Incommensurability (and Related Matters)

Conference Links:

	Online Volume of Abstracts
	Conference Schedule
	Incommensurability Literature List
	Map: Leibniz-Haus
	Invited speakers
	Leibniz-Haus (photo)

Conference Description and Information:

Dates: 13 -16 June 1999

Sponsors: The conference's main sponsors are the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Science Foundation) and the Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science at the University of Hanover.

Conference Venue:

Leibniz-Haus der Universität Hannover, Holzmarkt 4-6, D - 30159 Hannover, Germany.

Conference Language: English

Organization Committee: Ronald Giere (Minnesota), Paul Hoyningen-Huene (chairperson, Hanover), Eric Oberheim (Hanover), Howard Sankey (Melbourne/Hanover), Marcel Weber (Hanover)

Invited speakers: A list of the eleven invited speakers and their tentative titles, and the eleven commentators on invited papers. See also the Volume of Abstracts.

Contributed papers: Contributed papers will be 20-25 minutes in duration, followed by a 5-10 minute discussion, altogether not exceeding 30 minutes. There will be three parallel sessions arranged thematically.

Conference schedule: See the conference schedule.

Conference proceedings: Now in press: P. Hoyningen-Huene & H. Sankey (eds.), Incommensurability and Related Matters, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2001.

General description: The thesis that some scientific theories may be incommensurable due to
semantic or conceptual variance is one of  the most contraversial claims to emerge from the
post-positivist or historical movement in the philosophy of science. The thesis has raised so much
controversy for such a long time because it has forced philosophers to re-think some of the major
issues in the philosophy of science; for example, reductionism, rational theory choice, progress, and
scientific realism. The incommensurability thesis has been understood as an attack on the mainstream
conceptions of all of these notions, and has forced a re-assessment and clarification of the issues. For
this reason, the incommensurability thesis has been widely debated in the literature of the philosophy of
science since the early 1960's when it was first proposed by T. S. Kuhn and
P. K. Feyerabend. Since then, there have been more than 300 articles on incommensurability.

In the course of this prolonged debate, a number of alternative approaches to the issues have been
developed in considerable detail. The first reaction to incommensurability was outright denial. Authors
such as Donald Davidson and Michael Devitt adamently argued that there is no such thing as
incommensurability. Other authors accepted incommensurability, but tried to show that it does not
cause irreparable damage to mainstream conceptions of theory choice and progress in the philosophy
of science (e.g. Sankey 1996). Yet other authors began to take incommensurability seriously, and have
abandoned these mainstream conceptions in favor of a more historically accurate philosophy of
science. In some extreme cases, this has led to post-modernist positions in the philosophy of science.
In any case, the incommensurability thesis has become an important topic of debate in very diverse
areas within the philosophy of science: Authors such as Paul Churchland have shown the importance of
incommensurability in cognitive science (1997), while authors such as David Bloor have used
incommensurability as a tool for the development of the sociology of knowledge (1976). Although
there has been a steady stream of publications on incommensurability, there has recently been a notable
increase in interest in the topic, especially in light of the sophisticated version of the incommensurability
thesis developed by T. S. Kuhn in his later writings on the topic. Moreover, following the deaths of
both Kuhn and Feyerabend, considerable attention has been directed to the current status of the
post-positivist tradition in the philosophy of science for which their work was a major source of
inspiration.

For these reasons, the time seems ripe to take stock of the situation; i.e., to assess the current status of the incommensurability thesis. This conference will draw together various strands of the contemporary debate about incommensurability in an effort to promote focused discussion of the topic, as well as to stimulate interaction between the alternative approaches to incommensurability currently being pursued.

Topics: while offers of papers on any aspect of incommensurability are welcome, we particularly wish to solicit offers of papers which touch upon one or more of the following central aspects of the problem.

(i) Incommensurability and the problem of realism: debate between scientific realism and anti-realism with respect
to incommensurability; neo-Kantian versus realist approaches to incommensurability.

(ii) Incommensurability and the theory of reference: the causal theory of reference as response to
incommensurability; problems with the causal theory of reference; descriptive or causal descriptive theories of
reference; reference of theoretical terms; continuity of reference; partial reference; reference of term tokens.

(iii) Incommensurability and the problem of translation and interpretation: principles of charity; communication
between scientists; understanding untranslatable languages; partial versus total translation failure; translation criteria.

(iv) Meaning variance: the issue of whether the meaning of theoretical and observational terms depends on and varies with theoretical context; relation between meaning variance and stability of reference.

(v) Incommensurability and theory comparison: the possibility of comparison of the content of scientific theories despite variation of meaning and/or reference; the possibility of comparative evaluation of theories based on shared methodological principles despite meaning and reference variance.

(vi) Incommensurability, rational theory choice and scientific progress: the problem of rational choice between theories whose content cannot be compared; incommensurability as a problem for scientific progress, especially for realist views of progress as cumulative advance on truth; relativism and incommensurability.

(vii) Taxonomic incommensurability: Kuhn's final version of the incommensurability thesis; local translation failure between subsets of interdefined terms; local holism, lexicons, lexical structures, taxonomic change, homologous lexical structures; taxonomic change versus causal theory of reference; truth as non-relative but internal to lexicon; taxonomic solution to "new world" problem.

(viii) Feyerabend's version of incommensurability: proliferation and pluralism, universal theories; historical examples, e.g. Brownian motion, wave/particle duality; the role of incommensurability in theory dynamics.

(ix) Meta-incommensurability: in addition to object-level incommensurability between scientific theories, there may also be meta-level incommensurability between philosophical approaches to the topic of incommensurability; e.g. a realist may employ realist assumptions in approaching the topic of incommensurability which beg the question against advocates of the incommensurability thesis.

(x) Cognitive approaches to incommensurability: recent applications of computational or cognitive science models to conceptual change and incommensurability.

(xi) Historical case studies: case studies from the history of science which reveal the presence or absence of significant aspects of incommensurability.
 

See also Literature on Incommensurability.