A Reconsideration of the Relation Between Kuhnian Incommensurability and Translation

ABSTRACT

Up to the introduction of the term and concept of incommensurability by T. S. Kuhn and P. K. Feyerabend in the early 1960s, scientific texts were supposed to pose no problem as regards their translation, unlike literature, which was thought very difficult to translate. After the introduction of the term, translation of scientific language became equally problematic because, due to conceptual and perceptual incommensurability, there was no common observation basis to ground linguistic equivalences between languages of incommensurable paradigms. This article highlights the presuppositions that link incommensurability to dramatic consequences (impossibility of communication, translation, and comparative evaluation of paradigms) and tries to sketch an alternative way of understanding incommensurability and translation drawing on Kuhn’s work. From this perspective, translation is not an all-or-nothing affair for either science or literature and becomes a problem to be solved for each particular set of circumstances.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank J. W. McAllister, editor of this journal, and the three referees for their valuable comments and criticism, which helped me improve the manuscript considerably.

Notes

1 Friedrich cites St. Jerome who, like a Roman emperor, declares: ‘The translator considers thought content a prisoner (quasi captivos sensus) which he transplants into his own language with the prerogative of a conqueror (iure victoris)’ (Friedrich 1992, 12–13).

2 In translation studies and history of science there is renewed interest in the practice of translation focusing on various cultural aspects and questions such as, who translates, what is translated, for whom and for what purpose are the translations made, etc. For more on cultural translation see Burke and Po-Chia Hsia (2007). On translation and science see Sarrukai (2002) and the articles in the special issue of The Translator (Olohan and Salama-Carr 2011), the special issue of Annals of Science (Dietz 2016), and the Focus section of Isis (Dupré 2018).

3 See, for instance, Cleanth Brooks (1960, 214): ‘One must put himself at the mercy of the translator—with the knowledge that the finer aspects of poetry elude translation’. Brooks also contends that, according to the American philosopher W. M. Urban, a poem ‘is strictly untranslatable: what it “says” can be rendered only by the poem itself’ (Brooks 1960, 232).

4 Paz wrote, ‘The meanings of a poem are multiple and changeable; the words of that poem are unique and irreplaceable’. Paz also spoke of ‘the fixed language of the poem’ which is ‘congealed and yet living’ (Paz 1992, 159).

5 The term ‘incommensurability’ was simultaneously and independently introduced also by Paul K. Feyerabend in his seminal paper, ‘Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism’ (Feyerabend 1962). On Feyerabend’s understanding of incommensurability, which differed from Kuhn’s, see Oberheim (2005). On Kuhn, Feyerabend, and incommensurability, see Hoyningen-Huene (2004).

6 For a detailed discussion of Kuhn’s early account of incommensurability, see Hoyningen-Huene (1990, 1993); Sankey (1993). On Kuhn’s later conception of taxonomic incommensurability, see Sankey (1998). In the present section, and in the present article, I am not giving a full account of Kuhn’s views on incommensurability but focusing only on those aspects that pertain to translation.

7 On the occasion of Structure’s 50th anniversary, David Weinberger (2012) put it succinctly: ‘The scientists hated incommensurability because it seemed to imply that science makes no real progress, the philosophers hated it because it seemed to imply that there is no truth, and the positivists hated it because it seemed to imply that science is based on nonrational decisions’.

8 Referring to Kuhn’s account of science, Israel Scheffler also comments: ‘The general conclusion to which we appear to be driven is that adoption of a new scientific theory is an intuitive or mystical affair, a matter for psychological description rather than logical or methodological codification’ (Scheffler 1982, 18).

9 ‘Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all’; ‘The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced’ (Kuhn 1970, 150, 151).

10 Although Kuhn speaks repeatedly of ‘persuasive arguments’ (e.g. Kuhn 1970, 159), he often contrasts logical proof and persuasion. ‘[T]he the status of the circular argument [arguing in defence of a paradigm by premising the same paradigm] is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle’; ‘[T]he superiority of one theory to another is something that cannot be proved in the debate. Instead, I have insisted, each party must try, by persuasion, to convert the other’ (Kuhn 1970, 94, 198).

11 Kuhn was not, of course, unaware of the fact that scientists who, as he says, are ‘reasonable men’ (Kuhn 1970, 158), use and hear arguments in the debate over the merits and defects of paradigms (cf. Kuhn 1970, 152, 155). What he contends is that the superiority of the new paradigm over the old cannot be shown by a step by step logical inference which resembles a logical or mathematical proof that rests on shared premises and agreed upon rules. Rather, in his view, the reasons used function as values that are applied differently by different individual scientists (Kuhn 1970, 199).

12 See Kindi (2011) for a discussion and criticism of van Fraassen’s idea.

13 In the opposite direction, Paul de Man (1984), talking about Walter Benjamin’s article, ‘The Task of the Translator’, translated by Harry Zohn (Benjamin 1969), makes the paradoxical claim that the English and French translations of Benjamin’s text, which defends the view that it is impossible to translate, instead of refuting this view, confirm it. He goes on to point out the grave misunderstandings of these two translations of the German original, translations which were penned by eminent scholars and experts of the German language. The claim he makes is not that these two translations just happened to fail but the oxymoron that, although these are translations of the particular text, they were bound to fail as translations.

14 The sense that Kuhn alluded to must have been the one that Carnap had proposed, namely, the formulation of rules that would guide translation.

