Randy Allen Harris, Professor, Rhetoric and Professional Writing, Department of English, University of Waterloo
Contact: raha@watarts.uwaterloo.ca
Introduction
The introduction traces multiple interlaced strands associated with incommensurability ('without a shared measure"), the word and the concept—mathematical, ethical, postmodernist, and scientific strands. The latter threads are particularly important to the book, since it was the application of incommensurability to historical and philosophical notions of science by Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn in the early 1960s that brought the term to widespread contemporary attention, forming the nexus of these varied strands, and inviting rhetoric to bear on issues of scientific communication and invention. Foregrounding these issues, Professor Harris develops a four-part taxonomy, correlated more or less roughly (depending on the category) with degree of (in)commensurability, total to negligible:
Harris also briefly outlines rhetorical theory, explores notions of rationality, linguistic relativity, translatability, and remedies to misalignments of themes, practices, and terms--as well as arguing throughout that incommensurability is best understood not as a relation between systems, but as a matter of rhetorical invention and hermeneutics; in short, that it is not a phenomenon characterizing theories (frameworks, paradigms, ...) so much as one characterizing theorists.
Charles Bazerman, Professor of English and Education, University of California, Santa Barbara
Contact: bazerman@humanitas.ucsb.edu
and
René Agustín De los Santos, University of California, Santa Barbara
Contact: delossantos@umail.ucsb.edu
Measuring Incommensurability:
are toxicology and ecotoxicology blind to what the other sees?
Professor Bazerman and his colleague, René Agustín De los Santos, take the notion of incommensurability into an area not traditionally explored in these terms, interdisciplary convergence. They show how the public consciousness of environmental issues that emerged in the 1960's and 1970's led to an increasing demand for information to monitor the changes our environment was undergoing. Traditional disciplines in the earth and biological sciences were enlisted and were reorganized into new disciplines focussing on environmental concerns. These new applied disciplines were particularly motivated by the regimes of regulation and oversight established by the National Environmental Protection Act, with its mandated new genre of the Environmental Impact Statement. NEPA and the EIS created new markets and forums for information—as well as clients needing their interests advanced and protected within these developing rhetorical regimes. The refigured disciplines encompassed work by diverse scientists—some of them migrants from the pre-existing disciplines, some of them maintaining dual loyalties, and some of them newly trained within the emergent disciplines. With this welter of interests, disciplines, and argument styles competing for results and resources in such a politically charged cauldron, we ought to find incommensurability. Bazerman and De los Santos look for it. They examine the work and literatures of these new fields in relation to the prior fields. They study the communication networks of current participants. They build upon interviews with people working in the old and new fields, in order to characterize the rhetorical practices at the crossroads of these interests and disciplines. They don’t find incommensurability. They find cooperation, negotiation, convergence. Toxicology and ecotoxicology use each others results and methods, respect each others practioners, and share practical concerns that foster the creativity and flexibility.
John Angus Campbell, Professor, Speech Communication, University of Memphis
Contact: jacbq@earthlink.net
The “Anxiety of influence,” hermeneutic rhetoric, and the triumph of Darwin’s invention over incommensurability
If ever two paradigms were incommensurable—built on logically incompatible assumptions —one could scarcely hope for a sharper contrast than between Charles Lyell’s "actualist" geology and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection. Lyell’s Principles of Geology was explicitly anti-evolutionary, setting forth a doctrine of "non progressionism" that attempts to preclude evolution as a logical possibility and place it beyond the purview of science. Darwin (and, indeed, Wallace) was undaunted. Professor Campbell’s essay traces Darwin’s adaptation of Lyell’s anti-evolutionary argumentation. “The ‘anxiety of influence’—hermeneutic rhetoric, and the triumph of Darwin’s invention over incommensurability,” situates Lyell’s massively influential Principles as an up-dated Newtonian world view, in which the implications of weak causes and deep time for recovering the history of the earth are devastating. The history is irrecoverable, in Lyell’s project, because the records are being relentlessly destroyed in the earth’s shredder/furnace by further operation of the very forces that had partially preserved them. Campbell traces how this vision of earth history without history not only failed to daunt Darwin, but (enriched by Robert Malthus’ social vision) inspired him. Campbell approaches incommensurability as an artefact of a failed positivist world-project of controlling history by thought, opposing it to an open, rhetoriographic understanding of history. Campbell argues that evolution is not, as Huxley held, a logical extension of Lyell rightly understood, but a rhetorical reinvention of Lyell creatively misunderstood.
