2.2 CONCEPTUAL DISTANCES

2.2.1 Breakdowns in Communication

On the old, communication-is-coming-to-share-something view, it was easy to say what a failure to communicate was: We failed to share the crucial something.

Let us return to the conversation between Wang and Smith. When Smith denied that people had subsistence rights, Wang realized she was unsure how to interpret his sentence; in the terms developed earlier, she was unsure how to score his sentence. Part of this realization included the possibility that she may have partially misunderstood earlier exchanges with him involving “rights,” or “subsistence,” or even “people.” Without further conversation, she could not be sure whether (1) he had said something false, but they were having no problems com­municating, or (2) communication, at least in that instance and perhaps even in prior instances, had broken down. We imagined that she began to explain her confusion, but that as they tried to sort things out, their situation got ever more puzzling, which might well have led her to worry that she had in fact been misunderstanding him on a whole range of related subjects (like duties, interests, and harmony).

As this example suggests, failures of communication are rarely all-or- nothing affairs. They can vary in both obviousness and degree of failure. The most extreme cases are characterized by the blank stare:We’ve been talking along happily when you utter something that I can make no sense of at all. In such cases it is both completely obvious that communication has broken down and that the breakdown is complete, since I have no way to clarify what you meant other than to ask you to say it in a dif­ferent way. The “rights” case is less extreme, though as our two conver- sants continued to talk it became increasingly obvious that there was a problem - and perhaps less clear how to continue. There are at least two stages of failure: first, the initial recognition or initial worry, and second, any subsequent exploration or attempt to overcome the failure. Whether the first phase counts as “recognition” or “worry” depends largely on the obviousness of failure, while the nature of the second stage will depend, in part, on the degree of failure.

In this light, let us look at the issue driving this section: How can Brandom explain communicative failure? He cannot avail himself of the abstract failure-to-share-content criterion, but our consideration of the “rights” case shows that there are other, more practical criteria that suggest themselves. Are we simply at a loss when it comes to trying to “score” our interlocutor’s utterance? Do we have no idea how to begin unraveling the mystery? These both correspond to the blank stare case. Most situations will of course be less extreme, with cases of minor puz­zlement about side issues - often put aside and soon forgotten - repre­senting the opposite end of the spectrum. In keeping with Brandom’s overall orientation, criteria of success and failure in communication turn out to be practical.

What we make of failures - that is, the interrelated issues of making sense of the failure and deciding what to do about it - will depend in part on normative matters.

2.2.2 Words Matter

We now understand something of what could count, in Brandom’s eyes, as communicative failure. Let us turn to the question of why such failures occur at all. Languages are often very malleable. History demonstrates this, and philosophy gives us no reason to doubt that it will continue. An important theme of this book, though, will be the degree to which languages are, and often remain, different from one another. The words our language contains at a particular point in time can matter.

One way to see how words matter is to reflect on the nature of the “commitments” that make up the various “scores” involved in linguistic practice. At one point Brandom notes that “almost everyone is commit­ted and entitled to such claims as that 2 + 2 = 4, that red is a color, and that there have been black dogs” [Brandom 1994, p. 185]. That is, we as interpreters will invariably attribute such commitments and entitlements to almost anyone. Notice that we use our language, our words, to make these attributions. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Unless Brandom were to posit some pre-linguistic scorekeeping facility, which would run counter to his most fundamental themes, scorekeeping has to take place in whatever language(s) we have available.

Even when we both speak the same language, this is periodically rel­evant: Imagine yourself on an art gallery tour being told that “In the next room we’ll see a series of paintings with fuliginous backgrounds.” Without much context, you may well be at a loss to score that utterance. Communication will have (momentarily) broken down, though the sen­tence may have still “communicated” things to you in a broader sense - confirming, perhaps, that this guide is pretentious and not particularly interested in communicating well with his audience. Once you reach the next room, of course, you may well be able to score the utterance, adding a new word to your vocabulary in the process.

When dealing with an interlocutor (or text) using a different language, especially one emerging from a significantly different cultural context, vocabulary issues can be even more salient. One of the issues in the “rights” case, recall, was that Wang became unsure whether her words were adequate to score Smith’s utterance - in particular, whether “quanli” adequately corresponded to “rights.” There is a range of senses, from simple to increasingly radical, in which this could be true. The sim­plest case is analogous to what happened with “fuliginous”: I have other words that can capture the same meaning - can play the same inferen­tial role - but just did not know which ones to use.

More radical cases arise when one cannot, or cannot easily, match one’s interlocutor’s words with one or more of one’s own words, even given plenty of time to investigate. Students of languages and cultures distant from their own regularly run into terms in the language under study that resist easy translation. Let me begin with cases in which the foreigners use some object, or ascribe some property, or perform some action that has no correlate in our practices. I’ll call this a missing-word case. Imagine yourself a missionary in seventeenth-century China, won­dering what the objects on a friendly Confucian scholar’s desk are. The scholar utters “Zhe shi yige yantai” while pointing at the round stone on which he mixes dry ink with water when preparing to write calligraphy. You are fairly sure that “zhe shi yige...” correlates with our demon­strative “this is a...”; the question is, What to do about “yantai”? I am imagining that “inkstone” is not, at this point in time, part of our lan­guage, whether or not that corresponds to the actual histories of English and of Western writing technology.

