Incommensurability & Translation 1858989434

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Incommensurability and Translation Kuhnian Perspectives on Scientific Communication and Theory Change

Edited by

Rema Rossini Favretti P rofessor }'Applied LinRuistics, University (>j' Bologna, Italy

Giorgio Sandri Professor

.u;~ sketching an example, be able to suggest what it involves. ~-1--.• ..., (~ I have discussed elsewhere the way in which students who already know how to talk about position, velocity and acceleration acquire the additional conceptual vocabulary of Newtonian physics, particularly the Newtonian .... r (',rf-,., terms 'for~e', 'mass' an~ 'weight' . 1 There are, I there suggest, various different ~-( routes which the learnmg process may traverse, but all of them involve ..I &:tpositing the validity of one or more universal generalizations ordinarily 4.v."'-t.,,lloca la =rli.visime, nutuata dall' an si o:nsic'Eram classi di fatturato aperior si cE aWEnire se

si elimim. dalla aralisi q..allrrjUE! fattore

SeTbra infine interessante rio:irfure dE, care

si evince dall' espressime i:er il tasso di

h

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Scientific Discourse: lntertextual and lntercultural Practice

/n commensurability and Translation

ru:Jli st:.ruraiti classici cElla micrce:xn:mia. a piu gaE"ali (e arche in altre direzimi) se ne a Sj:DSl:are1ti d=l.la d'.nerd> e cEll 'offerta. ura e cre::lito. In q..iesto s::ritt o, p;rtanto, ci esterno nello ,;p3ZiO re±lito tasso di ccntbio :

zicni differmziali rm lireari diwnta dl. all. i» scro g.ielli trarcesi . In se::x.n:B p:sizime iosita. Infire e plau.sibile p3:1S3lE che la '!CI nex:ostit:uzimalisro nuietario. Al ccntrario, altri J:Be5i o C:Elle roIJTB.ti"" interrezimali , clu.sivarrrote es:g3"l'.l . In prina ai:prossi.nazime ibile di la'vQr o. Di o:nse:µnza cgni q..alwlta i o, riferiti satpre al 1990. A q.iesto riguari:b i rai:p:irti fra cmtramti, nella misura in a.ri ra che prrprio ru q..iesto versante in Italia ci n'aralisi di~ta cEl sett ore. A tal fine ti a tassi irrlicizzati, 9'.6fJ ex.), chll'altra mte ccnsie:Erato il nnlo C:Ell' :in:Ertezza. che am ansai;BJQli cEl. S.JO =i.teuto ccq:eratiw. urernrutralita Mla !IO"Eta. Pi.ii pre:isarrB"Jte

Si si Si si Si si si si

ra

l' :irrpressime, in = lu.sime che le intrcd.lce nel cmtratto un' altra r:arte n ipotizzi ora ura arl.>ta (i.nprevista) CEl limita prevalEl1tE!TEnte a =i.sie:Erare tal osservi cxrre le ircli.razimi di mt.rani:e ottime, anzicre (All e (A2 1, Si mti ch rxnJcm i teC:Eschi SEgUit i, nell'ordire, p:JSSa riferire a periodi relatiVITTffite t

si potra±e sostmere che l ' irrlii;arl31za CEl si µii affemere che hn p:chi problrnii rm si pi> al l ora SlfiXJrre che il grad:> di prot si rerl= re::ESSaria ura variazime salarial si ricordl. l' ircidnz.a C:Etermirnnte di q..ies si rileva. llIXl strurreito id:nro a proru:ivere si sia 11DSSi poco e rrale, mnt.re il settore si scro utilizzate le inforrrazicni =i.tabil si sostime che e nutata la ratura CEi W:>i si s.nxn= sia gnerata cl3lla presmza di u Si tratta ora di nostrare cxrre q.e;ta (si va:B carmidael (19821 per UB sintesil

=

Going through the articles, however, I should prefer to say that the subject's activity is either foregrounded or backgrounded according to the author's choices in the construction and realisation of the processes. The author's presence is signalled both in English and Italian articles by different linguistic choices and discursive practices. Difference lies in the way this presence is emphasized or de-emphasized. In a study on scientific discourse (Rossini Favretti, 1993), it was noted that the communication process is primarily established to convey information and to evaluate the information making statements with a truth value or a probability value. The observation can be further generalized considering that languages have evidential devices which encode epistemological considerations, such as the degree of reliability the writer attributes to a proposition or to a source of knowledge. As Bazerrnan argued in his study on experimental articles in science ( 1988, p. 216): 'Even when an author does not use first person to call attention to his evaluative role, he makes many evaluative judgements throughout the article through estimates of the reliability of various claims.' Evaluation is not limited to a particular section, where the writer's hypothesis is tested and as the case may be falsified, but it generally pervades the whole text. Focusing our analysis on the introductory paragraphs of the articles examined, we have observed that both the problem and the current approach

to the problem are presented in the 'Introduction'. It is difficult to draw a distinction between information and evaluation. The hypothesis set forth by the author is incorporated into the body of scientific

211

knowledge. There are frequent appeals to the context of the discipline and to the shared understanding of that context. The introductory paragraphs tend to const~ue and. emphasize a commonly shared structure of intersubjective meanmg, settmg out the reader's expectations and defining the conceptual framework of reference. For the purposes of our analysis, the writer's interpretive attitude is to be presupposed and investigated.

