INCOMMENSURABILITY, RELATIVISM, METHODOLOGY

INTRODUCTION:

"Never let research get in the way of a good story"

In this essay I wish to examine the critique of‘relativism’ as applied to the philosophy ofscience. Relativist accounts argue that whatscience ‘takes’ to be a universally enframingaccount of knowledge of the world is always, infact, located within an institutional and socio-culturally determined community. Moreover, whatthat community takes to be a universal epistemologyis always a particularised epistemology which canclaim no greater worth (as knowledge) than anyother competing claims to truth. The immediateimplication of this critique for the design andexecution of empirical methodology is that, whilststructured and designed to be ‘neutral’ or ‘value-free’, methodology is only ever neutral insofar asit conforms to the world-view of the communitywhich develops it. Therefore, according to arelativist thesis, knowledges produced byscientific method are not ‘transferable’ or‘translatable’ knowledges - they can exhibitconsistency with the epistemological foundations ofa particular ‘science’ - but cannot be taken to beuniversally true.

In the second part of this essay I will beexamining the conventionalist critiques ofscientific method made by Thomas Kuhn, PaulFeyerabend and Gaston Bachelard which, I willargue, finds echoes in the post-structuralist andrelativist theories of Francois Lyotard. As ananswer to relativism I will briefly examineBhaskar’s critical realism and also the notion of dialogicrationalism as put forward by Jurgen Habermas orHilary Puttnam.

CULTURAL STUDIES AND METHOD

I would like to begin, however, by examining theimplementation of research methods in the humansciences in general, and in the field of culturalstudies in particular. Cultural studies, I wouldargue, maintains a complex and sometimes unexaminedrelationship with the positivistic methodologiesassociated with scientific rationalism. Despite arich and sound critique of positivism from withincultural studies, many writers appeal toempirical/evidential methods of proof without firstexamining those methods and qualifying theirpartiality.

Taking a cultural studies ‘text’ at random (forexample Douglas Kellner’s “Media Culture”) one canfind deployed a range of methodologies which act as‘proof’ to the arguments made by the author. InKellner’s book there are references to priorparadigmatic authorities (Marx, Baudrillard), theuse of quantitative statistics (figures fortelevision ownership), and qualitative statistics(respondents reactions to a particular mediaevent). These methods are deployed asargumentative proof of what is, primarily, apurposive critical polemic.

The distinction between polemic and ‘rational’knowledge is an important one, and one which thescientific community is keen to maintain, buttowards which cultural studies, with itssensitivity to notions such as discourse, ideology,hegemony, and indeed incommensurability, is much morereflexive. Take, for example, Stuart Hall’scritique of positivistic social science methodologyin the early phase of the `media effects' debatefrom his essay “The Rediscovery of Ideology: Returnof the Repressed in Media Studies”:

“The approach, though advanced as empiricallygrounded and scientific, was predicated on a very

specific set of political and ideologicalpresuppositions. These presuppositions, however,were not put to the test within the theory, butframed and underpinned it as a set of unexaminedpostulates. It should have asked ‘does pluralismwork?’ and ‘how does pluralism work?’ Instead, itasserted, ‘pluralism works’ - and then went on tomeasure, precisely and empirically, just how wellit was doing” (Hall S: 233)

There seems, therefore, to be a paradox; Culturalstudies deploys research methods designed toproduce knowledge, whilst at the same timemaintaining a reflexive and self-consciousperception that research methods are framed andexecuted from within a particular and locatedcommunity. This is a sort of avowal /disavowalparadox which would require a complex historicalarchaeology of cultural studies to explain.Initially, one might propose that cultural studiessits on an unstable border between, on the onehand, literary and philosophical theories of value(ethics, political philosophy and aesthetics) and,on the other, the more logically positivist andempirically descriptive methodologies of the hardersciences. (a sort of dialectical balancing act? Iwill need to digress extensively to follow thisthrough).

