Frank Kogan

Even for Kuhn's own purposes, the term "incommensurable" is the wrong one, since it implies "incomparable" or "incommunicable," neither of which is true. But I certainly think Kuhn's idea of non-matching social practices can be applied to music. But the application would be along the lines of someone not familiar with the Western seven-note scale hearing half steps as out of tune, or someone not brought up with counter-rhythm hearing some African drumming as "confusing" or "free and wild" when actually the drumming is within a strict format. Or an example that Van Der Merwe gives, the "pop" in the melody "Pop Goes The Weasel" sets up a need for resolution that arrives with the last syllable of "weasel," but you're not going to hear or feel that need if you're not raised hearing Western music. (At this point, most people in the world have heard and have embedded enough of both Western-influenced and African-influenced music in their own listening that they're not as likely as previous generations to mishear in these ways.)*

But as for the difficulty that Dave is talking about, and the gulf you're seeing between the technical jargon and the larger discussion, that's a difficulty in attempting to understand all behavior, whether the technical vocabulary is adequate or not or whether the vocabulary is generally accessible or not. E.g., pretty much anyone can learn in one day what "subordinate clause" and "adjective" mean, but that doesn't make it easy to say how a particular writer's use (or relative non-use) of subordinate clauses and adjectives, or a culture's use or relative non-use of subordinate clauses and adjectives, relates to meaning, intent, significance. Surely they do relate, but in no simple way.

Or another example, when at the end of King Lear, Lear goes, "Pray you, undo this button," this has an emotional impact based on what led up to that utterance over the entire play. But that doesn't mean we can jump to "This is what undoing buttons means in British culture" and "this is what undoing buttons means in Shakespeare's work." And conversely, Andrew Sarris writes, in his write-up of Max Ophuls in the American Cinema, "'Quelle heure est-il' ask the characters in La Ronde, but it is always too late, and the moment has always passed. This is the ultimate meaning of Ophulsian camera movement: time has no stop." This is excellent analysis, but it wouldn't work to then go, "the meaning of every Ophulsian track and dolly shot in every particular scene is that time doesn't stop." Nor would it work to say, "The meaning of dolly shots in film is that time has no end." Often, the choice to dolly or pan rather than cut is between showing a bunch of things at once without directing the viewer's attention to any particular thing, or singling out particular things, by cutting to one after another. But noticing this choice in this instance doesn't necessarily bring you to a broader understanding of significance and intent, unless you start looking at a lot of choices over a lot of scenes, and even there you might not make your way to any particular conclusion. In the sentence after the passage I just quoted, Sarris says "Montage tends to suspend time in the limbo of abstract images, but the moving camera records inexorably the passage of time, moment by moment." That's a ridiculous overgeneralization. The moving camera records the passage of time in Ophuls' films because that's what's happening in the plot and to the characters. Fritz Lang, on the other hand, uses moving cameras not to show the unfolding of time but to set up nervous tension, as what we're now seeing within the limits of the camera frame is likely to be imperiled by what we will see once the camera gets there. But that's because in Fritz Lang films, a lot of scary things happen.

*A good way of thinking about "paradigm" (in the broad sense of "disciplinary matrix") is to think of a paradigm as a social practice, bearing in mind that while all paradigms are social practices, most social practices aren't paradigms. But nonetheless, our understanding of miscommunication across paradigms can be used in understanding miscommunication across social practices in general.