4

The Construction and Representation of Events - A Comparative Approach

In re~ent years_ the rhetorical approach has entered the methodological debate drawmg attention, m Klamer's words, 'to the problem of understanding each other, and to the problem of communicating to each other' (Choi, 1991 , p. 132). Arguments have been used to motivate rejection of traditional epistemology in favour of rhetoric and discourse analysis and have contributed to investigate the role played by language in the construction and representation of events. Most centrally, the crucial role of persuasion in human sciences, especially economics, has been put into focus.s From this perspective, we can say that, in the realization of the discourse of science, there is a foregrounding of the researcher in English which is not paralleled in Italian, where attention is rather turned to the research, to its procedures and its results. Both in English and Italian we observe a process of coordination and negotiation, in which economic actions, things and events are situated and constructed. The concordances show that scientists tend to refer to what they do and to represent both their practices and the roles they play in the research but th.ere is evidence of a shift in the representation of the objects of emphasis'. This cons1derat10n leads to a third point that should be stressed. The construction of participants and events is not limited to the present but is extended to the past (Gilbert, 1977). As Swales (1990, p. 144) put it, in the ~uthors' attempts to find a 'niche' for their knowledge claims, there are appeals to the discourse community whereby members are asked to accept that the research about to be reported is part of a lively, significant and wellestablished research area'. Research articles are neither written nor read as self-sufficient entities. The author's claims are situated in a context where other papers are held as predecessors. The author's writing is constantly addressed to the context of the discipline, or the school, in which it is located. There are references to the past and the shared understanding of that past. Through citations and intertextual practices, the writer's discourse is related to a sequential series of other discourses and is embedded within the community's discourse and practices. Past work is represented and re-represented in the construction of the past

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lncommensurability and Translation

which is set up by the author to legitimize and validate his claims. In the conversation which is established, it may be either accepted or rejected. Most frequently, both in English and Italian articles, it is emphasized or deemphasized. . . The discussion has so far introduced a number of issues relating to the process of empha()is in discourse organization. Before coming to the conclusion, this issue is to be investigated with reference to the textual organization and to the analysis of thematic structures of our texts. One useful concept that linguistics could provide is the notion of theme. We will not examine this notion here. Suffice it to say that it has been defined as the element which serves as the departing point of the message and is usually associated with the given element in a sentence, that is, the element which is shared between the author and the reader and provides a reference within which the rheme can be interpreted. In our corpora we observed that different kinds of infonnation are thematized in English and Italian. If we go through the thematic structures of the introductory clauses, we see that representation of the 'event' is normally thematized in English, while what is thematized in Italian is the representation of the 'literature about the event'. For reasons of space, this position can be exemplified by the following introductory paragraphs of two articles drawn from our corpora: I. Introduction. International cooperation in monetary, and more generally macroeconomic, poli~y has fallen on hard times of late. Divergencies in policy objectives and economic conditions between the United States, Germany and Japan have meant that G7 summits have achieved little beyond an agreement to disagree, the blandness of recent summit communiques reflecting the absence of agreement on key policy issues. Policy coordination within Europe has been put into question by doubts over the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty and progress towards EMU, and the foreign exchange turmoil in September 1992, which has weakened the cohesion of the European Monetary System. . . . Jn this paper we review the record of pohcy cooperauon and consider whether and how it is helpful, and if so how its effectiveness might be improved by changes in the mechanisms for cooperation. We start by examining the rationale for policy cooperation; move on to consider the history of cooperation and_ its possible achievements; briefly review the possible benefits from alternative types of cooperation; and conclude with some reflections on the possible future of international macropolicy cooperation. In this short paper we do not seek to provide a comprehensive review of the literature on macroeconomic policy cooperation: comprehensive surveys of the academic literature may be found in Artis and Ostrey (1986), Bryant et al. (1989), Cooper (1985), Cooper et al. (1989), Currie, Holtham and Hughes-Hallett (1989), Currie and Levine (1991), Feldstein (1988a,b), Home and Masson (1988), Group of Thirty (1988), and Kenen (1989). Dobson (1991), Fun.aba.sM(l989) and Putnam and Bayne (1987) examine the historical record and mst1tut1onal aspects of G7