Foucault’s account in ‘The Order of Things’ isuseful here. Foucault outlines the notion ofepistemes as constitutive of particular world-viewsat particular historical periods. "An episteme is,very roughly, a conceptual grid that providesconceptions of order, sign and language that allowa series of discursive practices to qualify a‘knowledge’” (Gregory: 21) (note: there is acorrespondence, here, between Foucault’s macroepistemes and Kuhn’s notion of paradigms, to bediscussed later). Foucault charts thetransformation from the Renaissance episteme ofresemblance; “a way of thinking and being in theworld in which there was no gap between ‘words’

and ‘things’, no difference between signs onparchment and signs in nature” (ibid), to theclassical episteme in which a gap between words andthings was opened up; ‘resemblance’ yielded to‘representation’. In this classical episteme,science (or natural history) takes up the role ofnavigating between the word and object, a roledesigned “to bring language as close as possible tothe observing gaze, and the things observed asclose as possible to words” (Foucault q.v. Gregory:21). In the classical episteme science is alignedwith representation.

In his essay, ‘Conceptions of Knowledge’, BarryBarnes notes the primacy of visualisation as a guidingtrope in science. Examining the contemplative model ofenquiry he suggests that according to this account:

“knowledge is best achieved by disinterestedindividuals, passively perceiving some aspect ofreality, and generating verbal descriptions tocorrespond to it. Such descriptions, wherevalid, match reality, rather as a picture maymatch in appearance some aspect of the reality itis designed to represent”. (Barnes: 103).

Thus, visual apprehension and pictorialrepresentation become the model for knowledgeproduction. Our epistemological notions arepermeated by this metaphor: “We talk ofunderstanding as ‘seeing’, or ‘seeing clearly’ weare happy to talk of valid descriptions giving us a‘true picture’” (ibid). However, it is notablethat this model assumes that the subject engaged inthe act of representation is excluded from thepicture: disinterested individuals, passivelyperceiving, producing a picture which speaks for itself.Traditionally, the philosophy of science hasconcentrated on the internal consistency andlogical adequacy of this representation, whilstaccepting this absence of the scientist orobserver. However, the human sciences are morereflexive about the role of the representer, arguing

that knowledge is essentially social, somethingwhich is actively developed and modified inresponse to practical contingencies. Knowledge isnot produced by passively perceiving individualsbut by “interacting social groups engaged inparticular activities” (Barnes: ibid). Thus, inthe space opened up by representation, as in thedominant episteme of the classical age, the aims,conventions and cultural location of the scientistare brought ‘into the light’. It is here that thearguments of Bachelard, Kuhn and Feyerabend begin.

Returning to Foucault’s account, once the “unitaryfield of visibility and order was opened up indepth, knowledge was no longer mapped as a singlegeneral science of order but was insteaddistributed across a three dimensional space”(Gregory: 27). Human sciences are located in thisspace:

“On the first side were the mathematicalsciences; on the second side, the empiricalsciences (biology, economics and linguistics);and on the third, side philosophical reflection.These axes triangulated the space of the new“human sciences” (including sociology andpsychology) which existed in a state of constant,creative, and highly unstable tension with theirenframing discourses. In turn they attemptedmathematical formularisations, they borrowedmodels from the empirical sciences, and theysurrendered themselves to philosophicalreflection” (Gregory: ibid).

There is a complex interaction of traditions andenframing discourses in which the ‘human sciences’are located. Rather than a simple extension ofnatural science methodologies into the humansciences, there exists a mediated interaction ofcalculation, empiricism and reflection which, asFoucault suggests, is highly unstable.

However, whilst this account attempts to locate the

human sciences in their historical context, it doeslittle to explain why, although subject tothoroughgoing critique, of which Foucault’s work isa part), scientific method maintains such a stronghold in the human sciences.

