Quotes About Incommensurability

Once, he'd dreamed of experimental fusions, that he would be the one to merge folk harps with anime. Now he saw the incommensurability. In his own words: matter and antimatter. The end of the world.

If the ethical - that is, social morality - is the highest and if there is in a person no residual incommensurability in some way such that this incommensurability is not evil then no categories are needed other than what Greek philosophy had... and what their wisdom amounts to is the beautiful proposition that basically everything is the same.

This is, of course, an easy Berlinian riposte. Start with some graceful hand waving about incommensurability; declare that nothing could reconcile these great goods; and (with a tip of trilby) commend liberal pluralism for living with the contradictions.

If so, then we must conclude that scientists do not understand the meaning of their own theories and must wait for historians like Kuhn to enlighten them! Such a claim appears arrogant, to say the least, and imposes a burden of proof on Kuhn and other defenders of incommensurability that they have not met. So,