Rhetoric and Incommensurability

Description

Rhetoric and Incommensurability examines the complex relationships among rhetoric, philosophy, and science as they converge on the question of incommensurability, the notion jointly (though not collaboratively) introduced to science studies in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. The incommensurability thesis represents the most profound problem facing argumentation and dialogue—in science, surely, but in any symbolic encounter, any attempt to cooperate, find common ground, get along, make better knowledge, and build better societies. This volume brings rhetoric, the chief discipline that studies argumentation and dialogue, to bear on that problem, finding it much more tractable than have most philosophical accounts.

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Rhetoric

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 19 septembre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602359987
• Langue: English

Extrait

Rhetoric and Incommensurability
Edited and Introduced by Randy Allen Harris
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2005 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rhetoric and incommensurability / edited and introduced by Randy Allen Harris.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-932559-49-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-932559-50-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-932559-51-5 (adobe ebook)
1. Science--Methodology. 2. Comparison (Philosophy) I. Harris, Randy Allen.
Q175.R434 2005
501--dc22
2005010812
Printed on acid-free paper.
Cover art: “Tango,” oil on canvas, by Mark Forth, used courtesy of the Artist and The Tory Folliard Gallery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 8 1 6 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].


This book is for Indira


Incommensurability is a difficulty for philosophers, not for scientists.
—Paul K. Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason
Properly understood—something I’ve by no means always managed myself—incommensurability is far from being the threat to rational evaluation of truth claims that it has frequently seemed.
—Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road since Structure
To divide humanity into irreconcilable groups with irreconcilable attitudes, having no common language of truth and morality, is, ultimately, to rob both groups of their humanity.
—Stephen Spender, World within World
No incommensurability [is] absolute
—Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance
The English term ‘incommensurable’ is somewhat unfortunate.
—Sir Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies


Contents
Preface
I Incommensurability, Rhetoric
1 Introduction
Randy Allen Harris
2 Three Biographies: Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Incommensurability
Paul Hoyningen-Huene
II Issues
3 Kuhn’s Incommensurability
Alan G. Gross
4 Incommensurate Boundaries: The Rhetorical Positivism of Thomas Huxley
Thomas M. Lessl
5 The Rhetoric of Philosophical Incommensurability
Herbert W. Simons
III Cases
6 Science and Civil Debate: The Case of E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology
Leah Ceccarelli
7 Stasis and the Problem of Incommensurate Communication: The Case of Spousal Violence Research
Lawrence J. Prelli
8 The “Anxiety of Influence,” Hermeneutic Rhetoric, and the Triumph of Darwin’s Invention over Incommensurability
John Angus Campbell
9 Cell and Membrane: The Rhetorical Strategies of a Marginalized View
Jeanne Fahnestock
10 Measuring Incommensurability: Are Toxicology and Ecotoxicology Blind to What the Other Sees?
Charles Bazerman and René Agustín De los Santos
11 Novelty and Heresy in the Debate on Nonthermal Effects of Electromagnetic Fields
Carolyn R. Miller
References
Index to the Print Edition


