incommensurability : mackenzian

July 17, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Checking your lenses

Close-up of brown-rimmed eye-glasses with light brown tinted lenses. — Photo credit: Jean Scheijen

I had an eye exam today, my first in too long.

I’ve had my current glasses for nearly a decade and no substantial changes to my vision. But there was a surprise.

There’s a defect in my lenses.

It’s a small thing, a little whorl in the glass that warps light as it passes through UV-responsive film. The light is warped before it hits my eyes because of that defect.

I had gotten so used to it, to cleaning the lenses despite it, that I didn’t even remember it until in the big chair next to a tray of other lenses and an opthalmologist raising her eyebrow at me.

“It must have been the heat,” I mumbled. It could have been heat weakening the glass over a decade. My lenses could have been poorly manufactured to begin with. The “why” of the defect now didn’t matter as much as the fact that I had gotten used to it and I was making up excuses for it.

How much like life that was.

In a room devoted to nothing but getting me the best lenses possible based on what I need today, I sat acclimated to old, scratched, and dodgy lenses and explaining why they weren’t so bad.

I walked away with a much more current prescription and yet I’m still wearing my old glasses. I have plans to replace them, just not today. I tested out alternatives with my pupils dilated so much I couldn’t read the labels on the display or the price tags, and I didn’t buy. I needed change, and I have not changed.

The lenses that we use to perceive and understand the world can serve us for many, many years without obvious problems. And yet, because being human means being in motion, a constant locus of change, that consistency can become a disservice.

Whether you’re leading others or working with teammates, keep an eye on your lenses. Take the time to inspect the frameworks you use to perceive, interpret, and evaluate people, arguments, and events. Challenge yourself to make sure that your lenses match where you are in life today, not merely where you once were.

And when you have the opportunity to adopt better-fitting lenses, take it.

October 2, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Why Communicating Can Be So Hard

Steven Pinker is a Harvard psychologist who has spent the last few years studying language and morality. You may recognize his curly grey locks from his 2007 TED talk on the international violence rate: “The surprising decline of violence.”

In a new column posted to the Chronicle of Higher Education this week—just in time to drive traffic to his latest book—Pinker turns to academic writing. Why, he asks, is scholarly writing so dense, what are the philosophies that encourage complexity, opaqueness, directness, and clarity, and how does the academic profession discourage its members from learning “good writing”?

Pinker doesn’t quite justify his philosophy of “good writing” in the Chronicle article; maybe he does in the book. Instead, he argues for good writing’s practical impact: good writing is “good” when it helps readers to understand: when it is direct and descriptive rather than self-conscious, full of hedges and vague qualifiers, or self-referential.

Pinker also explains why experts may be great at thinking and combining ideas but weak at writing those thoughts for others to read and learn from:

Scholars lose their moorings in the land of the concrete because of two effects of expertise that have been documented by cognitive psychology. One is called chunking. To work around the limitations of short-term memory, the mind can package ideas into bigger and bigger units, which the psychologist George Miller dubbed “chunks.” As we read and learn, we master a vast number of abstractions, and each becomes a mental unit that we can bring to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name. An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes at a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks. —Steven Pinker, “Why Academic Writing Stinks,” The Chronicle

The second expertise effect Pinker mentions is functional fixedness (his term is “functional fixity”). Functional fixedness is the tunnel vision created by over-identifying with what we use a tool or concept for and so not seeing its other possible uses: seeing a hammer only as a tool for pounding nails, not as a possible doorstop, or weapon, or ice-breaker, or…

Combined, chunking and functional fixedness create the challenge of communicating across knowledge and experience gaps that I tried to explain in my recent post about incommensurability. Experts and lay people are “worlds apart” because knowledge separates them at the level of thought as well as socially and by worldview.

Progress can start with being aware of the gap and understanding that it’s a fact of cognition, not a malicious expert plot to hide what They/We know from the People. Pinker’s assumption is that this communication gap can in fact be bridged—and that’s good news for all of us who’ve learned a little bit about anything (i.e. gone to grad school!) yet struggled to explain it to those who haven’t already learned what we have. It’s also great news for all of us beginning to learn about complex issues from faith and sexuality or the tangled threads of rhetoric and science in climate change.

Pinker’s book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, is already a top-seller on Amazon after only a few days after its official release. Consider yourself a “thinking person” regardless of whether you agree with his ideas, and get yourself a copy.

August 11, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Worlds Apart: The Incommensurability Problem

When I was about 7 years old, my brother had a series of children’s songs on cassette tape. One of the songs included this chorus:

Danke schön, mein Herr!
Danke schön, danke schön!
Thank you, my King—
For life is so wunderschön!