Leah Ceccarelli, Assistant Professor, Department of Speech Communication, University of Washington
Contact: cecc@u.washington.edu
Science and civil debate:
the case of sociobiology
Professor Ceccarelli’s chapter addresses a debate that has spilled much ink and heated many collars over the last two decades, a debate in which participants on both sides seem to be taking Kuhn’s revolutionary-war description of scientific controversy not as an account so much as a battle plan—one side destined to win only when the last holdouts of the other, incommensurable, paradigm have died out—and envisioning their conflict as a fierce battle to the death. The two sides dispute the proper meaning of key scientific concepts, they engage in resistive readings of each other’s discourse, and they impugn each other’s values and motives. Ceccarelli suggests a different plan, one which rests on a very different vision of scientific controversy. Rather than bloody revolution, she suggests casting scientific controversy in terms of a civil debate, particularly on the model of Cicero’s controversia, with resolution coming in the form of a negotiated compromise that takes up bits and pieces of each side and thus dissolves the differences between seemingly incompatible contraries. Ceccarelli looks especially at the argumentation of E.O Wilson, the progenitor of sociobiology, showing that some of his early responses to criticism included admirably Ciceronian themes, but that latterly he has settled into a hostile recalcitrance that forecloses agreement, promoting incommensurability and rejecting cooperative exchange.
Jeanne Fahnestock, Professor, English, University of Maryland
Contact: jf1@umail.umd.edu
Cell and membrane:
the rhetorical strategies of a marginalized view
Professor Fahnestock investigates another dispute in which the levels of animosity run high. She traces competing theories defining the structure and composition of the cell, in her chapter, Cell and membrane: the rhetorical strategies of a marginalized view,”focusing especially on disagreements over the nature of the cell’s interface with the world, its membrane or "wall." These controversies have necessarily involved debates over whether the cell is essentially defined by that membrane or by its internal substance—the container or the contained. As the very notion of a "cell" suggests, the container definition has become the orthodoxy that we encounter in classrooms and textbooks and TV ads for skin cleansers. But that view was challenged in the fifties and sixties by Gilbert Ling, a scientist holding a suite of heretical views, but someone who has always had supporters, and renewed in the early part of this century by Gerald H. Pollack. The Ling/Pollack view is seen by all concerned as fundamentally incommensurable with the current paradigm of cell structure; as such, it is ignored by the mainstream. But, Fahnestock argues, incommensurability (as Ceccarelli argues of E.O. Wilson) can be a rhetorical investment, all of the arguments arising from an uncompromising hostility in which irreconcilability becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given the productivity of the current paradigm, there is no pressure to listen to, let alone accommodate, the alternate, Ling/Pollack (Associated Induction) understanding of the cell and its membrane. But, Fahnestock contends, there are parts of this view that are relatively amenable to the mainstream. The differences might be converted rhetorically into less serious differences of emphasis or perspective, and productive talk could ensue. But the Associated Induction side’s investment in, and the mainstream’s assumption of, incommensurability blocks reconciliation.
