Law, Incommensurability, and Conceptually Sequenced Argument

Kuhn’s Incommensurability Thesis: What’s the Argument? Forthcoming in Social Epistemology

In this paper, I argue that there is neither valid deductive support nor strong inductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis. There is no valid deductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis because, from the fact that the reference of the same kind terms changes or discontinues from one theoretical framework to another, it does not necessarily follow that these two theoretica...

Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Argument

Many lawyers lack a basic understanding of the structure and process of legal argumentation. Their limited understanding, which often leads to less than effective advocacy, stems from legal education's failure to make the structure and process of legal argument explicit and systematic. One approach to this problem is to explore the intrinsic relationship of law to rhetoric. Because law and rhet...

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...