Pragmatic Encounters

Richard J. Bernstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848936157
• eBook ISBN: 9781317332084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Richard J. Bernstein is a leading exponent of American pragmatism and one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century. In this collection he takes a pragmatic approach to specific problems and issues to demonstrate the ongoing importance of this philosophical tradition. Topics under discussion include multiculturalism, political public life, evil and religion. Individual philosophers studied are Kant, Arendt, Rorty, Habermas, Dewey and Trotsky. Each of the sixteen essays, many of which are published here for the first time, offers a way of bridging contemporary philosophical differences. This book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy and those researching social and political theory.

Section II

Democracy and Pluralism

5 The Spectre Haunting Multiculturalism

In recent decades, the expression ‘multiculturalism’ has been widely discussed and has taken on many meanings. But a spectre has haunted this discussion. Cultures are complex, changing and dynamic. Yet when we speak of multiculturalism, there is an enormous temptation to think of cultures as more or less coherent wholes, each with its own distinctive integrity that distinguishes it from other cultures—whether we think of this difference in an anthropological, religious, political or ethnic manner. Individuals living within a given culture frequently feel that they gain their deepest sense of identity as members of it. So the problem of multiculturalism becomes how we are to think about cultures and how to deal practically with different cultures when there are serious conflicts. These conflicts become especially acute when members of cultures think that their values and beliefs are incommensurable with each other. The spectre that haunts these controversies is incommensurability. I want to examine why the talk about incommensurability became so popular in the later part of the twentieth century—and why I believe that the concept, used uncritically, has pernicious consequences when dealing with multiculturalism. I propose to do so by exploring some of the philosophical sources of incommensurability.

In 1962, when Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared, it was an intellectual sensation. It would be difficult to name another book written in the 1960s that caused such an intellectual stir and was so widely discussed in the full range of the humanistic, cultural and social scientific disciplines. Although Kuhn’s primary interest was with the well-established natural sciences, few natural scientists paid much attention to it, but the book became a central text for humanists and social scientists. Consider the extent to which expressions that Kuhn popularized have become part of our everyday discourse. We all speak about ‘paradigms’ and ‘paradigm shifts’ frequently without realizing that they have their source in Kuhn’s monograph. And one expression became a lightning rod for controversial debate: incommensurability. Suddenly everybody seemed to be talking about incommensurability—incommensurable paradigms, theories, languages, vocabularies, cultures and world views. I do not want to review the tangled twists and turns of the debates about incommensurability—and what I take to be confusing and illuminating in these debates.¹ I am primarily concerned with another issue, the issue of reception. Why has the heady talk about incommensurability been so widespread? What is it about this expression, and the many ideas associated with it, that captured the imagination of so many thinkers? Even more important, what can we learn from the fierce debates about incommensurability? I do want to begin, however, with Kuhn’s original text and briefly explore how Richard Rorty appropriated and transformed Kuhn.

The expression ‘incommensurability’ is used about a half-dozen times in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.² When discussing the phenomenon of competing schools of thought in the early developmental stages of most sciences, Kuhn writes, ‘What differentiated these various schools was not one or another failure of method—they were all “scientific”—but what we shall come to call their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practicing science in it.’³ Much later, when he analyzes the nature and necessity of scientific revolutions, Kuhn tells us that ‘the normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with what has gone before’.⁴

But the main (although very brief) discussion of incommensurability occurs in the context of Kuhn’s analysis of the resolution of scientific revolutions. Kuhn seeks to clarify why proponents of competing paradigms ‘may [each] hope to convert the other to his way of seeing his science and its problems [but] neither may hope to prove his case’. He isolates three reasons why ‘the proponents of competing paradigms must fail to make complete contact with each other’s viewpoints’. These are the reasons for claiming that there is ‘incommensurability of the pre- and post-revolutionary normal-scientific traditions’. ‘In the first place, the proponents of competing paradigms will often disagree about the list of problems that any candidate for a paradigm must resolve. Their standards or their definitions of science are not the same.’⁵ Second, ‘more is involved than the incommensurability of standards’. There is also a radical change in the web of concepts used for explanation. Thus, for example, to make the transition from Newton’s universe to Einstein’s universe, ‘[t]he whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole’. But the third reason is the ‘most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms’.⁶ I shall quote this passage at length because it became a primary source for the controversy about incommensurability:

In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations to one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another. Equally, it is why before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.⁷

I have cited virtually all the passages in which Kuhn speaks explicitly about incommensurability, although of course much of what he says in other places is relevant to his discussion. But these passages are instructive not only because of what they say but also because of what they don’t say—what they are silent about. Note that in none of these passages does Kuhn define or specify what he means when he uses the expression ‘incommensurability’.⁸