15 Kuhn notes that he does not want to eliminate the difference between literal and figurative use of language. His point, he says, ‘is simply that the literal and the figurative use of terms are alike in their dependence on preestablished associations between words’ (Kuhn 1989, 12).

16 Paul de Man gives the example of the German word Brot and the French word pain. Both mean the English ‘bread’, but Brot in the context of Hölderlin brings to mind, according to De Man, Hölderlin’s text Brot und Wein which is certainly not the case with the French pain. Pain is associated with ‘pain français, baguette, ficelle, bâtard, all those things’ (de Man 1984, 87). Pain et vin brings to mind, he says, what you get for free in a cheap restaurant.

17 ‘Except under very special circumstance, like those of the historian at work, the price of combining [two incommensurable lexicons] is incoherence in the description of phenomena to which either one might alone have been applied. Even the historian avoids incoherence only by being sure at all times which lexicon he is using and why. Under these circumstances, one may reasonably ask whether the term “enriched” quite applies to the enlarged lexicon formed by the combination of this sort’ (Kuhn 1989, 22).

18 MacIntyre gives the example of translating Horace’s Latin into Hebrew. What Horace said about gods ‘could only have emerged in Hebrew as at once false and blasphemous; the Hebrew explanation of the Roman conception of a god could only have been in terms of an idolatrous regard for evil spirits. It is in the course of just this type of explanation that “daimōn” is transformed into “demon”.’ (MacIntyre 1988, 380).

19 Cf. Quine (1969a, 3): ‘What we want from the linguist as a serviceable finished product, after all, is no mere list of sentence-to-sentence equivalences, like the airline throwaways of useful Spanish phrases. We want a manual of instructions for custom-building a native sentence to roughly the purpose of any newly composed English sentence, within reason and vice versa’. Neither Kuhn nor MacIntyre would believe that such a manual could ever be constructed.

20 Cf. Bacon (2000): ‘Plainly words do violence to the understanding, and confuse everything; and betray men into countless empty disputes and fictions’ (Aphorism 43); ‘But the idols of the marketplace [the illusions imposed on the understanding by words] are the biggest nuisance of all … ’ (Aphorism 59). Similar comments can also be found in other writers of the period, such as Boyle and Leibniz. See Rossi (2000), chs. 7 and 8.

21 Cf. Bacon (2000, 225): ‘State all the things you accept briefly and summarily, so that there may be no more words than there are things’.

22 On the efforts to construct a universal language in seventeenth-century England and the relation of such a language to scientific terminology see Salmon (1988, 129–206). Cf. Halliday and Martin (1993, 6).

23 One of the referees of this paper objected that the early modern view that words are burdens can hardly be attributed to the pre-Kuhnian philosophy of science of the twentieth century since it did not embrace a realist conception of the world, but rather assumed an anti-realist or instrumentalist perspective. It is true that the logical positivists, who dominated philosophy of science in the first half of the twentieth century and helped philosophy take the linguistic turn, did not care about ontology and focused on the linguistic expressions of science. But the language they studied was not the rich and dynamic language that scientists actually use but a metaphysically neutral formal language. They dealt with a pure calculus of uninterpreted symbols that were manipulated ‘according to preassigned formation and transformation rules’ (Feigl 1970, 5). Words in this context are signs that lack any substantive content that would pose a problem for translation. As Feigl put it, expressing more generally the spirit of the logical positivists, ‘their “meanings” are, if one can speak of meanings here at all, purely formal’ (Feigl 1970, 5). In both cases, i.e. in early modern times, and in philosophy of science before Kuhn, words in actual use meant trouble for philosophy. That is why in both cases, they were set aside and the effort was to substitute an ideal language (formal or not) for the actual one.

24 The terms ‘conceptual’ and ‘perceptual incommensurability’ were introduced by Hoyningen-Huene and Sankey (2001).

25 On the relation between Kuhn and Whorf see Irzik and Grünberg (1998).

26 We find the same thought in Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason: ‘In “learning language” you learn not merely what the names of things are, but what a name is; not merely what the form of expression is for expressing a wish, but what expressing a wish is; not merely what the word for “father” is but what a father is’ (Cavell 1979, 177). Kuhn and Cavell influenced each other when they were both at Berkeley. For more on the relation between Kuhn and Cavell see Kindi (2010).

27 Hacking (1975, 115) called similar questions ‘stupid’. Kuhn was concerned that, in works that followed historical philosophy of science, nature may have lost its part in the theories we built about it (Kuhn 2000b, 120). He, nevertheless, insisted that ‘the supposedly solid facts of observations turned out to be pliable  … the so-called facts proved never to be mere facts, independent of existing belief and theory’ (Kuhn 2000b, 108).

28 See Kindi (2010, 2012a, 2012b). Wittgenstein (1988, 50) says that ‘a concept is the technique of using a word’. Hacking (1990, 359) followed Wittgenstein in assuming that concepts are ‘uses of words in their sites’.

29 A similar understanding of translation is found in the Middle Ages. The word translatio meant ‘displacement’ or ‘transfer’ and appeared in expressions such as translatio studii and translatio imperii, which mean transfer of culture or government from one epoch to another or from one place to another (Cassin 2014, 1146).

30 Venuti discusses an English translation of Antonio Tambucchi’s Italian novel, Sostiene Pereira, to show how the choices made by the translator (incorporating both British and American slang) may invoke associations with works and styles in the English language not available in the original.

31 ‘“Incommensurable” means that you are always confronted with a remainder’ (James 1996, 62).