Scientific Discourse: lntertextual and lntercultural Practice

213

cooperation. Currie and Vines (1988) survey broader questions of cooperation between OECD count_nes and the Third World. (From 'International cooperation in monetary poltcy: has 1t a future?', Economic Journal, 1993). l. lntroduzione e sommario Dall 'inizio degli anni '50 studi originati nelle piu diverse aree di ricerca economica ?anno gra.dualmen~e po~ato ad individuare nel progresso tecnico uno dei piu 1mp_ortant1 fatton d1 crescna. Con 1! passare degli anni, mentre ii termine progresso vemva gradualmente nmp1azzato da quello piu neutro di cambiamento, si veniva sv1luppa.ndo una leneratura s~m~re piu convinta, da un Jato, di affrontare problemi nlevantl per la teona econormca m generate e, dall'altro, di poler dar loro soluzione. Negli anni '80, numerosi. autori hanno formulato piu compiutamente teorie che cercano d1 superare lo stad10 della «visione» schumpeteriana in cui sembrava essere stata relegata la materia. A seguito di tale generazione di ricerche, oggi e diffusa la convinzione che l'.analisi de! cambiamento tecnologico sia giunta ad uno stadio de! percorso di ncerca per procedere oltre ii quale devono essere rivisitati sia i fondamenti microeconomici sia le implicazioni macroeconomiche. Tuttavia sono ancora numerosi i probleJ?i da risolvere, mentre se ne aprono di sempre piu impegnativi, che, m alcum cas1, sembrano rimettere in discussione le basi stesse della teoria economica. La maggiore complessita dei processi produttivi e di scambio, ii ruolo dei «gran?i» fattori di produzion~, la centralita delle «capacita sociali» portano a sottolmeare forme d1 endogemta de! cambiamento tecnologico ed istituzionale. I problemi di instabilita ... (From 'Cambiamento tecnologico e crescita economica: nuove acquisizioni e questiti aperti nella riflessione teorica' Economia Politica 1993)' , , Two different communicati.ve and epistemological situations emerge not only in the articles considered, but in the generality of the articles collected in the corpora. In the English research article, when presenting the research to the members of his community, the author raises validity claims for his/her inquiry by thematizing either economic phenomena, or, in the case of marked themes, their temporal or institutional location. In the Italian articles, it is the main contributions of the research community that are thematized. In English articles, the relevance of the event, constructed in its institutional or historical context, is the means by which discourse declares itself to be authorized and a discourse about the economy and economic events tends to prevail. In Italian articles, the source of authorization is found and constructed in_ scientific tradition (both national and international) and in its gaps. Discourse about economics, or metadiscourse, is predominant. . This. divisio~ does not exclude different forms of overlapping and mteract1on , but it appears as a general trend in all the articles of our corpora. The reference to a common paradigm does not seem to imply a common cultural tradition. On the one hand, scientists seem to take part in an intradisciplinary, transnational conversation while instantiating different

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lncommensurability and Translation

Scientific Discourse: lntertextual and lntercultural Practice

linguistic systems in their writings. On the other, they seem tied to their national cultural and scientific traditions. Invisible 'colleges' are created at a national and international level and communication seems to take place envisaging different participants and with reference to different cultural traditions. A tension is created between the influence of the international scientific setting and the national scientific and academic tradition. This tradition seems to be extended to a number of European - I would say continental European - scientific communities.

3. The role that value judgements may play in descriptive statements has been the object of debate also in economic studies. 4. The literature that investigates scientific discourse organization is quite extensive. There are many approaches to this process and contributions from different disciplines. Modern rhetoric (see, for example, Kaplan, 1972; Klamer, 1988; McCloskey, 1986) provides useful insights correlating the structure underlying scientific papers and the basic segmentation of the process of inquiry. Rhetorical categories were a starting point for more general semantic theories concerning the structures of narrative texts (Greimas, 1976) and scientific texts (Hutchins, 1977; Hoey, 1994). 5. A good deal of literature has been dedicated to the study of the consequences of the rate of monetary expansion on economic growth: this analysis is necessary for an understanding of the long-term implications of monetary policy. In particular, the various authors have tried to identify the conditions that safeguard the 'superneutral' character of money, or rather the invariance of real variables, above all the process of capital accumulation, to changes in the rate of monetary growh. This 'superneutrality' therefore appears as the dynamic counterpart of the notion of neutrality. (Our translation). 6. The analysis of other lemmas like 'examin*, investigat* , consider*, demonstrat*' and 'esam•, osserv*, studi*, consider*, nota*', validated these results. 7. l. Introduction and Summary From the beginning of the 1950s onwards, studies in various fields of economic research focused increasingly on technical progress as one of the most important factors for growth. As the years went by, while the term 'progress' was gradually replaced with the more neutral term 'growth', the literature revealed an increasing conviction on the one hand of the need to deal with problems of economic theory in general and on the other of the ability to provide a solution for these problems. In the 1980s, numerous authors proposed more highly developed theories aimed at going beyond the stage of Scumpeter's 'vision' to which the subject appeared to have been relegated.

