Paradigm and Possibility: Reconstructing Kuhn through Relational Ontology — III Incommensurability and the Myth of Translation

Few ideas in twentieth-century philosophy generated as much anxiety as Thomas Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability.

The reaction was immediate and revealing.

Critics accused Kuhn of irrationalism.

Relativism.

Epistemic tribalism.

The collapse of scientific objectivity.

Why such panic?

Because Kuhn appeared to threaten one of the deepest assumptions of the representational worldview:

that all rational disagreement ultimately occurs within a shared world of stable meanings and invariant objects.

If scientific paradigms are genuinely incommensurable, then something profoundly unsettling follows:

scientists separated by revolutionary transformations may not merely disagree about the same reality.

They may not fully inhabit the same phenomenological world at all.

Philosophy spent decades trying to neutralise this possibility.

“Incommensurability” was gradually softened into something manageable:

• difficulties of translation;
• shifts in terminology;
• altered standards of evidence;
• conceptual reclassification.

The crisis was linguistically domesticated.

But from the perspective of relational ontology, this domestication entirely misses the depth of Kuhn’s insight.

The problem is not merely that scientists use different words.

The problem is that phenomena themselves are relationally constituted within different organisations of meaning.

Translation fails not because vocabularies differ, but because the phenomenological organisations sustaining those vocabularies are not fully continuous.

This distinction changes everything.

Under the representational model, language functions primarily as a naming system attached to pre-given objects. Translation therefore appears fundamentally straightforward in principle: different theories may use different terminologies, but they ultimately refer to the same underlying entities.

Meaning becomes secondary.

Objects remain primary.

Relational ontology reverses this order entirely.

Phenomena do not precede meaning as stable substrates awaiting labels. Rather, phenomena actualise relationally through historically organised systems of construal. Meaning is not attached to objects after the fact; it participates constitutively in the emergence of phenomena themselves.

This means that scientific revolutions do not simply rename the same world.

They reorganise what can coherently emerge as a world.

Kuhn repeatedly circled this insight without fully stabilising its ontological implications.

Consider the transition from phlogiston theory to oxygen chemistry.

From the modern perspective, it is tempting to describe the episode as a simple correction:

scientists once mistakenly believed in phlogiston and later discovered oxygen. The same chemical processes existed throughout; only the explanation changed.

But this retrospective framing quietly projects contemporary phenomenological organisation backward into the past.

For eighteenth-century chemists, phlogiston was not merely a fictional substance incorrectly inserted into otherwise familiar phenomena. Entire chemical processes were organised through a different construal system governing combustion, weight, transformation, material interaction, and explanatory coherence.

The phenomena themselves were differently constituted.

Combustion did not merely mean something different.

It emerged differently within the relational organisation sustaining chemical intelligibility at the time.

This is why translation across paradigms proves so unstable.

One cannot simply construct a dictionary equating:

• “phlogiston” with “absence of oxygen,”
• or Aristotelian “motion” with Newtonian “motion,”
• because the surrounding organisations of meaning differ structurally.

The terms do not occupy identical relational positions within their respective phenomenological systems.

And here philosophy’s usual response reveals the lingering power of representational metaphysics.

Most attempts to rescue commensurability assume that beneath differing conceptual schemes lies a neutral observational reality guaranteeing continuity. Even if theories change, “the world itself” supposedly remains stable enough to secure translation.

But this assumption merely reintroduces the very ontology Kuhn destabilised.

Relationally construed, there is no access to a phenomenological world independent of the construal organisations through which phenomena actualise.

This does not mean reality disappears into language.

Nor does it imply subjective idealism.

Material relations persist.

Constraints persist.

Practices persist.

Technological interventions persist.

But what becomes available as phenomenon emerges relationally through historically organised semiotic potentials.

Incommensurability therefore becomes neither irrational nor mysterious.

It is the entirely predictable consequence of transformations in the organisation of meaning itself.

And this explains one of the strangest features of scientific revolutions:

participants often talk past one another even while using apparently shared vocabularies.

The conflict is not merely semantic.

It is ontological.

The same word may participate in fundamentally different systems of phenomenological relation. Surface continuity masks deep discontinuity in the organisation of meaning.

Kuhn recognised this repeatedly in historical scientific disputes. Competing paradigms often appear unable to settle disagreements through straightforward evidence because the significance of evidence itself depends upon the prevailing construal organisation.

What counts as:

• an observation,
• a legitimate explanation,
• a proper question,
• a valid method,
• or even a meaningful distinction

is not stable across paradigms.

This is why revolutionary scientific debates so often become strangely circular.

Each side appears irrational to the other because each evaluates phenomena through partially incompatible organisations of meaning.

Importantly, however, relational ontology also allows us to avoid one of the major weaknesses in Kuhn’s own formulation.

Kuhn sometimes described paradigm shifts in ways that implied near-total discontinuity between scientific worlds. Critics understandably objected that science clearly retains substantial continuity across revolutions:

mathematics survives,

instruments persist,

experiments remain reproducible,

technologies continue functioning.

Relational ontology resolves this tension elegantly.

Incommensurability need not imply absolute disconnection.

Relational organisations can overlap partially while differing structurally.

Scientific revolutions rarely annihilate entire meaning systems completely. Rather, they reorganise relations within broader fields of construal, preserving some continuities while transforming the phenomenological significance of others.

This makes scientific change neither cumulative nor wholly discontinuous.

It is reorganisational.

And this point carries consequences far beyond philosophy of science.

Because the myth of translation extends deeply into modern thought itself.

Modernity repeatedly assumes that communication consists fundamentally in transferring identical meanings between stable minds using interchangeable symbolic labels. Translation becomes possible because meaning supposedly exists independently of relational organisation.

But if meaning is relationally constituted, then translation is never mere equivalence-transfer.

Every act of translation becomes a negotiation across partially different organisations of meaning and phenomenon.

Perfect translation is therefore impossible in principle — not because communication fails, but because meaning is not detachable from the relational systems through which it actualises.

Scientific revolutions simply expose this condition dramatically.

They reveal that understanding is not the passive reception of invariant truths but the ongoing reorganisation of relational possibility itself.

This, ultimately, was Kuhn’s most dangerous discovery.

Not that scientists disagree.

Not even that scientific truth changes historically.

But that worlds may become intelligible differently because meaning itself participates in the constitution of phenomena.

And once that possibility is recognised, the dream of perfect translation begins to dissolve.

Not into chaos.

But into relation.