A profoundly good example of the problem philosophers face in reducing that which we cannot sense and perceive without instruments to analogies to experience which we can.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen/
As I struggle with the cultural conflation of truth with strategic good, assumed as metaphysical property of reality, and reconciling this with the requirement for ethical testimony, which can only be claimed by observation and measurement, I realize the problems facing those in quantum mechanics and those of ethics and politics of heterogeneous polities, are both products of vast increases in scale and complexity that our minds neither evolved for, nor have our language and epistemological traditions evolved to accommodate.
We are still mystics at describing reality at scale, not because we are conservative or unwilling, as we were with religion in reaction to science, but because despite our willingness we do not yet know how.
There are two solutions to this problem: to state scale concepts in perceivable terms as best we can, or to restate all concepts in new terms. Under both models language will eventually evolve, and with it the populace. I suppose the former is more pragmatic but less truthful, and the latter more truthful but less likely to succeed.
In ethics I face this same problem. And its painful.we must use extant language despite that it is wrong, clarify its meaning by cleansing it of error, and restate relations formed in homogenous polities with the properties of heterogeneous polities.
Universalism is an error in scale, measurement, and logic.
Its yeoman’s labor.