through, and it's doubtful that we're getting through either beyond (in the case of dolphins) 'jump through that hoop and I'll give you a fish.'" (28)

"[a] telling quotation from Max Planck: 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because tis opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it' (Planck 1950, 33-34; Kuhn 1996, 151; see R.A. Harris 1998)." (31)

"As Native American linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford (2000) has articulated the difficulties of incorprating Amerindian perspectives into English, 'the bitch of it is, even verb is a noun!'" (35)

"Or, take this meme: 'If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.' It is very widespread on the Web, in collections of quotations, always attributed to Wittgenstein, but never linked to a specific text. As it turns out, Wittgenstein never wrote it. But people like what it expresses, and, what the hell, Wittgenstein is famous for being really smart and deep, so it sounds a lot better coming from him." (35)

"It's semiotic webs and meaning variance all the way down." (43)

"A good rhetor (one who wants not just to communicate, nor simply to persuade, but to reach understandings and agreements), observes teh affordances an audience opens up, and the rhetorical constraints it exercises." (51)

"[...]why all the ink spilled on this topic? Because there really are rhetorical problems among rational, earnest scientists (and other people) that amount to very different argument appraisals, so taht what looks powerful to one side looks unimportant or perverse to the other." (54)

"That's a good deal of murk; my apologies." (67)

"In several ways, the differend is a much more finely honed instrument for dealing with the diachronic discontinuities we label with incommensurability, a word that contains a late-modernist ideology -- especially in its sense that there is always a resolution which excludes and renders one of the parties partially unintelligible or mute. There is even a nicely symmetrical sense of the irrational to LYotard's concept, in a linkage to theGreek term incommensurability -- arrhetos, 'unspeakable.' The victim in a differend, because the regulation occurs in an unaccommodating idiom, is left without a way to speak his case, perhaps being forced entirely into silence. But for all that, differend remains peripheral to the current project, and we can only glance at a word that overlaps in fascinating ways with our cornerstone term, in a discourse preoccupied with the sorts of communicative misalignments that drove Feyerabend's and Kuhn's work, and that feeds value incommensurabilists." (79)

"But the real issues are misunderstanding and disagreement, which concern not things directly, but people's attitudes to things (and to each other), and, socially, the arguments they build around those attitudes. The most useful application of incommensurability, in the end, is a name for a condition not of theories (things), but of theorists (people)." (92)

"If incommensurability is a syndrome, then rhetoric -- the search for ways to adjust ideas to people, people to ideas -- is the cure." (94)

"Since it does not cause the practical problems one would predict for science; since communication is hindered and confounded, perhaps, but not blocked; since evaluation and comparison are difficult, perhaps, but not impossible -- incommensurability is an invitation to explore how scientists get their jobs done in the face of misalignments and discontinuities in meanings, themes, and practices." (97)

"Misconstruals in an atmosphere of conviviality -- when a very different set of blinkers lead us to take another person's words in the ways we can build on them as indulgently as possible -- move in teh direction of ascribing insight." (111)

"Incommensurability plays a vital role in these processes, and an inevitable one, given the nature of meanings, values, practices, and humans. But it is not always generative, and it only becomes visible with the big dust-ups." (115)