5

Concluding Remarks

This paper does not intend to give comprehensive answers. Rather, it is intended to provide cues for further investigation of scientific discourse, especially in field of comparative studies, in order to identify practices through which the transnationally shared values of a scientific community or group interact with the national experience of its members. A comparative approach is suggested as a means for the identification of the procedures for the translation of values and viewpoints grounded in different linguistic and cultural experiences. In the interaction taking place within scientific communities, translation is seen as an interlinguistic and intercultural practice. Questions may arise as to the translatability of scientific discursive practices. It can be argued that we cannot speak of translation where the impossibility of a word-to-word correspondence has been highlighted and even discursive practices seem to differ in their sequencing. In our perspective, translation is seen as strictly connected with the interpretation of the text and the appropriation of discourse in its context of reference. Acknowledgements

I wish to thank F. Tamburini and the C.l.L.T.A staff for their valuable help in processing the documents. Notes 1. Transnationalism, together with cooperation, was seen as one of the features of the Royal Society. In the words of its first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, 'The object of science (is) of so vast an extent, that it demand(s) the united genius of more than one nation to exhaust the subject' (Birch, 1968,vol. 1, p. 317; originally published 1756-57). 2. One corpus consisted of 20 articles drawn from English journals (Cambridge Journal of Economics, The Economic Jourmzl, Oxford Economic Papers, European Economic Review), the other consisted of 20 articles drawn from Italian journals (Economia politica, Giornale degli economisti, Note economiche, Rassegna economica). Both English and Italian corpora were sampled from a selection of journals issued in a period from 1990 to 1995. In the

sampling, no previous information about the approach was given. Further articles were examined to validate the results of the analysis. The corpus is relatively small but it is textspecific, and is intended to provide evidence as a basis for further investigation.

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Following this generation of research, today there is widespread agreement that the analysis of technological change has reached a stage beyond which progress will only be made by means of a reassessment of both the microeconomic foundations and the macroeconomic implications. However, there are sti II numerous problems to be solved, and increasingly difficult ones emerge, that in certain cases appear to cast doubt on the foundations of economic theory. The increasing complexity of processes of production and exchange, the role of the 'great' factors of production and the central role of 'social skills' are factors that underline the endogenous forms of technological and institutional change. The problems of instability ... (Our translation).

8. The role played by discourse in social sciences has been pointed out repeatedly. Keynes's description is noteworthy: 'In economics you cannot convict your opponent of error - you can only convince him.'

References Bazerman, C. (1988), Shaping Written Knowledge, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. Birch, T. (1968), The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge from its First Rise, A facsimile of the London Edition of 1756-57, with a new Introduction by A. Rupert Hall ... and with an additional bibliographical note by Marie Boas Hall, The Sources of Science, 44, New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation. Choi, Y.B . (1991), 'An interview with Arjo Klamer', Methodus, 3 (I), 131-7. Collins Cobuild English Dictionary (1995), London: Harper Collins. Crane, D. (1972), Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities, Chicago: Midway reprint. Gadamer, H.G. (1982), Truth and Method, New York: Crossroad Publishing Company. Gilbert, G.N. (1977), 'Referencing as persuasion', Social Studies of Science, 7, 113-22.

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Greimas, A.J. (1976), Semiotique et sciences sociales, Paris: Seuil. Halliday, M.A.K. (1985), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, London: E. Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. (1994), 'The construction ofknowledge and value in the grammar of scientific discourse, with reference to Charles Darwin's the Origin of Species', in M. Coulthard (ed.), Advances in Written Text Analysis, London: Routledge, pp. 136-56. Hoey, M. (1994), 'Signalling in discourse: a functional analysis of common discourse patterns in written and spoken English', in M. Coulthard (ed.), Advances in Written Text Analysis, London: Routledge, pp. 26-45. Hutchins, J. (1977), 'On the structure of scientific texts', UEA Papers in Linguistics, 5, 18-39. Kaplan, R.B. (1972), The Anatomy of Rhetoric: Prolegomena to a Functional Theory of Rhetoric, Philadelphia: Center of Curriculum Development. Klamer, A. (1988), 'Economics as Discourse', in N. de Marchi (ed.), The Popperian Legacy of Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 259-78. Kuhn, T. (1968), The Essential Tension, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. ( 1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn., Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lavoie, D. (ed.) (1990), Economics and Hemieneutics, London: Routledge. McCloskey, D.M. (1986), The Rhetoric of Economics, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ricoeur, P. (1981), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. and ed. by J. Thomson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rossini Favretti, R. (1993), Language, Culture, Institutions, Bologna: Pitagora. Rossini Favretti, R. (1998), 'Dialogue in scientific discourse', Dialoganalyse, VI, Proceeding of the 6th Conference, Prague 1996, Ti.ibingen: Niemeyer, 211-20. Samuels, W. (1990), Economics as Discourse, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishing. Sen, A. (1991), 'Economic methodology: heterogeneity and relevance', Methodus, 3 (!), 67-80. Sinclair, J. (1991), Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinclair, J. (1992), 'The automatic analysis of corpora', in J. Svartvik (ed.), Directions in Corpus Linguistics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 379-97. Swales, J.M. (1990), Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Setting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Van Dijk, T.A. (1977), Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse, London: Longman. Winter, E.O. (1982), Towards a Contextual Grammar of English: The Clause and its Place in the Definition of Sentence, London: Allen and Unwin.

