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:<\/p>\n
“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).<\/p>\n
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<\/em> be brought together or reconciled, no matter how much communication was involved?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3280"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4632,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3280\/revisions\/4632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}