ABSTRACT
The most important fact about incommensurability is how blandly it is ignored and casually denied. If you scan the entire range of current English-language philosophy, hard-core analytic philosophy or something less decisive, you will find that incommensurability is conceptually well nigh invisible. At the risk of a bad joke, I would say that it’s a little like racial prejudice viewed through the eye of a satisfied liberal: it does not exist because it would be incompatible with our legal assurance of equal opportunity – ‘which no one can deny.’ But that means, of course, that incommensurability is essentially a political or ideological problem for the dominant currents of recent American philosophy. Or, better, it needs to be analyzed as if it were (if its proper challenge is to be grasped at all).