Alan G. Gross, Professor, Rhetoric, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Contact: Grossalang@aol.com
Kuhn's incommensurability
Professor Gross charts Kuhn’s specific refinements to that notion, as he settled more closely on local semantic conflicts and mismatches, offering another important supplement to my general introduction, carefully explicating Kuhn’s late notion of a structured lexicon, his incommensurability-driven refinement on paradigm. Scientists from the same community may differ in what they know about the concepts in the lexicon, about chlorine, for example, but they all share a professional commitment to the lexicon and its structure. When problems and the lexicon come into significant conflict—Planck's quanta are the classic example—we have a condition necessary to, though not sufficient for, a scientific revolution. If a revolution comes, its completeness is established when a new structured lexicon is firmly in place so that it is no longer possible to use the central concepts of the old lexicon in the old ways; voila, incommensurability. Gross also has a prescription; if the philosophical mission has always been to tell people how to think, the rhetorical mission has always been to tell them how to speak. But the sharper tools in the respective sheds know that language and cogitation are deeply entangled, that both have public as well as private aspects, and that the real missions are how to think logically (from logos, language) and how to speak thoughtfully. That’s why both philosophers and rhetoricians invest so much attention in argumentation.
Gross’s prescription is not for scientists, but for science-study scholars, to help us clean up our arguments about incommensurability. Drawing on W. B. Gallie’s essentially contested ideas program—a philosophical therapy that speaks very richly to issues of incommensurability—Gross takes a retrograde stand calculated to infuriate postmodernists. Understanding incommensurability, he insists, depends simply on arguing from historically revealed scientific practice (revealed in non-theory-driven ways), and then proceeding to engage each other cooperatively.
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Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science, University of Hannover, Germany
Three biographies: Kuhn, Feyerabend, and incommensurability
The year 1962 is the "official" birth year of the incommensurability concept, the year it first appears in the science-studies literature. Professor Hoyningen-Huene’s chapter traces its paternity—to the two fathers, Paul K. Feyerabend and Thomas S. Kuhn—examining their previous personal and professional trajectories that led them to converge in such a significant way in 1962. He outlines the differences between the two concepts of incommensurability, with respect to their concrete content, to their function, and to their implications for the study and practice of science. In particular, he compare Kuhn’s and Feyerabend’s respective versions of incommensurability according to eight criteria:
Hoyningen-Huene also charts out how Kuhn and Feyerabend reacted to one another, and to one another’s respective visions of science.
Thomas Lessl, Associate Professor, Speech Communication, University of Georgia
Contact: tlessl@arches.uga.edu
Incommensurate boundaries:
Positivism and Darwinism in Victorian biology
Professor Lessl works from the position that science has operated (roughly speaking) under two distinct ideological canopies since its early-modern origins—a Baconian world view which came into prominence around the middle of the seventeenth century, and a positivist one that superseded it around the middle of the nineteenth century. The Baconian ideology tied the fate of science explicitly to the millenarian telos of Protestantism. But in the eighteenth century science began to reconstitute itself in terms of secularism, systematized by positivism in the next century. Lessl argues that this ideology fosters the incommensurability of competing scientific conceptions of biological origins. Specifically, he explores the failed alignments of the themes and values saturating the “evolution” and “design” positions in biological speciation. It is usually supposed that design was pushed out of science by the arrival of the Darwinian thesis, but Darwin’s advent also coincided with the rise of positivism, which Lessl finds at least as responsible as the evolutionary synthesis itself for the exile of design theories. Indeed, Lessl suggests evolutionary and design conceptions might be largely commensurable, outside the ideological hegemony of positivism. “We can at least say,” Lessl argues, that “the banishment of design does not represent incommensurability in the ordinary Kuhnian sense.” .
