Tuesday, December 31, 2002

"One can indeed, as I have tried to do, learn the idiom of each [worldview] from within as a new first language, much in the way that an anthropologist constitutes him or herself as a linguistic and cultural beginner in some alien culture. In doing so one can come to recognize that the only capacity which the adherents of each standpoint possess for translating the utterances of the other would always result in what some adherent of that other standpoint who had learned the rival language would have to characterize as mistranslation, as misrepresentation."
-Alisdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry

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