The problem? I didn’t yet speak German. So what I heard instead was this:

Donkey shave my hair!
Donkey shave, donkey shave!
Thank you my King—
For life is so wonder shave!

I knew, even then, that what I was hearing didn’t make a lick of sense. But since it’s what I heard, it’s what I sang. I sang it loudly and with appropriate harmonic flourishes, and I sounded great!

Sometimes, we're worlds apart. (Photo used under license.) — Sometimes, we’re worlds apart. (Photo used under license.)

I didn’t begin learning German for about four or five years later, so it wasn’t until I moved on to secondary school that I realized what the lyrics truly had been.

Until I could hear the lyrics in the tongue they were composed and originally sung in, I had an incommensurability problem.

Worse still: until I learned the language of the song, and used that learning to listen again, I didn’t really know where my problem lay or how to fix it.

That’s so like life.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein

In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.” —Thomas Kuhn

When two worlds intersect, if they do not share a common “language”—what the philosophers call a common measure—they will struggle to understand each other. Each will tend to interpret the other in terms of her own base of knowledge and assumption. Their values will be distinct, perhaps coincidentally compatible, but more likely contrasting or competing outright.

Marginalized social groups manage this problem of distinct linguistic, knowledge, and assumption systems in an interesting way. Exposed to common and dominant languages as well as those that carry our communities’ messages, strategies, and insights, we often become “multilingual.” Codeswitching is not necessarily something we do for fun; it’s more commonly something we do to survive.

By necessity, we’re conversant with the languages, systems of meaning, and expected patterns of behavior dominant in the wider culture as well as those that apply in our own safer and more familiar places. But that knowledge is rarely reciprocal.

I was born to Jamaican immigrant parents in England toward the end of an era when teaching children other European languages was a class-based luxury rather than a social or professional basic. The educational system didn’t yet rank Asian, Mesopotamian, African, or other regional language groups as high-value languages to learn. Our elders were also more likely to diminish our cultures’ patois and dialects than encourage us to adopt and respect them alongside Standard Written English and Received Pronunciation.

All of the countries I’ve lived since then in have promoted English over other languages—even Jamaica, which gives the Anglo tongue greater respect than it does its own patois. For the most part, English (really Englishes) has (have) always had more cultural capital in these societies, and it’s connected me to greater educational and social opportunities than any other linguistic-cultural system could have. I was destined to be an anglophone and receive the local and international benefits that English-speaking brings with it. Only in the Jamaican food market or on the street among my age-mates has my English-First brain ever felt like a liability.

My parents, both from subsistence country farming families and both striving to rise up through the service and caring professions, rarely spoke patois at home. Because they never addressed my siblings or me with it except when excited or upset, patois is part of my emotional register: it conveys stories and frustration and humor and survival, concepts and perceptions that don’t translate well out of context, whole worlds that the Queen’s English not only doesn’t permit entry to but also actively undermines understanding of.

But I can’t sustain conversations in that language. I feel it in my blood, in the tightening of my muscles, in the pulsing of my heart. I’ve inherited it as a stranger, and I can’t mirror my parents when they switch back into that world. We are separated by culture and experience and languages, even as we’re connected by genes and love and name.

The hardest thing about grad school wasn’t the 60-70 hour weeks I worked without flinching, the opacity of Habermas, or the cyclical infections of imposter syndrome. The hardest thing was seeing incommensurability step out of my philosophy of science readings and assume a defeated posture in my conversations with my parents whenever they asked me how my course was going and when I’d be done.

Just about all I could say was “I’m doing well” and “I’m tired.” Just about all they could say was “Keep it up, I’m proud of you” (Dad) and “Remember I always tell you to stop and smell the roses” (Mum). Beyond my sharing an article or video once in a while or tracking down texts for my mother’s history classes, that was as much as our language-worlds intersected. We learned—or at least I did—from the resistance and fear of fundamentalism meeting pluralism. I learned not to poke Mama Bear with a stick.

I quickly became fluent in the languages I was learning, languages and ways of seeing that helped me to understand and interpret myself and the worlds I was entering. But that fluency came at cost.

Sometimes, the languages we’re most familiar with actively undermine our perception and understanding of others. I haven’t yet found a way to bridge the distances between my worlds and my parents’. It makes sense that the abstract solution is “Learn more languages and use them!” Simple solution. Straightforward. Not so fluid in the flesh.

And I don’t yet know what the answers are. Not with the Church and its many minorities. Not with the ethnic groups who don’t live with near each other and live as if in different universes. Not with children like me and families like mine.

But maybe this is the research question of my life: We are connected—that’s not negotiable. So how will we live together? If we can’t learn one another’s languages, and only some of us can learn new languages, new symbols, new stories, how will we share our lives?