The price of knowledge is a change in lexicon

The lexicon of a group is structured to support and contain key aspects of the knowledge of the group. Thus, new theories, worldviews, paradigms, etc. may strain that knowledge to the point that changing the lexicon becomes the only means of relieving the strain.

Aspects of a community’s knowledge of the world are built into the structure of its lexicon, and novel experiences sometimes strain that built-in knowledge in ways that can be relieved only by lexical change.^[1]

Thus, the price of new knowledge is a change in lexicon—the group cannot simultaneously hold on to its traditional lexicon and attain an upgraded paradigm. The lexical structures and categories of the former cannot accommodate the new knowledge of the latter.

What makes these remarks about language important is that history displays repeated episodes in which the price of new knowledge has been a change in descriptive language. Among the beliefs acquired with the lexicon are many that one may later find good reason to change. ==The development of science turns out to depend on alteration, not only of what one says about the world, but also of the lexicon which one uses to say it.^[2]

When a new paradigm emerges, the use of certain words may also change. When this happens, the texts of the prior paradigm become untranslatable by the new lexicon (that now has new meanings for certain shared lexical entries).

These required lexical changes are at the heart of the phenomena I once labeled manifestations of incommensurability. Because the use of certain words has changed, some of the statements that recur in the texts of an older science cannot be translated into the language of a subsequent science, at least not with the precision required to understand why they were made. That is the problem that gives rise to what I previously described as the first of the historian’s two tasks: recapturing the integrity of an out-of-date scientific tradition.^[3]

Thus, Inter-paradigm communication requires paradigmatic bilingualism.

#paradigms #cognition #translation