Linguistics and Kuhn’s incommensurability hypothesis

128 4. Code Model Linguistics: Patch or Abandon? the “chess game” of normal science, but if that is all that they do, then they can engage in that process without questioning or conflicting with the paradigm. In fact, they may be strengthening the paradigm by these actions. A scientific paradigm does not specify every action or perspective a scientist may entertain; accordingly, there may be a degree of divergence and competitive perspectives between subcommunities, without there being any violation of the paradigm which unites them at a more fundamental level see Kuhn 1996 :44ff.. To continue the analogy, rev- olutionary science is in view when presenters begin changing the rules, or throw out the rules and invent a different game, perhaps even throwing out the “chess board” and “pieces” in the process.

4.2.4. Linguistics and Kuhn’s incommensurability hypothesis

Kuhn’s ideas regarding the incommensurability between paradigms is probably the most controversial of his proposals expressed in Structure. While the question of whether or not paradigms are incommensurable is not a simple thing to answer, or even debate, the implications of the issue are rather straight forward. If paradigms can be commen- surable, then a scientist can accurately compare two paradigms and successfully choose the better. But if paradigms cannot be commensurable, then paradigm boundaries interfere, so that scientist cannot objectively evaluate available paradigms. Linguists offer differing opinions regarding the question of commensurability, just as they differ on other points of Kuhn’s theory. Edmondson and Burquest seem to share with Percival 1976 and Hymes 1974a their position regarding the co-existing status of linguistic paradigms. However, they direct their attention to a different issue, namely Kuhn’s incommensurability hypothesis Edmondson and Burquest 1998 :1–13. Edmondson and Burquest reject this hypothesis. Building upon Imre Lakatos’ modifications of Kuhn, including the idea that phenomena Kuhn addressed as paradigms might be better served by the idea of “research traditions,” they insist that the major schools of thought or research traditions in linguistics can be productively compared and suggest that the ability of various theories to solve particular problems can be used as a metric for their evaluation 1998 :4–8, 13; see Lakatos 1976 . For example, they author a comparative review of various grammatical theories based upon how those theories account for the English auxiliary complex. Edmondson and Burquest are well aware of the complexity of their objective. In discussing incommensurability, they write: “This incommensurability is the result of the fact that theories Kuhn calls theories of this type paradigms define for themselves what the interesting problems in a discipline are ….” Edmondson and Burquest 1998 :4. Concerning this issue, Kuhn writes: We have already seen several reasons why the proponents of competing paradigms must fail to make complete contact with each other’s viewpoints. Collectively these reasons have been described as the incommensurability of the pre- and postrevolutionary normal-science traditions …. In the first place, the proponents of competing paradigms will often disagree 4. Code Model Linguistics: Patch or Abandon? 129 about the list of problems that any candidate for paradigm must solve. Their standards or their definitions of science are not the same. Kuhn 1996 :148; italics added In other words, if a comparative test of grammatical theories were to claim an absolute standard of measurement, that test would require a neutral, theory-free set of problems in order to be an objective unprejudiced test. As Edmondson and Burquest note in their preface, their review was designed for use in connection with a graduate course in linguistic theory. Illustrations afforded by the English auxiliary complex undoubtedly serve some theories better than others, but professors of a complex disci- pline must nevertheless endeavor to instruct students in the details of competing and sometimes conflicting theories. The situation raises an additional question concerning incommensurability: If the discipline of linguistics is, indeed, a complex of co-existing paradigms, then to what extent may any individual linguist or linguistics student simultaneously handle multiple competing paradigms? Can an individual personally employ two or more paradigms simultaneously? George Lakoff points out that, indeed, many scientists including linguists obviously do employ competing models in their research. He writes: Many functioning scientists, in their everyday work, depend on the ability to shift from one conceptualization to another. In fact, learning to become a scientist requires learning alter- native conceptualizations for scientific concepts. Take electricity