Perhaps the answer to this is that, in Westernsocieties the profound success of scientific methodover-arches all attempts to see it as a discourse;“We depend on science for our way of life, andscience defines reason, for [all] practicalpurposes” (Myerson: 5). Perhaps then, CulturalStudies takes scientific method as a pervasive model;that to enquire into the nature of things one hasto start from some guiding principle or thesis andgather evidence which fits, and thus proves, thethesis. Hilary Puttnam speaks of the pervasivenessof this model (of scientific success) when henotes:

“I am suggesting that the high prestige ofscience in the general culture is very much dueto the enormous instrumental success of science,together with the fact that science seems freefrom the interminable and unsettlable debatesthat we find in religion, ethics andmetaphysics.” (q.v. Myerson 30)

Science ‘gets things done’ and one consequence ofthis success is that there exists an overridingimperative to accept science as the mostsophisticated tool in the production of knowledge:

“I suspect many of us will stick with thescientistic view even if it, at any rate, can beshown to be inconsistent or incoherent. Inshort, we shall prefer to go on being depressedto losing our status as sophisticated persons”(ibid: 28)

Andrew Ross, in “Strange Weather”, notes that evenmarginal and alternative cultural groups feelobliged to appeal to science to ground their

claims:

“The fierce independence of the New Age Community.. is increasingly compromised by its evangelicaldesire to move beyond a marginal status in thelegitimate scientific world. Consequently, theclaim to an alternative world view, distinct fromorthodox rationalism, increasingly rests uponarguments that this claim is nonetheless unjustlyexcluded from or suppressed by the dominantscientific paradigm. ... Perhaps there isnothing more to learn here than the old Marxistlesson that a dominant culture has the power toengender an opposition in its own image" (Ross:19-20).

My own view is that cultural studies maintains arelation with scientific rationalism that is, touse a psychoanalytic simile, like the Oedipalrelation of son to father. Cultural enquiryvacillates in a dialectic between the ‘use ofmethod’ and the ‘critique of method’, betweenuniversalistic rationalism and relativism, between‘imitation of’ and ‘rejection of’ the methods ofthe natural sciences. To the extent that culturalstudies is ‘interdisciplinary’ or multi-perspectival it remains sensitive to the notionthat none of these multiple discourses can claim asuperior, ‘meta-linguistic’, rationality. Yet itsenterprise remains, at least partly, the productionof knowledge; for this the empirical methodology ofscience acts as a model. At one extreme end ofthis dialectic vacillation are theories ofincommensurability. These theories contend thatthe design and implementation of researchmethodologies is fundamentally misguided (as aroute to ‘truth’) because they are grounded in aparticular paradigm and are therefore‘untranslatable’ between cultural world-views.

In the following sections I wish to examine theturn towards theories of incommensurability withinthe philosophy of science. These theories stem from

a turn away from an examination of the notions of‘logical coherence’ and ‘internal consistency’utilised in scientific theory choice (c.f. Popper)and towards an historical examination of ‘whatscientists actually do’ (c.f. Feyerabend). Thisperspective aims to “describe the actual characterof scientific investigation and the ways in whichscientists choose which theories to accept or atleast pursue in further research” (Bechtel: 50).Implicit in this change of direction is anexamination of the role of the cultural, social andinstitutional conventions which impinge onscientific theory choice.

BACHELARD: REVOLUTION AND COMPLEXITY

Gaston Bachelard argues that what characterisesscience is discontinuity. (understood asepistemological break by Althusser). He proposes anon-evolutionary explanation of the development ofscience, where “prior developments do notnecessarily explain the present state of science”(Lechte: 4). As an example, it is not possible toexplain Einstein’s theory of relativity asdeveloping out of Newtonian physics because the twosystems are radically discontinuous.

“No doubt there are some kinds of knowledge thatappear to be immutable. This leads some people tothink that the stability of the contents is due tothe stability of the container, or, in other words,that the forms of rationality are permanent and nonew method of rational thought is possible” (q.v.Lechte: 4)

Indeed, Bachelard argues that the (sometimes)radical changes in the meaning of a concept, or inthe nature of a field of research are what bestcharacterise science - science is alwaysrevolutionary.

Moreover, Bachelard criticises the notion of

‘simplicity’; a commonly held tenet (often referredto as Occam’s razor) in the philosophy of sciencethat argues that when two theories adequatelyexplain a phenomenon it is the simpler of the twowhich is chosen. This derives from an argument ofDescartes’ who proposed that progress ensued fromstarting from a point of clear and simple origin(Lechte ibid). Bachelard argues that when simpletheories are applied (through experimentation) to aphenomenon, complexities and exceptions arise. ForBachelard there are no simple ideas; "applicationis complication" (ibid). This is because phenomenaare not simple ‘substances’ but exist as a complexof (structural) interrelationships.

