Online research in philosophy

The uses of analogy are ancient. It can even be argued that analogical thinking is the most basic cognitive tool humans have to move from the unknown to the known (Gentner et al. 2001). As Olson succinctly puts it, “analogies are useful when it is desired to compare an unfamiliar system with one that is better known” (Olson 1943, p. i). Analogical thinking is thus ubiquitous and found in many texts at least since Homer in Antiquity (Lloyd 1966). For example, (...) it is well known that to explain the properties of atoms, Aristotle compared them to the letters of alphabets, something much better known to his readers than invisible atoms (Hallyn 2000).Many studies have looked at particular uses of analogies among the .. (shrink)

Academic debates are so frequent and omnipresent in most disciplines, particularly the social sciences and humanities, it seems obvious that disagreements are bound to occur. The aim of this paper is to show that whereas the agent who perceives his/her contribution as being misunderstood locates the origin of the communication problem on the side of the receiver who "misinterprets" the text, the emitter is in fact also contributing to the possibility of this misunderstanding through the very manner in which his/her (...) text is written. In other words, I propose a symmetric approach to understanding misunderstandings: taking simultaneously into account the position of the reader in the scientific field and the structure of the texts of the writers. The paper thus proposes to complement the sociological analysis of controversies in a scientific field with the close reading of texts, a practice usually found in studies of argumentation, in order to explain the occurrence of misunderstandings. The debate surrounding the charge of "relativism" among sociologists of scientific knowledge provides us with a case study to analyse in detail the argumentative context of misunderstanding. (shrink)