ABSTRACT

The incommensurability lies at the very heart of Alasdair MacIntyre’s project. Firstly, he argues, most specifically against Donald Davidson, that there is such a thing as incommensurability, and that it cannot be made to disappear by arguing that incommensurability is an unintelligible or dubious notion, as Davidson tries to. Secondly, MacIntyre argues, against relativism and perspectivism in general, that, although incommensurability exists, it need not pose insuperable problems for philosophy or society, since there are rational ways of overcoming it. According to the canons of logic first formulated by Aristotle, to conduct an ad hominem argument against someone is an unjustifiable form of rational procedure. In the Aristotelian canon, an ad baculum argument is a blatant fallacy because it consists of trying to win an argument by force rather than by reason, through a “might makes right” argument of the sort favoured by children, gangsters, superpowers, and many others.