PART THREE

Cognition and Formal Reconstruction

13. Argumentation and Knowledge: From Words to Terms Pierre-Yves Raccah

1 Introduction

Scientific theories will be shown to provide descriptions, rather than explanations of phenomena. From that point of view, science could look like a formal language, a sort of representation system, with which one can also generate complex representations out of simpler ones. But scientific theories do much more, they play a crucial psychological and social role: once a theory is accepted by a community, it constitutes an inter-subjective tool to perceive phenomena: accepted hypotheses become the facts of newer theories. On the other hand, the scientific activity is governed by an internal tension: while scientists tend to specify the terms they use, in such a way that their discourse can be abstracted from the situation in which it is uttered (neutralization of the observer), their knowledge is more and more grounded in their experience. An expert who provides an a posteriori rational reconstruction of a piece of his/her knowledge does not describe that knowledge. For what, precisely, distinguishes an expert from a beginner is that the former does not go through the rational steps through which the beginner has to go. It will be argued that what allows the expert to, so to speak, navigate so easily through her/his knowledge is that this knowledge is structured in an argumentative way, rather than in a logical form. Though scientific communication requires that logical form, mastering a piece of knowledge requires a shift from that cognitive representation to the other cognitive representation. An analysis of the semantics of natural languages, in which a distinction can be made between word meaning and term meaning, allows a better understanding of the mechanisms of that tension between grounded

knowledge and scientific discourse.

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2

Incommensurability and Translation

Explanation and description

We often say that nature obeys laws; that natural phenomena can be explained by rules; or that some particular theory explains some particular set of phenomena. As long as these statements remain general and metaphorical, they are acceptable and harmless. However, if someone believed that Nature really obeys some set of laws (in the sense that she would be obedient), (s)he would certainly be considered as mystical or at least irrational. 1 As a matter of fact, one must consider irrational not only the belief that nature is obedient, but also the belief that theories give explanations to natural phenomena, in the usual meaning of the word explanation. For both attitudes presuppose a very special metaphysical standpoint according to which nature is subject to behaviours which, in the first case, would be dictated by laws 2 and, in the second case, would be such that one could find reasons (or even causes) for those behaviours. Can we seriously pretend that the law of universal attraction is a cause (or a reason) of the movement of the Earth around the Sun, in the same way as Othello's jealousy was one of the causes, one of the reasons, of Desdemona's death? The only way, thus, to avoid personifying nature (with all the irrationality it would imply) is to consider that 'natural laws' cease to be natural as soon as they are laws and cease to be laws as soon as they are natural ... 3 One might want to hold that, since we can observe regularities in nature, there must be something 'out there' which is responsible for the regularities we observe. This belief - which is also mine, I must confess - is not really rational: 4 the only conclusions we can draw from observable regularities is that there may be something, either 'out there' or within the observers' systems of observation, which is responsible for the regularities observed. In other words, the so-cailed 'natural laws' should be interpreted as possible constants of the human cognitive systems, or as relating the human cognitive system to the world we observe, but not properties of that world alone. However, once we know that whatever we think we are saying about the world is, in fact, a statement about the cognitive relationship we have with the world, we might want to simplify our statements, using the metaphor of natural laws. But we should not be blinded by that metaphor: what linguistic expressions such as 'natural law' refer to only belongs to the representations suggested by the use of language; the fact that we can speak of natural laws does not guarantee their existence. It follows from these reflections that, even if we want to describe the regularities of our observations in terms of natural laws, we are not entitled to hold that these regularities exist because of some law: this would suppose the personification of nature which we have to reject. For what law would force nature to obey some natural law? And, if we wanted to formulate such a law,

Argumentation and Knowledge: From Words to Terms

221

what would force nature to obey that other law? Yet another law? We thus have to abandon the idea that science explains nature. What does remain is the fact that science describes nature, in such a way that the descriptions it provides are often felt like explanations (hence, the use of the term natural law). If we consider scientific theories as a set of rules which generate a description of some aspects of a class of phenomena, we get hold of a more reasonable conception of natural laws. That position can be called a de dicto conception: what we call 'natural law' is a rule which explains the description we make of some phenomenon within the framework of some theory, in the sense that the rule allows us to formally generate the description. The study of physical theories very well illustrates the necessity of such an epistemological precaution. If, for instance, we considered the law for uniformly accelerated movement, as it is expressed in e

= 112gt2 + V/ + e

0

as an explanation of the trajectory of an object with initial velocity v0 at time t = 0, starting at point e0 of the space, we would also have to explain why this relation holds for this type of movements, and, after a short series of 'why?'s, we would end up formulating, as an explanation, the law of universal attraction:

for which it would be necessary to find an explanation .. . and so on. Fortunately, this is not the way physicists proceed: the aim of these equations is not to provide an explanation to the 'mysteries' of nature, but to explain how the theory describes and predicts the phenomena it is supposed to account for. Scientific theories also provide more abstract laws, which account for less abstract ones, like the universal attraction law accounts for the different movement laws. These more abstract laws, as we have seen, have no intrinsic explanatory value for the phenomena: they only explain how we can describe some phenomenon E in some particular way T(E), given that we describe some other phenomena, E 1, E 2, • • • E., using descriptions T(E), T(E), ... T(EJ In order to do so, a scientific theory 8 must provide means to (a) structure a set of phenomena of the field in simple and more complex phenomena5 (we will say that the phenomenal structure of 8 rests on external hypotheses);

Incommensurability and Translation

Argumentation and Knowledge: From Words to Terms

(b) assign descriptions to the phenomena of that set (let us call that a 'theory of measure' for 8); (c) generate descriptions out of other descriptions, with the means of theoryspecific operators (called internal hypotheses) ; (d) compare descriptions one to another (in particular, compare a description assigned to a phenomenon to a description generated).

