Incommensurability, explanation, world views

tuomas.kuronen@tkk.fi — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Consider LSE's slogan: rerum cognoscere causas ("to know the causes of things", ripped from Virgil, I suppose). It makes a direct claim favouring causal explanation. Another matter, however, more rooted in the Anglo-American tradition is the tendency to embrace methodological individualism (individuals matter).

Taken these, it should not come as a surprise that a joint session of Arabic and US speakers covering contemporary issues in the Middle East became a clash of world views above anything else. Everyone agreed with the existence of roughly the same set of problems.

What is interesting, is that given the newly elected US administration, the approach seems to be: ‘micro-agents and macro-measures'. Both the measures of the ‘international community', as well as the ‘group controlling' seem somehow to have access to the solving of the problems. The field of application is huge, and as the focus of interest shifts from the unpleasant to the more generally accepted (thus more interesting), some fates become irrelevant to the nexus of policy practice. Weirdly enough, some people seem to find the flow of medical equipment relevant.

As I am in the middle of digesting about a half of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure... it appeared to me that perhaps incommensurability is fundamentally conceptual by nature, rather than simply "talking past each other" as sometimes proposed? Taking this a bit Wittgensteinian, are practitioners of different schools of thought unable to even see the problem (or ‘puzzle', as Kuhn would have it), not to speak of speaking of it?

If we believe the professionals (no matter what discipline, in this case a foreign policy professional from Washington), they have a whole toolbox full of ready-to-use means to solve all kinds of problems in the world. Belief in agency for ideological (and practical) reasons is handy. By being able to point out causes of things, one can justify pretty much any policy decision. Some people call this ‘pointing fingers'.<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Ctkuronen%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><style> </style> <p>Consider LSE's slogan: <i>rerum conoscere causas</i> ("to know the causes of things", ripped from Virgil, I suppose). It makes a direct claim favouring causal explanation. Another matter, however, more rooted in the Anglo-American tradition is the tendency to embrace methodological individualism (individuals matter).</p> <p>Taken these, it should not come as a surprise that a joint session of Arabic and US speakers covering contemporary issues in the Middle East became a clash of world views above anything else. Everyone agreed with the existence of roughly the same set of problems.</p> <p>What is interesting, is that given the newly elected US administration, the approach seems to be: ‘micro-agents and macro-measures'. Both the measures of the ‘international community', as well as the ‘group controlling' seem somehow to have access to the solving of the problems. The field of application is huge, and as the focus of interest shifts from the unpleasant to the more generally accepted (thus more interesting), som [...]

GloStra Blog Entries tagged 'methodological individualism'

Incommensurability, explanation, world views