for example. What intuitive understanding of electricity is required to be able to solve problems with circuit diagrams correctly? As Gentner and Gentner 1982 observe, there are two prevalent ways of meta- phorically understanding electricity: as a fluid and as a crowd made up of individual electrons. Both conceptualizations are needed. Those who understand electricity only as a fluid tend to make systematic errors in certain kinds of problems—those where the crowd metaphor works better. Students who understand electricity only as a crowd of electrons tend to make mistakes on a different set of problems—those where the fluid metaphor works better. Understanding electricity, at a certain level of sophistication, requires metaphors—more than one. Knowing how to solve problems in electrical circuitry involves knowing which metaphor to use in which situation. Lakoff 1987 :305 The question is somewhat resolved by isolating the two senses of Kuhn’s term ‘paradigm’, as: 1 a constellation of group commitments and 2 shared examples. While the constellation of commitments refers to the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so forth, shared examples refers to “one sort of element in that constel- lation,” namely the concrete puzzle-solutions, employed as models or examples Kuhn 1996 :175. Accordingly, in addressing the multiple models which a physicist employs in addressing electricity, Lakoff is referring to the shared examples sense of the term ‘para- digm’. Similarly, as discussed above, in his 1970 Postscript, Kuhn discusses theory in its narrow sense of “technical account of phenomena” as an element of the “disciplinary matrix,” stating: “All or most of the objects of group commitment that my original [ 1962 ] text makes paradigms, parts of paradigms, or paradigmatic are constituents of the disciplinary matrix, and as such they form a whole and function together” Kuhn 1996 :182. Note that here Kuhn refers to theory as an object of group commitment. In other words, he has isolated an object of group commitment from the constellation of commitments itself. 130 4. Code Model Linguistics: Patch or Abandon? So, repeating the questions, can an individual linguist or linguistics student simultaneously handle multiple competing paradigms? If the question is in reference to paradigms as shared examples, clearly the answer must be “yes.” It is a rare occurrence for a scientist to consistently employ a shared example without having inherited com- mitments, or without developing commitments during its use. Shared examples and group commitments tend to go hand in hand. A linguist may employ more than one theory object of commitment, provided he is not overly committed to any particular object. Some linguists, however, may not be so eclectic. Kuhn argues that, within normal science, most scientists are strongly committed to particular objects. The anthropologist Thomas Headland offers some insight into this issue. In a symposium on the limitations of binary thinking in contemporary anthropology, Headland discussed the possibility of employing theories as tools, without developing excessive commitment to any particular tools: My point here is that anthropological schools of thought should be tried and, if workable, adopted as tools, or windows. This is a helpful way to approach theories. The trouble— defined in this symposium as “binary thinking”—comes when these paradigms become entrenched as ideologies. Headland 1997 When and how does the practitioner go from simply using a theory or model to building a constellation of commitments with that theory or model as foci? Commenting upon Kuhn, Hoyningen-Huene suggests that commitment to a theory tends to grow as the body of perceptions dependent upon that theory grows. The ability to switch to a second perception may be inversely related to one’s affinity for a previous perception. Quoting Kuhn 1996 :85, also 114, Hoyningen-Huene writes: For one thing, according to Kuhn, “the scientist does not preserve the gestalt subject’s freedom to switch back and forth between ways of seeing.” This ability is not denied the scien- tist in principle, however, since the historian of science who diagnoses such perceptual changes must also be able to reproduce them. It is rather the scientist’s interests which prevent him or her from returning, after a perceptual change he or she believes to be advantageous, to the mode of perception left behind. If the scientist considers the old mold at all, it is reflec- tively to reject it, not to reproduce it in all its immediacy. Hoyningen-Huene 1993 :41 Hoyningen-Huene is primarily commenting upon the problem of incommensurability as it relates to paradigm shift. Kuhn seems to suggest that it is impossible to jointly explore two paradigms unless a switch has been made from one to the other 1996 :204. An analyst who has made a philosophical switch from a prior paradigm into a later paradigm may “look back into” the prior paradigm he held earlier. But it can be difficult for an analyst working from within the prior position to analyze a paradigm he has not actually held. Furthermore, with the passage of time it may become increasingly difficult for an analyst who has switched to a later paradigm to recreate a pre-switch perspective Robert Andrew Barlow 1998, personal communication. This is not to suggest that a paradigm switch is necessarily a one-way bridge, although such mono-directional movement is the more normative scenario. 