On Fri, 21 May 2010, Alan Rudy wrote:
> Let me see if I have this right. There is a universal innate element,
> or form, to justice and language but that in each particular
> instantiation of justice or language there are
> qualitatively/incomprehensively different characteristics, or content...
My statement of "mutually incomprensible languages" simply meant that if I speak English and you speak Chinese we won't understand each other, even if we share deep structures. (There are languages of which this is not true, like Spanish and Italian -- they are mutually comprehensible: I can speak Spanish and you can speak Italian and we can understand each other). That is all I meant by mutually incomprehensible: very substantially different. It's a stock phrase.
I don't know how this morphed into the philosophical idea of radical incomprehensibility -- the impossibility of translation -- which I quite strongly don't believe in. I simply meant that there is no contradiction between the existence of universal deep structures and very different languages -- different in everything that matters to us. It's an obvious point.
And all saying is that logically, theoretically, the same is obviously true of morality.
Again, I think this is a simple point: that even if you accept arguendo that evolution provides a set of deep structural morality modules, nothing in that commits you to a universal morality. It only implies universal moralities. I.e., everyone's gotta have one, but there's no reason they have to have the same one. Just like with languages.
Last point: this has got zero to do with ev psych, for which I have nothing but disdain. No more than Chomskian grammar does.
Michael