Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Analytic social epistemology
- Common sense versus collective memory
- Consensus versus dissent
- Criticism
- Disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity
- Epistemic justice
- Evolution
- Expertise
- Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Explaining the normative structure of science
- Feminism
- Folk epistemology
- Free enquiry
- Historiography
- Information science
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge policy
- Knowledge society
- Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Mass media
- Multiculturalism
- Naturalism
- Normativity
- Philosophy versus sociology
- Postmodernism
- Progress
- Rationality
- Relativism versus constructivism
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Science and technology studies
- Science as a social movement
- Science wars
- Social capital versus public good
- Social constructivism
- Social epistemology
- Social science
- Sociology of knowledge
- Translation
- Truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge
- Universalism versus relativism
- University
- Bibliography
- Index
Translation
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Analytic social epistemology
- Common sense versus collective memory
- Consensus versus dissent
- Criticism
- Disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity
- Epistemic justice
- Evolution
- Expertise
- Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Explaining the normative structure of science
- Feminism
- Folk epistemology
- Free enquiry
- Historiography
- Information science
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge policy
- Knowledge society
- Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Mass media
- Multiculturalism
- Naturalism
- Normativity
- Philosophy versus sociology
- Postmodernism
- Progress
- Rationality
- Relativism versus constructivism
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Science and technology studies
- Science as a social movement
- Science wars
- Social capital versus public good
- Social constructivism
- Social epistemology
- Social science
- Sociology of knowledge
- Translation
- Truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge
- Universalism versus relativism
- University
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Social epistemology's interest in translation comes from Kuhn's (see kuhn, popper and logical positivism) incommensurability thesis, which implies that scientists cannot normally translate between conceptual schemes, or “paradigms”. Thus, most scientists fail to see beyond the paradigm in which they are trained. It is left to more recent initiates, relatively inexperienced in the old paradigm, to appreciate fully a scientific revolution as converts to the new paradigm. However, according to Kuhn, true scientific revolutionaries such as Galileo and Einstein can switch back and forth between the old and new paradigm in their understanding of the world, a capacity he likened to bilingualism. While science and technology studies tends to stress the relativist (see relativism versus constructivism) implications of Kuhn's thesis – to change one's paradigm is effectively to change one's world – professional translators normally possess the scientific revolutionary's capacity to live in two worlds at once. Their translations, however, are epistemic hybrids, attempts to render alien lines of thought in a native medium. These are largely exercises in intellectual diplomacy that scientists themselves do not normally face. After all, physicists are not concerned with capturing the full sense of Aristotelian physics in Newtonian mechanics. Rather, they happily relinquish all interest in Aristotle on the assumption that most of what is worthwhile in Aristotle can be better expressed in Newtonian terms and what cannot be so expressed is not worth expressing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Knowledge BookKey Concepts in Philosophy, Science and Culture, pp. 193 - 196Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2007