The obvious step at this point is to add a new word to our lan­guage. Make up a word like “inkstone,” letting it denote just what the Chinese refer to by “yantai” and the problem would seem to be solved.^[42] Donald Davidson has written that “even when the metalan­guage is different from the object language, the theory exerts no pres­sure for improvement, clarification, or analysis of individual words, ex­cept when, by accident of vocabulary, straightforward translation fails” [Davidson 1984a (1967), p. 33]. The presumed fact that English lacked the word “inkstone” is no mere accident, of course; English had no word for it because English speakers had no need for the concept, given that they had never employed inkstones. Adding the word to our language now that we have encountered inkstones, though, seems perfectly straightforward.

One of the features of simple missing-word problems is their iso­lated nature.

Brandom has pointed out that sometimes even what looks like the addition of a single word can be problematic. The following example will help to make the point. Brandom writes that “When the prosecutor at Oscar Wilde’s trial asked him to say under oath whether a particular passage in one of his works did or did not constitute blasphemy, Wilde replied ‘Blasphemy is not one of my words’” [Brandom 1994, p. 126]. Wilde recognized, that is, that using the word “blasphemy” brought with it certain commitments that he rejected, even if he were to deny that a particular passage was blasphemous. Brandom labels the process of reflecting on and making explicit the commitments entailed by our words “expressive rationality.” As Brandom puts it (rather grandly):

In Reason’s fight against thought debased by prejudice and propa­ganda, the first rule is that material inferential commitments that are potentially controversial should be made explicit as claims, expos­ing them both as vulnerable to reasoned challenge and as in need of reasoned defense. [1994, p. 126]

My project in this book can be seen as in part the application of expres­sive rationality to different communities’ rights discourses.

“Inkstone” is unlikely to raise anyone’s hackles, in part because of the ways it ties to commitments and practices that we already endorse. It is when problems are less isolated that the most radical conceptual differ­ences occur. This is perhaps most likely when dealing with a vocabulary of inter-defined theoretical terms, such as that associated with scientific, ethical, or political practices. It has thus been primarily in studies of these types of practices that theorists have spoken of the most extreme kind of conceptual difference, incommensurability. In her pioneering Patterns of Culture, for instance, Ruth Benedict wrote that different cultures travel along “different roads in pursuit of different ends, and these ends and these means in one society cannot be judged in terms of those of another society, because they are incommensurable” [Benedict 1934, p. 223]. Thomas Kuhn and others have similarly argued that scientific prac­tices and their attendant vocabularies can be mutually incommensurable [Kuhn 1970,1983].

Incommensurability is a tricky, often problematic, notion. I see it as a limiting case of conceptual differences, applicable (if at all) when diver­gences of practice and vocabulary are so pervasive that the task of enriching one’s language, and so being able to score an interlocutor’s utterances, seems hopeless. As Kuhn has put it, the question is no longer of enriching one’s language, but of learning the other’s language - and perhaps then teaching that language to still others [Kuhn 1983]. Even this understanding of incommensurability, though, risks treating lan­guage as overly static. “Incommensurable” sounds like a relation that stands for all time: If language A is incommensurable with language B, then sentences of the one can never be correctly translated into the other. Given how much languages can change over time, this is a very strong claim which is never adequately defended. While I believe that there can be a variety of reasons why people’s linguistic practices can resist change, it nonetheless seems preferable to say that languages are “incommensu­rate” rather than “incommensurable.”¹¹

Interesting, real-world cases where there is the potential for com­munication to fail tend to fall in between the extremes represented by missing words and incommensurate languages. In the remaining chap­ters of this book I will rely on Brandom’s conception of language to ^[43] understand the changing relations between Chinese and Western rights discourses, and I will exploit his notion of expressive rationality as I seek a method of constructive, legitimate engagement across cultural and con­ceptual differences. One important step in that direction will be to better understand how conceptual differences can give rise to moral pluralism, to which I now turn.

2.3 PLURALISM

If speakers of different moral languages systematically use concepts that differ significantly from one another, then they are liable to talk past one another. This is the simple idea behind the understanding of pluralism that I will endorse. The spectrum of conceptual differences that we have just examined opens up the possibility of moral pluralism. Consider the initial dialogue between Wang and Smith. Depending on how the ques­tions that dialogue raised are answered, Wang and Smith may come to see that they are using a common concept, but disagree about certain of its characteristics, or they may decide that their concepts are actually dif­ferent, and that “rights” is an inadequate translation for “quanli.”

I need to emphasize how important this kind of decision can be. If the two are disagreeing about a common concept, then one of them is mis­taken. It would be like you and I visiting an art museum, and after taking a tour, disagreeing about whether, for a painting to count as fuliginous, it had to have predominantly gray hues. Neither of us had ever heard the word before the tour guide used it, and we each came to a different understanding, each taking on and attributing different commitments to one another and the tour guide. Neither of us intends to create a new word, of course; we are seeking to grasp a concept that is new to us but familiar to art museum tour guides. There is no temptation in a case like this to conclude that we are using different concepts; if we want to resolve the dispute, we can simply swallow our pride and ask the tour guide who is correct.