4. Code Model Linguistics: Patch or Abandon? 131 Finally, George Lakoff adds some important modifications to the typical approach to the debate regarding incommensurability. Lakoff suggests that the contemporary version of the debate regarding relativism and commensurability really began in linguistics, with the hypotheses of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who “claimed that the conceptual systems of languages could be so radically different that they could not ‘be calibrated,’ that there was no common measure, no common standard by which they could be compared” Lakoff 1987 :322. That debate was taken up by philosophers, including Kuhn, and later Paul Feyerabend 1993 . Lakoff explains that Kuhn and Feyerabend, as well as most of their critics, fail to address a crucial point, that “there are several kinds of commensurability, and commen- tators are by no means clear about which kind is being discussed.” He adds, “conceptual systems that are commensurable by one criterion may be incommensurable by another” Lakoff 1987 :322. He provides a list of five kinds of commensurability: Translation seems to be the favored criterion of objectivist philosophers. Two conceptual systems are commensurable if each language can be translated into the other, sentence by sen- tence, preserving truth conditions. Understanding is an experientialist criterion. Two conceptual systems are commensurable if they can both be understood by a person—presumably via the preconceptual structure of his experiences and his general conceptualizing capacity. Use is one of Whorf’s criteria. Two conceptual systems are commensurable if they use the same concepts in the same ways. Framing derives from the work of Fillmore and Kuhn. Two conceptual systems are commensurable if they frame situations in the same way and if there is a one-one correspondence between concepts in the two systems, frame by frame. Organization derives from the work of Brugman. Two conceptual systems are commen- surable if they have the same concepts organized relative to one another in the same way. Lakoff 1987 :322 Lakoff continues, stating, “All of these are criteria for total commensurability. They can be made into criteria for partial commensurability by characterizing ‘partial’ either with respect to degree of commensurability, or with respect to corresponding parts of the total systems. For example, two systems may be commensurable in their concepts of space, but incommensurable in their concepts of time” 1987 :322–323. With these five kinds of commensurability in mind, Lakoff then returns to Whorf’s hypothesis and reviews the classic objectivist critique of that hypothesis. That critique goes as such: A critic may note that Whorf has, himself, explained his classic example of the Hopi conceptual system to a non-Hopi, English reading audience via the English language. From the classic objectivist perspective, the fact that Whorf was able to do this illustrates that the two systems are not incommensurable, as Whorf presumed. The critique then argues by extension that, if the classic example is proved wrong, then the whole hypothesis has been proved invalid. Lakoff does not accept this critique as sufficient cause to dismiss Whorf in and of itself. He points out that that the critique “uses the translatability criterion, which is 132 4. Code Model Linguistics: Patch or Abandon? defined as the preservation of truth conditions in sentence-by-sentence translation,” a criterion which is itself an objectivist criterion. There are, however, four other criteria remaining. While the Hopi conceptual system may indeed be commensurable with that of an English reading audience in regard to Translation and Understanding, they are not commensurable on the Use, Framing, and Organization criteria Lakoff 1987 :327–328. The “goodness” or “badness” of a particular revolution may be up for grabs. How- ever, one can attempt to understand the particular problems driving the shift. An analyst may not agree with anothers’ choice to switch, but he or she may, nevertheless, at least consider the types of problems which a particular community wishes to answer, partic- ularly if one is willing and able to examine the different types of commensurability involved.

4.3. The Saussurean paradigm