Incommensurability, proportionality, and defeasibility

Incommensurability (and Incomparability)

Seven INCOMMENSURABILITY AND DEMARCATION

as this does nothing to support the thesis that the members of the two tribes share any important moral beliefs and would not help the absolutist in arguing against relativism. The claim of the absolutist about the Crow and the . . thing is not at all clear. If the relativist contention is expressed as “what is right and what is wrong varies fiom culture to culture,” then whether we are to asse...

Incommensurability and affinity

This article takes what has always been a methodological and ethical question for anthropologists (how should we relate to others?) and turns it into an ethnographic one (how do those we study think ethically across borders?). We show that, paradoxically, anthropologists’ commitment to their own forms of ethics across borders have frequently effaced alternative conceptions among the people we s...

Defaults, Defeasibility, and Argumentation Description

This seminar will be organized around a loosely related collection of readings on defaults, defeasibility, and argumentation that I think are, or should be, of real importance for certain areas of philosophy, but whose bearing on the subject has not been explored in detail. Just to establish the philosophical relevance of this kind of work, we will begin by (A) reading quickly through my recent...

Incommensurability and Scientific Realism