The factors of discontinuity and complexity,stressed by Bachelard, seem to militate againstscientific /empirical rationalism orepistemological certainty and can be seen to openup pathways to philosophically relativistpositions. This, however, is not Bachelard’s aim.Rather, Bachelard wishes to foreground thedialectical nature of rationalism and empiricism(realism):

“Rationalism - which includes philosophy and theory- is the field of interpretation and reason;realism, on the other hand, provides rationalismwith the material for its interpretation” (ibid: 3)

Thus, experimentation without theory must remain ata naive level (for it is unaware of what it isdoing) whilst rationalism without empirical realismtends towards an idealist abstraction (i.e. thatscience is nothing but the reflection of anunderlying philosophical system). Moreover,despite his notion of ‘discontinuity’, Bachelarddoes not argue that competing epistemologicalsystems in science exist at the same time, but thatrather, ‘new science’ subsumes (or envelopes) ‘oldscience’. Thus, a rationally coherent scientificpicture at a given time is possible. On closeinspection, Bachelard is both rationalist and

realist although he does make some attempt tohistoricise and complexify his field.

KUHN: PARADIGMATIC REVOLUTION.

For Kuhn, The key concept in the development ofscientific method is the paradigm or ‘theoreticalmatrix’ (Bechtel: 52). A paradigm provides aframework for the description and experimentalinvestigation of phenomenon, within a particularscientific discipline.

Like Bachelard, Kuhn argues that science developshistorically in a series of stages characterised byperiodic crises and revolutions (although heprovides a much more thorough historical accountthan the former). This series is cyclical; periodsof normal science are overtaken by crises, there isa revolution (a paradigm shift, where the dominantparadigm is ousted and replaced by a new one) and aperiod of normal science ensues with the newparadigm in place.

A paradigm, however, is not just simply a model ortheory but a framework which dictates how the modelis to be applied. (like a discourse which sets itsown ‘enframing’ horizons). Kuhn focuses on howscience is taught from text books; general theoriesare commonly taught by means of examples that showhow to apply the theory to phenomena in theparadigm’s domain, these ‘exemplars’ become themodel for students:

“Students begin by literally imitating the exemplaritself, for example by solving the same equationfor different values. Later they learn to modifyand extend the exemplar to solve new problems byanalogy to the original exemplar” (Bechtel: 53)

Thus a scientist’s goal, during periods of normalscience, is neither to confirm or falsify theoriesbut to fit the theory to nature - the generaltheory is unquestioned. Therefore, when

experimentation fails it is the experimenter (orthe experiment) that is assumed to have ‘got itwrong’. Experimentation is not a test of theory itis, in a sense, a ritualistic confirmation ofscientific belief.

Kuhn believes that normal science enters a periodof crisis when experimental failures and anomaliesbegin to mount up. As failure rates increase, oras the paradigm is found to be inadequate whenapplied to new problems, researchers become more‘adventurous’ and imaginative. Alternativeparadigms with different fundamental principles aresought and, if found, paradigmatic ‘wars’ ensue;Science enters a revolutionary phase (in directanalogy to political revolutions). In a scientificrevolution the rules that governed during ‘normal’science are no longer applicable (for they are partof the paradigm that is under attack), and norecourse is possible to ‘meta-rational’ rules inorder to decide between competing paradigms. It isat this stage that propaganda an persuasion areinvoked:

“As in political revolution, so in paradigm choice- there is no standard higher than the assent ofthe relevant community. To discover how scientificrevolutions are effected, we shall therefore haveto examine not only the impact of nature and oflogic, but also the techniques of persuasiveargumentation effective within the quite specialgroups that constitute the community of science”(Kuhn 1970: 94)

Kuhn contends that competing paradigms are‘incommensurable’ in that they cannot be comparedby recourse to reason; Kuhn denies that there is aneutral language (of observation) that may beappealed to for adjudication, and that the veryterminology of alternative paradigms does not evenrefer to the same ‘world’, indeed that there is aclash of ontologies:

