On Incommensurability
10:36:00 PM
I’ve been away buried under a tottering stack
of papers working on my MSc thesis. My thesis focused on formalizing a theory
of incommensurability, which occurs when two things can’t be traded off against
each other.
Imagine you’re trying to rent a vacation
apartment. The qualities that are most important to you in any apartment are
how close it is to the metro station and the amount of natural light it
receives (pretend you’re a fan of Nordic design so the natural light thing
makes sense).
If you’ve got an apartment that receives an
amazing amount of natural light but is two hours away from the metro station,
and one that is ten minutes away from the metro but is in what Nigerians would
call a ‘face-me-I-face-you’ building: surrounded by other houses on all sides
and receiving very little natural light. It becomes harder to choose which
apartment you prefer because neither is entirely better than the other. This
conundrum, in a nutshell, is incommensurability: you’re not indifferent between
the apartments, but you also cannot easily tradeoff between them, causing the
decision making process to become both mentally and emotionally taxing.
Some of the resources I enjoyed reading
through while working on my dissertation included:
1. Ruth Chang’s easy to read guide to incommensurability. Chang is a philosopher
with a knack for clear and engaging writing.
2. The Scandal of
the Irrational retells a story of the Pythagorean brotherhood who
first conceived of the term incommensurability to describe the relationship
between two things that can’t directly be measured. They [wrongly] assumed
rational and irrational numbers could not be represented on the same scale,
capturing a rift between arithmetic (dealing with the rational) and geometry
(irrational). Scandal, deaths, and more abound in this tale. This is a chapter
in Abel’s Proof which has an even more
intriguing history.
3. There’s relatively little
research on incommensurability, but Deparis et al.,
(2012) in some ways establish the first/second paper directly
looking into the issue. The concepts and intuitions are straightforward, the
methodology, not so much. But a good read overall.
4. Economics is very concerned with utility. However, the way utility is used (as a proxy for value) and the
assumptions inherent in this use, are quite dissonant. Daniel Read traces the
origins of utility from Bentham to Kahneman, in this
fascinating read.
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