Paradigms, Experience, and What Can Be Translated

Paradigms, Experience, and What Can Be Translated

A paradigm is not merely a collection of opinions. It is a way in which the world becomes intelligible. It determines what counts as real, what counts as knowledge, which questions can be asked, and which answers appear meaningful.

It is therefore tempting to say that different paradigms cannot be fully translated into one another. The world of ancient Egypt, a shamanic world, a modern physical world, and a mystical world of experience are not simply different theories about the same neutral object. They are different ways in which reality appears.

This should be taken seriously.

When we encounter an older religious or cosmological system, such as that of ancient Egypt, we should not immediately reduce it to our own modern vocabulary. The gods, the rites, death, the calendar, the Nile, kingship, and the cosmos did not form a loose collection of beliefs. They belonged to a lived world. To understand this world is not merely to translate words into modern concepts. It is to realize that the words had their place within another whole.

The same applies to a shamanic experience. It does not first have to be turned into neurochemistry, psychology, or anthropology in order to be real as experience. At the level of experience, it is already there.

Here there is a clear point of contact with the ontological turn in anthropology.

The ontological turn means, in simplified terms, that the cosmologies of other cultures should not immediately be understood as “beliefs” about a world whose true nature we already know. A shamanic, animistic, or ancient Egyptian world is not merely a symbolic, poetic, or mistaken description of our world. It must, at least methodologically, be taken seriously as a world with its own ontological conditions.

This is an important correction to the reflex of modernity. The modern gaze often wants to say: “They believed that the gods existed, but we know that it was really about society, psychology, astronomy, power, or natural phenomena.” The ontological turn slows down this reduction. It asks instead what it would mean to understand these concepts from within the world where they belong.

In my own framework, the ontological turn can be understood as a reminder that the observer-perspective must not be reduced to the structure that can be projected from it.

Let us call such a perspective \(o\). It is not merely a subjective opinion about the world. It is the concrete, lived, and situated form in which the world appears. It includes the body, place, time, practice, symbols, instruments, language, ritual, and what is experienced as real. An observer-perspective is therefore not a disturbing filter placed on top of an already finished reality. It is the place where reality becomes accessible at all.

This does not mean that everything is arbitrary. Nor does it mean that every perspective is closed in upon itself. From an observer-perspective, something can also be projected as structure. This can be denoted \(p(o)\): the structural projection of the perspective.

The distinction between \(o\) and \(p(o)\) is crucial.

\(o\) is the lived world: the rite, the body, the gods, the landscape, death, hunger, the seasons, symbols, and the immediate actuality of experience.

\(p(o)\) is what can be made comparable, transferable, or shared: the calendar, directions, cycles, proportions, measurements, architectural geometry, and the practical relations between sky, agriculture, and social order.

It would be a mistake to reduce the ancient Egyptian \(o\) to our modern \(p(o)\). We would then lose the world itself. We would replace a lived cosmology with a table of astronomical relations, social functions, and historical data. But it would also be a mistake to say that nothing can be transferred at all. We would then lose the possibility of understanding.

We cannot simply understand the ancient Egyptian \(o\). We cannot step into the inner world of Egyptian high culture as if we ourselves lived there. We can study texts, images, buildings, and tombs, but the actuality of their world is not identical with our reconstruction.

Yet we can understand certain parts of their \(p(o)\). We can understand the calendar, the cycles of the Nile, the role of the stars, architectural geometry, proportions, techniques of orientation, and social coordination. We can see that there were structures that ordered their world and that can, in part, be reconstructed even from our perspective.

The calendar is a particularly clear example. To us, a calendar may appear to be a neutral system for dividing time. But in an ancient Egyptian context, it was not merely a schedule. It was connected to the flooding of the Nile, the possibilities of agriculture, religious festivals, royal administration, and the regularities of the sky.

At the level of \(o\), the calendar was therefore part of a lived cosmology. It ordered not only days, but also meaning, work, waiting, ritual, and social order.

At the same time, it contained something that could become \(p(o)\): recurring cycles, astronomical observations, practical divisions of the year, and relations between sky and agriculture. These structures can partly be reconstructed without thereby claiming that we have entered the Egyptian world as the Egyptians themselves lived it.

The calendar thus shows why the distinction is needed. If we reduce the calendar to astronomy, we lose its place within a world. If we make it entirely untranslatable, we lose the structures that can in fact be compared, understood, and carried forward. This does not mean that we have captured the whole. It only means that something has survived the translation.

Here the relation between the ontological turn and my framework becomes clear. The ontological turn reminds us that \(o\) must not be reduced to \(p(o)\). A foreign perspective is not merely raw material for our analysis. It is a world in which reality appears in another way.