“in a sense I am unable to explicate further theproponents of different paradigms practice theirtrades in different worlds.” (Kuhn 1970: 150)

Thus, in cultural terms, Kuhn sees science as a‘political’ enterprise in which persuasion is asimportant as logic and in which there existsontological incommensurability between paradigms.To this extent his argument is anti-rational.However, this incommensurability is periodic andcyclical (only in times of revolution is it aproblem) and Kuhn is not proposing (like Lyotard) aradical and permanent relativism. Indeed, forKuhn, revolutions are progressive in that ascendantparadigms tend to produce either new or moreknowledge. Several writers have noted that sincethe publication of ‘The Structure of ScientificRevolutions’ Kuhn has backtracked severely on hismoment of ontological relativism (Newton-Smith1983, Lakatos 1970).

The ‘realist’ criticism leveled at Kuhn’s thesis ofincommensurability centres on the fact that heextends paradigmatic incommensurability to thepossibility of a neutral observation language. W.Newton-Smith points out that, following this lineof argument:

“both so-called theoretical terms and so-calledobservational terms are treated as being implicitlydefined by the theory in which they occur. In thisevent Newton and Einstein cannot even communicateabout the observational consequences of theirtheories! Not only do they mean something differentby ‘mass’ they also mean something different by‘the needle points at 4’, ‘look, it's turnedgreen!’, and so on” (Newton-Smith: 12).

FEYERABEND: ANYTHING GOES?

“The history of science .... does not just consistof facts and conclusions drawn from facts. It alsocontains ideas, interpretations of facts, problems

created by conflicting interpretations, mistakesand so on. On closer analysis we even find thatscience knows no ‘bare facts’ at all but that the‘facts’ that enter our knowledge are already viewedin a certain way and are, therefore, ideational.”(Feyerabend 1975: 19)

The basis of Paul Feyerabend’s critique is thatscience is predominantly anarchistic and driven byideology. For Feyerabend, attempts to prescribeparticular and singular methodologies forscientific research are undertaken in order toprotect vested interests and to prevent newapproaches from developing (Bechtel: 59).Knowledge is always knowledge for a purpose. Inseveral places in his book; “Against Method”Feyerabend rails against the oppressiveconsequences of ‘Instrumental rationality’. Heconducts a polemic which privileges heterogeneityin methodological choice, proposing even witchcraftor astrology as legitimate avenues of research.

This view squares with the (post)modern conditionof knowledge identified by Anthony Giddens: “Noknowledge under conditions of modernity isknowledge in the ‘old’ sense, where ‘to know’ is tobe certain” (q.v. Myerson: 120) since knowledge isuncertain then the claims of science cannot beabsolute, thus a condition in which “a plurality ofheterogeneous claims to knowledge, in which sciencedoes not have a privileged place” arises (ibid).

Feyerabend claims that science operates by closingdown this heterogeneity. It does this in severalways; “a domain of research is defined. The domainis separated from the rest of history (physics, forexample, is separated from metaphysics and fromtheology) and given a ‘logic’ of its own”(Feyerabend 1975: 19). This logic then governswhat it is permissible to think or research in thatdomain. So far this critique is quite similar toKuhn’s, however, Feyerabend is politically

committed to the proliferation of incommensurablediscourses. He sees paradigmatic singularity asoppressive, as providing the conditions for aninstrumental restriction on freedom of thought andaction. His ‘rallying cry’ for a liberatingscience is “anything goes” (ibid: 21). Thus hechides Kuhn:

“He has failed to discuss the aim of science.Every crook knows that apart from succeeding at histrade and being popular with his fellow crooks hewants one thing: money. ... What is the aim of thescientist? is normal science going to lead up toit?” (Feyerabend 1970: 201)

Whereas Kuhn attempts to be objectively descriptiveof the scientific enterprise, Feyerabend isprescriptive. Arguing against Kuhn’s notion thatscience deals with one ‘stable’ paradigm at a time,he counters that scientific revolutions (or gestaltswitches) cannot be proven to lead to progress orto ‘anything better’ in terms of humanemancipation. because of paradigmaticincommensurability. He therefore proposes theoverthrow of the ‘serial’ paradigm model and itsreplacement by proliferation: “The idea thattheories are blameless for decades and evencenturies until a big refutation turns up andknocks them out ... is nothing but a myth ... whyshould we not start proliferating at once and neverallow a purely normal science to come intoexistence” (1970: 207).

