Colin (am I now talking to myself?)
I'm not clear how you move from denying that the rules of football are
incommensurable with those of cheesemaking but then claim that law is
incommensurate with psychiatry? I mean, how would you go about comparing
football to cheesmaking, or even a less extreme version, soccer with
american football? They are incommensurate because they are simply not about
the same thing. And as I said, this is a trivial form of incommensurability.
The anti-pro abortion example is a good one because if these two discourse
were truly incommensurable why do the protagonists continue to engage with
each other. They have differing value systems, sure, but we can't
presuppose a priori that they will never reach agreement. Incommensurabilty
should mean that no exchange is possible, they would, to paraphrase Kuhn, be
simply living in different worlds. The abortion debatists are not, as you
make clear living in different worlds, on the contrary, they are living in
the same world and taking up differing stances towards a particular portion
of it. I have no problem with this, since it implies different conceptions
of the same world (philosophical realism). I suspect many on this list,
however, would recoil in horror at this.
As for being smug, well what can I say. Apologies perhaps? My everyone was
simply those that had bothered to read him (as far as I can tell that isn't
actually that many, despite the vast mountain of citations, now I am being
smug (maybe it's a personality defect)).
Thanks,