My framework adds the question of what, despite this difference, can be projected as shared structure. When translation takes place, it is not the whole world that is translated. It is certain structures.

Here there is an important objection. What is taken to be \(p(o)\) is not automatically neutral. When we say that we can reconstruct a calendar, an architectural geometry, or an astronomical order from a foreign perspective, we always do so from another perspective. Even what counts as “structure” may be shaped by our own concepts, instruments, and interests.

This is a central lesson of the ontological turn. Otherwise modernity risks returning through the back door: first we say that we respect the foreign world, but then we rescue only what can be translated into our own structural categories.

For this reason, \(p(o)\) should not be understood as the simple extraction of neutral structure. It should rather be understood as the result of a work of translation between perspectives. A structure becomes shared only when it can be carried through admissible transitions between perspectives without entirely losing its identity.

It is therefore not enough to have a description within one perspective. We also need rules for how descriptions change when the perspective changes. In physics, such a principle is called equivariance. Transferred to culture and anthropology, the word must be used cautiously, but the basic thought is useful. The shared is not what one perspective asserts about another. The shared is what can survive a tested relation between perspectives, where neither the familiar nor the foreign is given the final word in advance.

This is an epistemic form of structural realism, not ontic structural realism.

It does not mean that only structure exists. It does not mean that experience, actuality, body, ritual, or inner world are secondary illusions. On the contrary: the perspective is primary. But when we try to speak jointly about reality, when we try to compare, measure, test, and understand across the boundaries of perspectives, it is structure that we primarily gain access to.

Modern physics offers an important clue here.

Physics does not begin with an absolute, perspective-free vision. It works with measurements made from determinate perspectives. Clocks measure time. Rulers measure length. Instruments register light, motion, charge, temperature, and energy. But physics does not stop with the individual perspective. It asks how measurements in one perspective relate to measurements in another.

The theory of relativity is the clearest example. Two observers may measure different times and lengths, but the difference is not arbitrary. There are transformation laws. There are invariant structures. The objective is then not the perspective-free. The objective is what can be translated between perspectives according to determinate rules.

This does not mean that the method of physics can simply be transferred to anthropology, religion, or mysticism. That would be too crude. But physics shows something important in principle: objectivity need not be understood as a divine watchtower outside all perspectives. Objectivity can be understood as what is preserved through admissible changes of perspective.

In this way, two simplifications are avoided. The first is naive objectivism: the idea that we can simply step outside all perspectives and describe the world as it is in itself. The second is naive relativism: the idea that because all perspectives are situated, there is no meaningful commonality at all.

Against both, one can say: we never have access to the world from nowhere. But this does not mean that we are locked inside private worlds. Between perspectives there can be transitions. Something can be preserved. Something can be translated. Something can be recognized as structure.

The question is therefore not whether a paradigm is “true” in an absolute sense, nor whether all paradigms are equally arbitrary. The question is rather: what can survive the transition between perspectives?

A paradigm may well grow out of reality like a branch on a tree. This is a strong image. But branches do not grow arbitrarily. They grow in relation to light, soil, water, gravity, trunk, and other branches. They are historical and living, but they are not without structure.

In the same way, human paradigms can grow out of needs: food, shelter, illness, death, fertility, orientation, meaning, and community. But what arises from need can still contain patterns that can be transferred. A calendar may be born from the needs of agriculture and at the same time express astronomical regularities. A ritual may be a lived action and at the same time carry a structure of time, place, body, and cosmos.

This does not make experience less important. Rather, it shows that experience and structure should not be played off against one another. The lived world must be met with humility; what can be made shared must be treated with care.

This may also be how we should understand the encounter between physics, mysticism, and older cosmologies. Science should not claim to exhaust lived experience. But mysticism and symbolism should not be made immune to every question of structure, transferability, and shared intelligibility.

The ontological turn teaches us not to translate too quickly. An epistemic structural realist framework teaches us to ask what is actually being translated when translation is nevertheless possible.

The decisive point, then, is not to reduce one to the other. It is to distinguish between the actuality of the world in a perspective and the structure that can survive between perspectives.

Where translation is not possible, one should speak carefully.

Where translation is possible, the work of objectivity begins.

But the boundary between these two cases is not given in advance. It must itself be investigated, tested, and sometimes renegotiated. Perhaps it is precisely in this boundary work — between actuality and structure, between world and translation — that both anthropology and physics become philosophically interesting.

Note. For a more formal development of the idea of objectivity as what survives translation between standpoints, see my working article Objectivity as What Survives Translation on Zenodo.