The combination of these factors seems to be operated by the following abductive reasoning:

222

We can thus say that a theory e correctly predicts a complex phenomenon E whenever the description it generates is identical to the description its theory of measure assigns to E. Thus, given a set of external hypotheses for an empirical theory e, which entitle us to consider a phenomenon E as a structural complex involving the phenomena E 1, E 2, .. ., E, (that is, E = R(E 1, E 2 , •• • , E) for some structural relation R) given a theory of measure for e, which allows us to describe the relevant aspects of E 1, E 2, .. ., E, and E, as T(E), T(E 2), ... T(E) and T(E), and given a theoretical operation S, the experimental control of e, consists in comparing T(E) , that is T(R(E 1, E 2, • • • E)), with the description 8 generates, that is, S(T(E 1), T(E 2 ), •• • T(E)) . Figure 13.1 illustrates how this functions. 6 ; Phenomena ~ , ' ~--- - ----- -'

~R I

Ei.Ez, .. .,En

223

Since nature obeys rules and since rule S generates a satisfactory description of the natural phenomenon E, it must be this rule S that nature obeys in order to produce phenomenon E. (Note the de dicta ~ de re shift from the first to the second occurrence of S.)

3

Facts and Observation

In the description proposed above, phenomena E I , E 2 , ... , E n and E are referred to without questions on how they are perceived, as if they were, so to speak, directly accessible to observation. This reconstruction is based on a metaphor according to which the world, with its structures, appears to our cognitive system independently of the way it functions. That is, in spite of the precautions taken for rules or laws, the position defended seems to endorse the simple objectivist point of view for entities or events. This is only an appearance, due to the necessity of the presentation. Let us now focus on the constitution of the facts in an empirical theory. First, I would like to insist on the fact that the simple objectivist position cannot be grounds for a scientific activity because it relies on a non-rational belief, which I express as 'B': 7 B Our means of observation, that is, our cognitive and perceptive apparatus, occasionally augmented with some technical devices, gives us a 'picture' of the world, which can be partial but still reproduces its essential features .

1

T(E1). T(Ez),. .. , T(En) T(R(E1.Ez,. ...,En)) ? ';. ?

The two main reasons why B is not a rational belief are:

\ _ _ 5,...----) S(T(E1).T(Ez),. ... T(En))

Figure 13.1 Structure of scientific theories

The 'explanatory effect' produced by a scientific theory is external to the theory. In an attempt to reconstruct how this effect can occur, it can be said that it is due to the following two factors : our tendency to believe that nature follows rules; our tendency to assimilate a phenomenon with its description.

(a) We cannot know what the 'essential features' of the world are, principally because we could not, for obvious reasons, be in the position to exhibit 'essential features' of the world which our cognitive system does not reproduce. The statement of the belief B is thus circular for it really says that our means of observation, ... , give us a 'picture' of the world, which can be partial but still reproduces what our means of observation makes us think is the essential features of the world. (b) The 'picture' our cognitive apparatus gives us of the world cannot - again, for obvious reasons - be directly compared to the world itself in order to exhibit their resemblance. There are ways to indirectly make that comparison (for instance, an analysis of human or non-human action on the world) : but, as we will see, they need human interpretation and, thus, are not theory independent.

224

Argumentation and Knowledge: From Words to Terms

lncommensurability and Translation

225

,- - - - - -··-·- ..... . . - -,

In the same way as we found it necessary to account for the explanatory

: Phenomena (8 1)

effect of scientific descriptions, we feel compelled to account for the way our observation of the world structures it into phenomena. The idea is a recursive loop of the scheme suggested above: an accepted theory forces us to perceive the world in terms of the entities and relations it predicts. In other words, consider a theory 8 1, which describes what it considers as phenomena E~, .. ., E: and E 1 as T(E:), T(E ~), .. . T(E:) and S1(T(E:), T(E~), ... T(E~)). Suppose, now, that 8 1 has been accepted by the scientific community; a member of this scientific community, while working on a theory 82, will identify some of 8 2 's phenomena, E~, E ~ , ... , E!, with some of 8l's 1 descriptions T(E~). T(E~), .. . , T(E:) ; 8 2 's structural relation R with 8l's theoretical operation S, and so on, so that Figure 13.1 has to be modified accordingly (see Figure 13.2). We can thus say that the phenomena of a new theory are the theoretical constructs of accepted theories. This is easily understood when we consider that, behind any measuring device, lies a theory, for instance, the ammeter can be seen as a reification of the theory of electromagnetic induction. From a metaphysical point of view, one would, of course, need to know where all that starts from, what the first step of this loop is. But, fortunately, science does not include metaphysics: we are not concerned with this question.

:

-----------"'•

E:,

4

T(E1 ), T(Eb, ... T(E~

T(R(E1 E~, ... Ef,))

?=?

---~ ~-,-.--~ S'(Tt;-T~~--~~E:~-.

