Sunday, June 22, 2014

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Just finished reading A Beginner's Guide to Reality by Jim Baggott. It is an intertwined history of philosophy and science, and I liked the book quite a bit. The people and topics in this book that have been written about by many authors, but every author brings their own take to anything they write about, something that allows us to take away new insights and ideas.

One of the items in this book that is an example of this is a discussion in the epilogue about the "socio-cultural revolution" that takes place in science when an area is undergoing a paradigm shift due a building consensus around a new set of discoveries or ideas. He compares it to similar changes that occur in other segments of human societies, showing that science does not exist outside a society's culture and is, in fact, influenced greatly by it.

This general idea was not new to me, but I got something new from a footnote where he paraphrases Thomas Kuhn : "Kuhn wrote that when this happens, individuals in the communities behave as they occupy different (social) worlds. Even though they may use the same language, many of the words in this language have taken on quite different meanings in these different worlds. The worlds are incommensurable. The words no longer have any common measures by which they can be unambiguously compared."

I couldn't help but see what's happening today as a "perfect storm" of this problem, with political, religious and other social groups currently going through this process at the same time. People have stopped trying to communicate and are just throwing insults around, at least partly because communication has become virtually impossible--incommensurable. The factions into which we have siloed ourselves have combined full-blown defensive postures with no-surrender attitudes with anything-goes attack strategies.

We are also fooling ourselves and missing what's really going with this loss of the ability to communicate on by thinking, "Why don't they realize what we're saying is so obviously true?" We are dumbfounded at "the ignorance" of the other groups and become so frustrated that we can longer justify being civil.

What a mess.

P.S. After this original post, I ran across this short article and video about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Beetle in the Box Analogy talking about individual perspective versus shared experiences when it comes to shared meaning of the words we use.

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