Carolyn R. Miller, Professor, English, North Carolina State University
Contact: crmiller@ncsu.edu
Novelty and heresy in the debate on nonthermal effects of electromagnetic fields
Professor Miller (Like Bazerman and De los Santos) looks to interdisciplinary developments—or, perhaps cross-disciplinary is a more accurate term in her case, since she finds little of the cooperative energy that usually characterizes interdisciplinarity work. From this base, Miller seeks to complicate Kuhn’s picture of science with rhetorical pressures different from those found in the familiar paradigm-succession story. Her chapter examines a case that concerns not only change over time but also the problems of multidisciplinary inquiry: the debate over nonthermal effects of nonionizing radiation that has developed over the past fifty years, and gained recent steam from controversies over cell-phone tower sites and research linking brain tumors to cell phone use. Differences in worldview in this case, Miller argues, derive not only from different levels of commitment to a newly proposed explanatory framework within a single scientific community, but also from different long-standing and deeply engrained commitments in separate disciplines. Research in this area involves electrical engineers and physicists as well as biologists and epidemiologists. While she does not find convergence, Miller argues that neither does she find incommensurability. Rather, Miller explores the explanatory viture of two related tensions she sees operating in this debate, the tension between novelty and tradition and the tension between heresy and orthodoxy. What is at stake in the debate are health and safety standards for exposure of human populations to electromagnetic fields of various strengths and frequencies, both in specific workplaces, for specific consumer products, and in the ambient environment. And, here, these interests pull the debate away from agreement and cooperation, the constituencies concerned only to shore up their own views, denigrate the competing ones.
Lawrence Prelli, Associate Professor, Communication, University of New Hampshire
Contact: ljp@christa.unh.edu
Stasis and the problem of incommensurate communication:
the case of spousal violence research
Professor Prelli’s chapter is, like many contributions to the volume, diagnostic and prescriptive. He presents and applies a heuristic procedure—known in antiquity as stasis procedure— for identifying and resolving communicative blockages confronting scientists operating from different paradigms and orientations. Creatively applied it can resolve the problems routinely diagnosed in terms of incommensurability. Prelli’s first move is to redefine incommensurability as a problem of communication rather than of logic or of mathematics, downgrading the intransigent adjective incommensurable into the more amenable incommensurate. Next, Prelli explains how the systematic, guided questioning of classical stasis analysis can identify and ameliorate sources of incommensurate communication under conditions of pluralism and offers procedures suitable for conducting such analyses of communication about science. This procedure and others like it are based on the observation that commensurate communication can be restored by getting those caught in conflict or confusion to discuss the same kinds of situated questions but without presupposing the same standards for arriving at the “right” answers. Prelli brings these observations and corollary recommendations to bear, in the case study that anchors his chapter, in an analysis of communicative problems that emerged among social scientists during a significant ongoing controversy over spousal violence research, a heavily value-charged arena.
Herbert W. Simons, Professor of Speech Communication, School of Communications & Theater, Temple University
Contact: hsimons@astro.ocis.temple.edu
The rhetoric of philosophical incommensurability
Professor Simons takes his start from the familiar observation that communication diagnosed as incommensurable is inevitably circular—but, according to Kuhn, only partially so. That partiality, suitably defined and elaborated, Simons turns towards understanding the continued intractability and convergence of belief, including variable patterns of each. His chapter plumbs the opposing and recalcitrant intellectual themes of objectivism and deconstruction, taking seriously the implications of neo-sophistic critiques of objectivism. In particular, he examines the rhetoric of keystone relativism essay, "Death and Furniture" (Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter 1995) which purports to debunk the so-called "bottom-line" arguments against relativism—the thumping of tables and invocations of pain and death that dramatically ‘prove’ our involvement in one obstinate reality. Perhaps the debunking even goes through, Simons concedes. But by way its reliance on the seemingly ineliminability of rhetorical components in even the most mundane claims-making about reality, the argumentative circle of the essay is left open, and the authors unwittingly provide support for a reconstructive realism, one based on reasonable arguments. Simons builds a reconstructive approach to incommensurability from this basis. Absent foundations or other common measures for adjudicating between philosophical paradigms, Simons argues, there are still possibilities for persuasion across the divide, and even for some degree of reconciliation, a process he calls rhetorical reconstruction, in pointed opposition to the wearyingly familiar applications of rhetoric in deconstruction. The key, Simons tells us, is in fully recognizing that the discourses of opposing paradigms are only partially circular, not closed loops, and consequently provide openings for dialogue based on appeals to common ground.