incommensurability
Americannoun
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Pluralism frequently relies on the concept of incommensurability, which describes a situation in which two or more goods, values, or phenomena have no standard of evaluation that applies to them all.
From Textbooks • Jun. 15, 2022
He favored the particular over the general, the obstinate incommensurability of actual human experience over the oily blandness of ideology.
From Washington Post • Jan. 23, 2020
Perhaps it's time we acknowledged this incommensurability, one that vitally affects all of us and all of us who are to come.
From BBC • Feb. 6, 2015
That "incommensurability," as Kuhn termed it, held that after a true revolution, an existing body of theory bears no relationship to the new theoretical framework, the opposite of "standing on the shoulders of giants."
From Scientific American • Apr. 27, 2012
Everyone in the Pythagorean brotherhood was already tight-lipped—nobody was allowed even to take written notes—and the incommensurability of the square root of two became the deepest, darkest secret of the Pythagorean order.
From "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