~, ,•Description's (8 1)

: -

r

----------~

Conceptual versus Cognitive Organization of Knowledge

I

t ----;

I

R

_A-

--- r-

Ei, E~, ... E~

According to the conceptual reconstruction developed above, scientific theories are essentially compositional, in the sense that what a theory describes as a complex phenomenon is necessarily described, within this theory, in terms of the parts of that phenomenon and a theoretical operation assigned to the structural rule which combines the parts of the phenomenon. Given that the correspondence between phenomena and descriptions is a matter of inter-subjective convention, it makes sense to wonder whether it is true or false that phenomenon E is assigned description T(E) . These characteristics partially determine the form scientific statements normally take, in order to be evaluated by the scientific community: each noun phrase must refer to one and only one scientific concept (hence, the importance of terminology in science); each statement to a truth value, each intransitive verb phrase to a function from scientific concepts to truth values, and so on. In the context of a communication between scientists, the responsibility for each utterance is supposed to lie with all the scientific community, not only with the speaker. If I utter

?=?

-----~,,.,-~~ -?.~

{ . 1 '

Descriptions (8 2)

:

S 2(T(/fj ), T(Eb, .. .T(Ef,))

--7

'

-----------"' ------JI ~-

1

2 )

I I

' --------- - -'

1

T(Ei ), T(Eb, ... T(Ef,)

Figure 13.2 A hierarchy of theories and descriptions

t

Phenomena (8

\

2~

I

i

lncommensurability and Translation

Argumentation and Knowledge: From Words to Terms

I am not expressing my opinion (or, at least, I am not presenting myself as doing so): I am claiming that what that utterance expresses is held true by the scientific community. This situation certainly explains why cognition has very often been reduced to a conceptual system and natural language to a logical calculus: cognition was assimilated to scientific knowledge and natural languages to scientific or technical languages, whose lexical items are not words but terms. I will now briefly show why human knowledge cannot be assimilated to a truthconditional information system; then, I will show why the meaning of natural language expressions cannot be reduced to truth-conditional information.

precisely what experts are paid for: doing at a glance what others take time to do. But there is no reason why an expert should be, as an expert, expert of his/her own expertise. For that reason, experts are not the most indicated persons to consult in order to understand their own cognitive processes. To take an example, suppose you go to your doctor with a headache and (s)he prescribes you aspirin; if you ask her/him why, (s)he, generally, can tell you that:

226

4.1 Expertise and a posteriori reconstruction The enormous amount of work that has been done in artificial intelligence often rests (though not, fortunately, always) on the assumption that, given the conceptual and computational tools which are now available to reproduce deductive reasoning, it would be sufficient to collect the best experts' knowledge in some field and have it elaborated by some sophisticated inference engine, in order to get a perfect expert system, that is, a system which would function like (or even better than) a human expert in that field. But this assumption is unacceptable for at least two reasons: (a) it presupposes that deductive reasoning is appropriated for any kind of expertise (and even, for that matter, at least for one), and that the same type of reasoning is universally adequate; (b) it considers collecting knowledge as something easy and, even, straightforward whenever you have a good expert at hand. The first reason does not concern us very much here. Moreover, it has been recognized as a serious problem by artificial intelligence people, and has been treated, technically speaking, with many interesting exotic logical systems, such as fuzzy logic, non-monotonic logic, and so on. Though the results are often interesting from a computational point of view, they are incredibly poor from a cognitive point of view. The second reason is, actually, the heart of the question we want to address. It seems obvious that, since experts possess knowledge of some domain, not only can they use that knowledge properly but, the more they know, the more they can say about what they know. But this turned out to be another nonratio~al belief and, in that case, it is simply false. When requested to explain why (s)he went from A to C, an expert may build a complex reasoning, with many steps, which rationally explains his/her inference. But it is usually not the process (s)he went into: the rational reasoning may take a few minutes while the expert inferred C from A in less than a second. Actually, this is

227

(i) headaches are generally due to a poor blood circulation in the cerebral membranes; (ii) the active principle of aspirin is the ion acetylsa!icilate; (iii) the ion acetylsalicilate activates blood circulation because (a) it fluidities blood, (b) it dilates blood vessels; thus, (iv) the ion acetylsalicilate may fight one cause of headaches; and thus, (v) aspirin may be indicated to fight headaches. But though this might be the explanation the doctor learnt when (s)he was a student, it is certainly not the reasoning (s)he actually made when prescribing aspirin. (S)he, most probably, associated a certain degree of dysfunctioning with a certain class of medicines and activated this association, forgetful of the reasons why that association was memorized. (S)he then remembers these reasons only when explicitly thinking about her/his knowledge, but not while using it. This way of managing knowledge may be frightening : the practitioner's expertise (as a practitioner) is no longer guaranteed by science. However, this is precisely what makes the difference between a real expert and a beginner. 4.2 Lh' are true in b, then u(h, b) ~ u(h',b) if and only if cont(h) ~ cont(h') If hand >h' are false in b,I then u(h, b)I...... ~ u(h', b)I if and only if cont(h) ~ cont(h). If his true in b, and h' is false in b,, then u(h, b) > u(h', b). I

I

...._

l

A simple continuum of utility functions satisfying the principles (HL.1)--(HL.3) can be defined as follows. Let card(h) be the cardinality of the set of disjuncts included in the B-normal form of h, that is, the number of possible worlds where his true. Then the weakness W(h) and the informative content cont(h) of h can be defined as follows:

=card(h)lt; cont(h) =1 - W(h) .15 W(h)

(19.4) (19.5)

Now we can define the following utility functions:

uv(h, b)

uc(h, b)

=1 if h is true in b; ' =0 if his false.in b,.