In the case of “fuliginous,” it seems clear that there is a single concept because there is a single community using it: Their practices embody the norms which determine what commitments can appropriately be attrib­uted when someone uses the word. In an opposite kind of case, it is equally clear that two different (though perhaps overlapping) commu­nities are involved. Consider how silly it would be, for instance, for two people to argue about whether a “foul ball” (in baseball) had to be dis­gusting, as in “foul odor.” The two words may have had a common origin, but they have come to be mere homonyms, expressing two very differ­ent concepts, each appropriate to its own context.

Our question is, Where does Ms. Wang’s and Mr. Smith’s dispute lie on the spectrum between these two extremes? I say that it is a spectrum, and not simply two options, in part because of the dynamic character of linguistic practice. All of our practices change over time, thanks to both conscious interventions and less conscious evolutions. As the previous paragraphs have implied, one of the decisive factors in these changes will be changes in the communities of which we see ourselves as members. Part of being a baseball player or a baseball fan is coming to use “foul” in a new way, alongside the old way. In some cases, becoming a mem­ber of a different group might put pressure on one to give up one’s old way of speaking. One of my friends in college had grown up in a small, homogeneous community near the Rocky Mountains. It wasn’t long after becoming a member of the diverse student body at an east-coast university that he realized certain words he used, often in jokes, were making others uncomfortable, and he was led to reflect on the inferen­tial connections that others, at least, drew from his utterances. He very likely was reflecting at the same time on the inferential proprieties to which his concepts were committing him. He soon stopped using the words, no longer willing to countenance their implications. As we saw earlier, Brandom calls this expressive rationality. It is at least part of the process that Wang and Smith may be prompted to undergo as a result of their encounter. As a result of complexities like this, assessing the dispute between Wang and Smith will require more than just answers to the questions I posed earlier. Determining whether they disagree about a shared concept, or are using two different concepts, is in significant part a practical question about with which communities they identify, and thus to which norms they are subject.

At one end of the spectrum, we might imagine two communities with moralities that are undeniably different and expressed in different lan­guages, but which speakers of each language can readily understand and translate into their own language. Since a long-lived language like English or Chinese has been used over the centuries to express a variety of moralities, it is perhaps unsurprising that speakers of such languages often can express in their own language the claims made by adherents of quite different moralities. Although “rights” may be the dominant idiom of Western morality at the end of the millennium, we still find in our vocabularies resources with which to discuss ideals of virtue, charity,

chivalry, honor, and many others.^[44] If we were to encounter a commu­nity speaking the language and committed to the ideals of Victori­an England, we could easily understand them, even as we objected (perhaps) to their paternalism.

At the other extreme are cases in which moral languages are so dif­ferent that some philosophers have labeled them “incommensurable.” Originally, “incommensurable” meant that two distances could not be measured on a single scale. Under the influence of philosophers like Kuhn and MacIntyre, its application has been extended to words of one language being inexpressible in another’s terms. While I think there is considerable value to the arguments that have been made in the name of incommensurability, I have found such discussions to suffer from a number of important failings. First, as explained earlier, most accounts of incommensurability treat language as overly static; it is preferable to say that languages are “incommensurate” rather than “incommensu­rable.” A second problem with incommensurability is that it is too blunt an instrument. Arguments for it tend to be all-or-nothing: Either two lan­guages are incommensurate, or they are not. This is unsatisfactory both because it gives one insufficient room to analyze the whole range of conceptual differences that can exist between languages, and because it introduces an artificial precision into what is ultimately a messy, practical question. The practical nature of incommensurability is a third issue that is often missed, though Mario Biagioli, at least, has paid it considerable attention. Biagioli argues that Galileo and his Scholastic rivals purposely kept their claims incommensurable from one another in order to pre­serve their socio-professional communities [Biagioli 1990]. Whether or not this case is best understood in terms of full-blown incommensurate languages, it nicely illustrates the ways in which the commitments of one’s community can help to shape the words one uses.

As far as I am concerned, incommensurateness is simply the limiting case of conceptual distance. If communication breaks down between two people in the way that I sketched earlier, and resists sustained efforts to reestablish it, then we may suspect that the people’s languages are incommensurate with one another. Perhaps this failure of communica­tion is confinable to certain fields of discourse and to certain fragments of the respective languages; it may be, for instance, that we are able to communicate about baking but not about morality. Radical failures of communication are unlikely to be too local, though, since when the problem is confined to a few words, a bit of linguistic enrichment will more often than not solve the problem, as we saw earlier in the missing­word case.

Locating people and their communities on the spectrum of conceptual differences is not a simple matter, and I feel it serves no purpose to arti­ficially place Smith and Wang somewhere on the continuum. They are, after all, merely a thought experiment, however much they are derived from things people have actually said. I will draw on the tools and ideas of this section in my subsequent discussions of whether or not the moral­ities containing different communities’ rights concepts are plural, as Liu Huaqiu claims.