Translating across disciplines without conflating them

Imagine that a UFO arrives on Earth and asks: “What is a human being?”

It listens in turn to an ENT specialist, a neurologist, a dentist, a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a priest, an imam, and then other people as well. They may all be speaking about the same human being. Yet they are not looking at exactly the same thing.

One observes with a medical instrument. Another works with accounts, symptoms, concepts, texts, rites or different standards of evidence. Each one examines a different part of the territory according to their scale, vocabulary, method and function.

Not deciding too quickly

The difficulty is not to decide arbitrarily which description should take precedence. Nor is it to merge everything into one large explanation.

The question becomes more precise: what exactly does each one observe, with which instrument, at what scale, for what function, and how far does their description allow them to conclude?

Translating the questions

Translation across disciplines does not only consist in translating answers. The questions must also be translated. The same sentence can change meaning depending on the problem it is trying to solve, the kind of evidence it accepts and the function it fulfills in its field.

Adding several descriptions is therefore not enough. Adding descriptions is not the same as articulating them. Articulation requires preserving what each description allows us to see, but also what it does not allow us to conclude.

Preserving differences in scale

A phenomenon can be described at several scales: biological, psychological, social, symbolic, technical, historical or spiritual. These scales can intersect, but they do not become identical because they sometimes speak about the same human being, the same gesture or the same event.

A useful translation preserves the status of what it carries. A clinical observation does not become philosophical evidence. A spiritual image does not become a biological measurement. A functional comparison does not become scientific validation.

Interdisciplinary false friends

Some words seem to bring fields closer together while actually shifting them. The same term can designate a technical operation, a lived experience, a moral category, a scientific hypothesis or a metaphor. These are interdisciplinary false friends.

The laboratory does not reject them. It slows them down. It asks what the word does in its original field, what it loses when it is moved, and what it may lead us to believe if it is translated too quickly.

Ancient texts and science

Ancient texts can preserve forms of attention, distinctions and thought experiments that help formulate better questions. Their age does not make them automatically true. It can, however, give access to other ways of dividing up reality.

Science provides a form of resistance here. It requires us to distinguish what is measured, what is inferred, what is reproducible, what remains hypothetical and what does not belong to its own framework. It protects the research from overly seductive analogies.

Two forms of drift

The first drift consists in merging everything: because two fields seem to answer one another, one assumes that they are speaking about the same phenomenon or the same mechanism.

The second drift consists in forbidding any comparison: because the fields are different, one gives up observing analogies of function that could nevertheless help pose better questions.

The work of translation seeks a more cautious path: comparing without merging, distinguishing without isolating, testing without impoverishing.

The role of the translator

The translator protects bridges as much as boundaries. The aim is not to annex one discipline by another. The translator checks what can circulate, what must remain attached to its original framework, and what changes status when it is moved.

In the Aksoydan Laboratory, this function serves to increase our ability to distinguish without artificially increasing certainty. It helps us see more differences, not conclude faster.

🍅 We note. We observe. We translate.