But before commenting on Kuhn, and the fate of the expression ‘incommensurability’, I want to consider the way in which Kuhn’s views were radicalized and transformed by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature—a book that proved to be as provocative and controversial as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I have already indicated that Kuhn was concerned with clarifying the structure and dynamics of the natural sciences. His primary motivation for introducing the term paradigm is based on the claim that the appeal to paradigms is what enables us to distinguish the natural sciences from other disciplines and discourses. But with Rorty there is no such restriction. He is after bigger game. Rorty seeks nothing less than to deconstruct Philosophy (with a capital ‘P’); a tradition that he traces back to Plato. This tradition was taken up and transformed in the ‘Cartesian–Lockean–Kantian tradition’ and has taken on a new life in the epistemological and semantic obsessions of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Unlike Kuhn, Rorty explicitly tells us what he means by ‘commensurable’, namely, that which is

able to be brought under a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached on what would settle the issue on every point where statements seem to conflict. These rules tell us how to construct an ideal situation, in which all residual disagreements will be seen to be ‘noncognitive’ or merely verbal, or else merely temporary—capable of being resolved by doing something further.⁹

Modern philosophy shaped by the Cartesian–Lockean–Kantian tradition in both its analytic and continental forms has been obsessed with commensuration. This is the quest that is characteristic of epistemology. Hermeneutics, as Rorty understands it, is not a name for a new method or discipline but is ‘an expression of the hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled’.¹⁰ We can bring out the force of Rorty’s provocative claims by seeing how he radicalizes Kuhn’s understanding of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ (revolutionary) science. For Kuhn, normal science is a form of puzzle solving, where there are accepted procedures of commensuration. Abnormal science arises when an increasing number of anomalies occur that do not seem to fit a prevailing paradigm. But for Rorty, commensuration is not exclusively a characteristic of normal science; rather, it can be a characteristic of any form of inquiry where there are

agreed-upon practices of inquiry (or, more generally, of discourse)—as easily in ‘academic’ art, ‘scholastic’ philosophy, or ‘parliamentary’ politics as in ‘normal’ science. We can get it [epistemological commensuration] not because we have discovered something about ‘the nature of human knowledge’ but simply because when a practice has continued long enough, the conventions which make it possible—and which permit a consensus on how to divide it into parts—are relatively easy to isolate.¹¹

In short, it is the ‘familiarity’ of entrenched practices that make a discourse normal and commensurable. Practices can become ‘normalized’ in any field of discourse—from physics to theology. Abnormal discourse arises when familiar and accepted practices (whatever their domain) are challenged. ‘The product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to the study of the unpredictable, or of “creativity”.’¹² Rorty is perfectly aware of the radical provocation of his claims. He knows that philosophers from the time of Plato until the present have generally thought that commensuration is, at the very least, a necessary condition for rationality:

Normal science is as close as real life comes to the epistemologist’s notion of what it is to be rational. Everybody agrees on how to evaluate everything everybody else says. More generally, normal discourse is that which is conducted with an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it.¹³

It is little wonder that both The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature initiated so much heated and intense discussion. Almost immediately, critics of both books claimed that the views of Kuhn and Rorty sanction irrationality and lead straight to a self-defeating relativism. Karl Popper, for example, criticized Kuhn for endorsing the ‘Myth of the Framework’, a metaphor that suggests that ‘we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our language’ and that we are so locked into them that we cannot communicate with those encased in radically different ‘incommensurable’ paradigms.¹⁴ Hilary Putnam, who is sympathetic with many of Rorty’s claims, nevertheless has consistently argued that Rorty leads us down the path of a self-defeating relativism.

Now it is one task to sort out what is right and wrong in the tangled disputes about incommensurability and its critics—disputes that preoccupied philosophers for several decades. But it is a very different question to ask why these disputes captured the imagination of so many thinkers in widely divergent fields. In Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, I suggested the beginnings of an answer when I spoke of the ‘Cartesian Anxiety’—the anxiety that is generated by a grand Either/Or: ‘Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos.’¹⁵ It would be a mistake to think that the Cartesian Anxiety is primarily a religious, metaphysical, epistemological or moral anxiety. These are only several of the many forms it may assume. ‘In Heideggerian language, it is “ontological” rather than “ontic”, for it seems to lie at the very center of our being in the world’.¹⁶ Using Rorty’s terminology, we might say that if we abandon commensuration, if ‘vocabularies’ are genuinely incommensurable, if there are no neutral ahistorical standards for judging and evaluating competing vocabularies, then it is hard to see what reasons one can have for favouring one vocabulary or paradigm over other vocabularies or paradigms. After all, Rorty tells us that ‘anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed’.¹⁷

Outsiders may be bemused by the passion with which philosophers debate these issues. But similar issues gain poignancy when we turn to the moral, political, cultural and religious dimensions of our everyday lives. The belief in commensuration is closely allied with the conception of moral universality. Many of us have been shaped by the conviction that there are moral universals and universal human rights that transcend religious, ethnic and cultural differences among peoples. Some critics argue that these alleged ‘moral universals’ (when unmasked) turn out to be projections of Eurocentric prejudices. This has not shaken the conviction of those who believe that all human beings possess a worth and dignity that ought not to be violated. But if we really pursue the claim of incommensurability ‘all the way down’, then we may well ask, ‘What is the warrant for believing in moral universals and universal human rights?’

Furthermore, despite the great hopes of what might happen after the fall of communism in 1989, we have witnessed the outbreaks of all sorts of collective hatr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I Pragmatism and Its History
• Section II Democracy and Pluralism
• Section III Critique in Dark Times
• Section IV Morality, Politics and Religion
• Works Cited
• Name Index
• Subject Index