I’m working on an article right now relating to problems of incommensurability in communication and deliberative democracy. I just found this neat passage from the prolific anthropologist Clifford Geertz:
“To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.” (Geertz, Local Knowledge, 1983, p. 16).
Indirectly, I think Geertz is dealing with a fundamental crux of much work on public deliberation–asking us to maintain a “largeness of mind” that incorporates the vast diversities of our planet while still being able to produce unities, decisions, and other outcomes. Geertz’s quote leads me to ask: Are there fundamentally incommensurable forms of communication in our world? In other words, are there interpretive frameworks, linguistic understandings, or other forms of human symbol use that could never be brought together or reconciled, no matter how much communication was involved?
Comments 2
Kenneth M. Kambara — December 6, 2010
Hi Don,
Very interesting post. It's been quite a long time since I've read Geertz. I tend to believe that incommensurality is a function of openness, or lack thereof, to other worldviews or paradigms, in the Thomas Kuhnian sense. In B-school circles, there was an orthodoxy of thought in the 80s-90s that trade leads to peace by using commerce as the lingua franca in an embedded global network of flows of money and goods. Unfortunately, I feel the rise of globalization created more "surface area potential" for incommensurality, by creating more possible friction points, in terms of doxa, habitus, capital, etc.
I just noticed I'm couching this in global terms, but my take is that there is more generally a rise in ideological polarization that goes hand-in-glove with increased commodification of ideology and its agents. This playing out through advertising and the 24 hour news cycle...although I realize this is sounding like a post-Marxist critique. The marketing mantra being to differentiate and favourably position the cause, resulting in greater perceived distance and polarization, and driven by what I see as "low information" decision making. While I believe problems of incommensurable communication can be addressed, I feel the institutions are aligning to foster it.
Don Waisanen — December 10, 2010
Hi Ken, fascinating point about business theory that I hadn't thought about. It's like Barber's "Jihad vs. McWorld" analysis--and I wonder if the limitation is that in global marketing (and much of what that entails) the acceptance of others is only predicated on reinforcing/affirming the interests of capital and commodification, rather than communicative spaces that might work with and buttress other logics.