(19.6)

cont(h).

(19.7)

I=

The utility functions uv and uc express the utilities attributed to truth and information, respectively. Now the 'global' utility u(h, b) can be defined as a weighted average of the 'partial' utilities uy(h, b) and uc(h, b). More precisely, we can introduce the following continuum of cognitive utility functions : uJh, b)

=a.uv(h, b) + (1 - a.)uc(h, b) = a.uv(h, b) +(I - a.)cont(h)

(19.8)

where 1/2 x = y)) & Q(x)). It is worth noticing that the natural language expression is of the form: [s NP VP], while the LF translation is of the form .Q(x)[S(x).], where Wis a quantifier. Function! performs a variety of work indeed, cancellation, introduction, modification, and so on. The NP grammatical constituent disappears under the f translation function applied to the whole sentence, and the value of the function f is the quantification of an open sentence: f does not perform a constituent-to-constituent translation, but instead maps the whole phrase ('The present king of France'(NP)) into a constituent ('There is an x such that P(x) .. . ) of a different syntactical category (S)).The resulting first order formula induces indeed the 'right' semantic interpretation in Tarski semantics. Translation function f does not provide itself objectual semantic interpretation, but provides instead the input to semantic interpretation: so, LFs do not belong to a language of semantic universals, but represent the syntactic translation of grammatical form into predicate logic. Function! provides a disambiguation of the surface NL string, either in the sense of reconstructing that part of information relevant to semantics which is missing in surface grammar, or even in the sense of

Translation and Semantics

473

representing in an explicit manner the different possible readings of surface expressions. For instance,! represents in terms of relative scope of quantifiers the two different readings of 'Everybody loves somebody'. (i) Would it be possible to generalize the strategy, and take fas the operation (function) which, by translating and representing surface syntax in LF, should introduce a general solution for every natural language constituent whose grammatical form does not provide full semantic information? (ii) What is the basic character of the f translation operation? (iii) Could LF representations be constructed through alternative strategies alternative f translation operations?

4

Constraints on Translation

The relations between syntax and semantics are meant to satisfy to different degrees - within classical formal grammars - the three following principles: (i) Compositionality: the category of an expression is determined by the categories of its immediate constituents and by the mode of construction; the denotation of an expression is determined by the denotations of its immediate constituents and by the mode of combination. (ii) Regularity: constituents of the same category get denotations of the same semantic type. (iii) Individuals: individual expressions denote individuals. Russellian translation function f does not satisfy 'compositionality': for instance, LF representation of the NP-VP 'the author of Ulysses is James Joyce' becomes the Q(x)-[S(x)] first order sentence 'there is one single individual who wrote Ulysses ... ', where the NP constituent has been cancelled by the !-translation. Russell's function f does not operate on steps of syntactic construction of expressions in order to provide, step by step, their translation into LF language: satisfaction of compositionality would amount instead to a step-by-step translation of the sort: fiS) = fiNP, VP) = (f{NP), fiVP)). Severe constraints on admissible translation functions would induce satisfaction of compositionality. But one must remember that the role of the !-translation is to represent in the forms of the LF language (first order language) the 'right' semantic interpretation of the constituent, that is, the semantic information which is missing in surface syntax, where NPs of different semantic type occur. When !-translation satisfies compositionality, it does not always satisfy 'regularity', as different translations for NPs of different semantic type would be allowed: expressions of the same category will be mapped into expressions of different

Jncommensurability and Translation

Translation and Semantics

semantic type (for instance, 'John', 'The author of Ulysses', 'Pegasus', some men'). Some scholars (Russell and many others) came to the conclusion that it is much more preferable to get rid of compositionality as regards /functions than to get rid of first order languages as representation languages. Surface structure (grammatical form) of natural language is systematically misleading and must be mapped into logical form through an unrestricted mapping: furthermore, the language of LF is the language of first order classical logic, and it undertakes a classical first order formal semantic interpretation. The choice of classical first-order logic as the representation language (the target language) is probably the key point of the strategy that selects 'regularity' and 'individuals' over 'compositionality'. The occurrence in natural language of descriptive non-logical terms and of syntactic constructions with essential occurrence of descriptive terms produces effects of higher complexity of semantic construction with respect to syntax. A typical case in point is the interconnection of quantification and intensionality in some natural language construction. No compositional representation at the first order and in classical extensional semantics would properly represent the needed semantical differences between the (s NP VP) constructions:

mapped into second order functional expressions intuitively designating, instead of the individual, the set of properties the individual possesses (a lambda expression(simplified) [AP { P(j)}] represents the set of properties of John, while [AQ ('