Preface
Within the comprehensibility chasm lies the condition of incommensurability.
—Carolyn R. Miller, “Rhetoric and Community”
The incommensurability thesis represents the most profound problem facing rhetoric—of science, surely, but of any symbolic encounter, any attempt to cooperate, find common ground, get along, make better knowledge and build better societies. It’s too big and too deep for me. So I invited the smartest, most clear-eyed rhetoricians I know—of science and of any symbolic encounter—and an equally gifted philosopher, to help me wrestle with it. The result is this book, which, hand-to-my-heart, you will find seriously illuminating about the way scientists and other value-holders achieve or fail to achieve shared understandings.
I would like to thank, first of all, these brilliant and good-hearted professors. Even the customary dog-work of copy editing and proof reading has been a joy on this project, as I got to read and re-read the paradigms they crafted, learning something new on every pass; and watching those essays come together in the first place was a lesson in scholarly collegiality I hope never to forget.
In addition to help from these model scholars, I have been very lucky in the range of support and feedback I have had in working through the problems of incommensurability, starting with my one unfailing source of insights and challenges, the students at the University of Waterloo. My contact with nearly all of them over the course of this project has been tremendously rewarding, but a small group of them deserve an extra measure of gratitude for specific help with various aspects of this book: Jim Brookes, Jacqueline Chioreanu, Paul Clifford, Ryan Devitt, Zarsheesh Divecha, Olga Gladkova, David Hoff, Kim Honeyford, Laura Knudsen, Sheila Hannon, Christopher Hutton, Shirley Lichti, Karen Menard, Sarah Mohr, Tiffany Murray, Stephen Noel, Joel Pearce, Jeff Stacey, Rachel Stuckey, Y-Dang Troeung, Lara Varpio, Karl Wierzbicki, and Robert Jing Zhu;Y-Dang deserves a yet greater helping of thanks for her hard work on the volume, as does Ryan for his incredible generosity, stamina and dedication.
I have also benefited from the opportunities, advice, opinions, and direct feedback provided by a diverse network of generous colleagues, including Kelvin Booth, G. Thomas Goodnight, Brian Hendley, Andrew Jewett, Tim Kenyon, John Lyne, Michael MacDonald, Andrew McMurry, Kathryn Northcut, Brian Orend, Trevor Pearce, Howard Sankey, Paul Thagard, Christopher Tindale, Jonathan Tsou, James Van Evra, and Charles Willard; from the scholarly and editorial direction of the tireless David Blakesley; from the support of Kevin McGuirk, Neil Randall, and Norma Snyder; from the eunoia and phronesis of Pauline McAughey; and from the financial assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
I am especially grateful for the thoughtful and encouraging commentaries of Michael Leff and Harvey Siegel on the overall scope and shape of the project.
This book would have been much poorer without the industry, intelligence, and intellectual integrity of Michael Truscello.
And personally, I would have been much poorer without the daily engagement of my closest rhetorical collective, Oriana, Galen, and Indira. They give me all the argumentation I can handle, and more reasons than I deserve to strive constantly for commensuration.
— Randy Allen Harris


I Incommensurability, Rhetoric
There are two possibilities. Perhaps incommensurability just does not obtain of scientific programs (theories, paradigms, . . .). Or perhaps there are ways around it, remedies—rhetoric.
—Randy Allen Harris, “Introduction”
Incommensurability had two fathers , unusual even for philosophical terms, and the joint paternity of Thomas S. Kuhn and Paul K. Feyerabend has contributed to much subsequent confusion. While the signifier is the same for both of them, each father engendered a different signified, taking the mathematical metaphor in largely overlapping, but subtly dissimilar directions.
—Paul Hoyningen-Huene, “Three Biographies”


1 Introduction
Randy Allen Harris
Arguments that seem powerful to one side seem unimportant to the other. What looks like striking insight to one side looks like perverse illusion to the other. Often, the parties simply see the world differently, in some way that is not directly observable. [. . .] What I take to be essentially this phenomenon has been most clearly identified and articulated by Kuhn, and his term is the one I will use: incommensurability.
—Howard Margolis, Paradigms and Barriers
Incommensurability—the lack of a common standard for taking the measure of two systems with respect to each other—has crippling implications for science, the domain in which it was first raised to widespread contemporary attention. * It disables progress. If one can’t measure theories with respect to each other, how can one choose which is best? If one can’t choose, how do new theories arise? What would be the point?
There is a hitch, though. Science isn’t crippled. It’s not even limping.
That’s not to say there aren’t problems with science. The areas that get attentive research and those that don’t, the flow of capital, the authority science has in the public sphere—to sample narrowly from a welter of political, ethical, and sociological issues impinging on science, and vice versa—all require steady vigilance, even steady suspicion, from the citizenry of the twenty-first century. Science and its cousin, technology, permeate almost everything we do, certainly every breath we take. But in terms of its daily duties with respect to its primary job—making knowledge about the phenomenal world—there is no sign of disability. Incommensurability should destroy science. It doesn’t. Why not?
There are two possibilities. Perhaps incom