Feyerabend derides the Popperian goal of science as‘the production of true explanatory theories’(Newton-Smith: 4) and phrases such as ‘search forthe truth’ and ‘highest aim of mankind’, becausethey act to inhibit dispute and criticism, ratherhe hopes to encourage dispute because it is theessence of dialectical materialism (as in Engels,Lenin and Trotsky) which produces synthesis. ForFeyerabend, competing epistemologies are theessence of progress. Feyerabend is here closest to

Jean Francois Lyotard - proposing the proliferationof negative dialogue, the expansion ofheterogeneity.

RESPONSES TO RELATIVISM:

BHASKAR’S REALISM.

Roy Bhaskar (in “reclaiming reality”) asserts that“the world cannot be rationally changed unless itis adequately interpreted” (Sprinkler: 124).Implicit in this is a charge leveled at nominalismand relativism that they sever too much of theconnection between language and intransitiveobjects of knowledge (the real-concrete world).Michael Sprinkler’s examination of Bhaskar’s oevrereveals a strong and sustained commitment toempirical realism. Bhaskar criticises Althusser’snotion of science (as self-sufficient andinternally coherent) as opening the floodgates topost-structuralism. He charges that Althusser’s:

“Failure to give any apodeictic status to the realobject rendered it as theoretically dispensable asa Kantian thing-in-itself [ding-an-sich] and helpedto lay the ground for the worst idealist excessesof post-structuralism.” (Sprinkler: 128)

The main body of Bhaskar’s criticism, therefore, isaimed towards the sort of relativism implicit inwhat he calls the ‘post-empiricist philosophy ofscience’. This relativism proposes that humanbeings are free to actively redescribe themselvesand their world and ensues, philosophically, fromFeyerabend's contention that ‘anything goes’ (wecan jump on any epistemological bandwagon we like)and Richard Rorty's ironic liberal analysis: “manis always free to choose new description (for,among other things, himself)” (Sprinkler: 126).

Bhaskar refuses to give up on a ‘real-concrete’background of physical constraints to freedom. Hebelieves that Rorty fails to sustain an adequateaccount of these “real and scientifically knowableconstraints” and, rather, engages in “the poeticredescription of an already determined world”.(ibid: 125). Against Kuhn and Feyerabend, for whom

experimentation is seen as a instrumentallyoriented ritual of epistemological confirmationrather than an observation of the world, Bhaskarargues:

“Justifications within science are a social matter- but they require and are given ontological grounds.”(ibid: 125).

Poetic redescription must, for Bhaskar, be groundedin the material; a prisoner may call himself a freeman, but it will not help him walk through a prisonwall. Groups who privilege rhetorical redescriptionover the scientifically knowable and materialcannot:

“ameliorate the actuality of their situation justby ‘creatively redescribing’ it in betterterms. ... Marx once pithily observed, the freedomto sell or withhold one’s labour power is preciselythe freedom to starve in the streets ...social lifealways has a material dimension.” (ibid)

CONCLUSION: DIALOGIC RATIONALISM

Returning to the issue of research methods incultural studies, certain questions presentthemselves. What, for example, are the lessons tobe gained from this foray into the philosophy ofscience? Feyerabend imaginatively erodes thedistance between polemic and the ‘neutral’production of knowledge. Methods of knowledgeproduction are for him always context bound andpartial. A matter, even, of irrational andritualistic belief rather than logical deduction.Representation (as in Foucault's classicalepisteme) is always representation from somewhere.

Bachelard’s notion of complexity, which hasrecently resurfaced in cultural studies discussionsof the implications of chaos theory andthermodynamics, suggests that something always

escapes representation; a problem cannot becontained within a research problematic because itwill always link (in a complex web ofinterrelations) to phenomena outside of theenframing method.

These factors; heterogeneity, located polemic andcomplexity, suggest that research, with the aim of‘enlightenment’ is futile. However, the proponentsof dialogic rationalism argue that despiteheterogeneous epistemological paradigms people ‘inthe world’ still interrelate on an everyday level(Christian with Muslim, Ecology warriors with Road-builders). For the dialogic rationalist thereseems to be at least provisional grounds for a formof coexistence which allows for the possibility ofdialogue. Habermas’s ‘theory of communicativeaction’ suggests the possibility of prior criteriafor agreement - (a claim which Lyotard, of course,would refute).

In his book “Rhetoric, Reason and Society”, GeorgeMyerson surveys potential answers to relativism andincommensurability. The foundational principle ofdialogic rationalism is that whilst there is no‘meta-rational’ discourse which can be employed tojudge between competing epistemological claims,nevertheless these claims can submit themselves todialogue. Thus Habermas, in the ‘Theory ofCommunicative Action’ states:

“This concept of communicative rationality carrieswith it connotations based on the centralexperience of unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in whichdifferent participants overcome their merelysubjective views” (Q.V. Myerson: 8)

The criticism leveled at this view is thatcompeting epistemological claims, founded on‘languages’ that are not compatible, cannotpossibly enter into rational argument (for in whatlanguage is agreement to be achieved). This is the

view proposed by Lyotard. Lyotard contends that‘dialogue’ is in operation at all times but that itrepresents the irreducible diversity of thinkingand judging. Whereas Habermas aims at consensus,Lyotard aims at dispute:

“There are as many universes as there are phrases.And as many situations of instances as there areuniverses”. (q.v. Myerson: 17).

Hilary Puttnam, unlike Habermas, is not so sureabout the existence of a priori conditions foragreement:

“The question: which is the rational conception ofrationality itself is difficult in exactly the waythat the justification of an ethical system isdifficult. There is no neutral conception ofrationality to which to appeal.” (Q.V. Myerson: 53)

However, he proceeds from this position byoutlining the logical error of anti-rationalism:

“there is an irony about these proposals to replacereason: don’t the reasons for not trusting reasoncome from reason? ‘he temptation is to fall intothe trap of concluding that all rational argumentis mere rationalization and then proceeding to tryto argue rationally for this position” (Q.V.Myerson: 29)

Puttnam believes that the radicalincommensurability thesis (as presented by Lyotard,and to a lesser extent Feyerabend) isunsustainable; How, he asks, could we not knowabout differences between meanings (Lyotard's‘phrases’) unless we bridged meanings to someextent:

“That conceptions differ does not prove theimpossibility of ever translating anyone ‘reallycorrectly’ as is sometimes supposed; on thecontrary, we could not say that conceptions differ

and how they differ if we couldn't translate.”(ibid: 125)

Puttnam concludes that there must be somecorrelation (or translation) of concepts andobjects which different groups share that isdefinable to the extent that ‘interpretation’succeeds. Therefore Puttnam is able to proposethat argument between paradigms, phrase regimes, orincommensurable discourses IS possible withoutrecourse to a universal ‘meta-linguistic’ meaning.(Although Lyotard would argue that this agreementwould always be the result of one group ‘giving up’something, of being subordinated in a linguisticpower relationship). The key to Puttnam’s positionis that he refuses to give reason an ‘absolute’quality:

“We will never define reason ... because weunderstand reason by using another reason, a reasonwhich is beyond the achieved definition. The questis endless, and reason has no final expression.Instead we have a dialogue, between optimist andpessimist, two characters, two voices” (ibid: 3).

In this essay I have wandered some considerable wayfrom ‘method’ in cultural studies in order to chasethrough some of the philosophical predicates ofmethodological choice in the sciences. I feel thatI have only begun to scratch the surface of what isa extensive field of enquiry. There are so many‘actors’ and so many complex arguments that I havebeen unable to give space to: Karl Popper, ImreLakatos, Woolgar & Latour, Richard Rorty,Althusser (& Lenin!) that this essay can onlyserve as an initial and partial enquiry - but thenagain, as Feyerabend has argued: all enquiries areonly ever initial and partial (and long may theycontinue so!).

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