Can we enable dialogue between different explanatory models in the social sciences? If so, how?

A question have been bugging me throughout my short academic career. Can we enable dialogue between different explanatory models in the social sciences? If so, how? I do not have an answer to this at present, but I have some ideas that I will try to briefly present as a series of connected propositions. These seem to connect largely to my views on language and communication and as such at least signal some form of intellectual cohesion between different areas of my thinking.

To set a premise: In my (limited) experience, there is much concern in academia over both how one can construct a dialogue with people who hold different epistemological views to oneself, and also how one can, or even if one can, employ parts of different explanatory models (e.g., analytical frameworks, theoretical explanations and so on and so forth - in academia we use many names for what in essence is the same thing!) together to construct new, more complete, insights and explanations. To me, these concerns fail to grasp the core of what propositions, and therefore communicated concepts, are. According to Wittgenstein, propositions, such as academic concepts, are constituted by atomic facts - the smallest parts of the proposition that cannot be further broken down. Moreover, concepts are not the labels that we use to communicate them, but something more that incorporates quite a lot of unsaid things that we interpret differently (see my blog post on language).

It stands to reason then, I think (if I got Wittgenstein right), that two incompatible concepts may share some, but not all, atomic facts. To illustrate this point: If we were to submerge a human in water (h2o) over time he would suffocate and die. However, if the same human was not to be submerged in o2 (or denied access to it) he would also die. Both h2o and o2 share o - so they are different concepts that are different things, but that share some atomic facts (in this case atoms). Furthermore, if we change from the concept of human to the concept of breathing life, we see that both o2 and h2o support life. The former for example supports mammals and the latter fish (mammals need both but that is beside the point being made here).

This also relates to how all stated (expressed) concepts are human constructs when formulated by humans and depend in part on how we formulate them in relation to their characteristics and links to other concepts as they form complete propositions. That is, submersion in h2o can be both giver and taker of life dependent on how we define "life". Many such relations are often hidden by the labels we use as we communicate. For example there is a difference between talking about "water" and "oxygen" and "h2o" and "o2", due to the connotations labels invoke in us as I have discussed elsewhere.

To then return to a proposition relevant for the social sciences, I argue that Foucault, Bourdieu, and Latour are linked through the notion of epistemic rupture and the related French epistemology and ontology rooted in the thinkers at the ENS de Paris in the early to mid-20th century (e.g, Althusser who drew on Bachelard). Therefore, when we talk of explanatory models that invoke fields, power relations in a Foucaultian sense, or Actor Network Theory - we are at a root talking of very similar models with slight deviations in their application and more noticeable deviations in their labels (how the core concepts are communicated). In essence, much of fighting between and within disciplines is rooted in this inability to see beyond labels, and a failure to deconstruct concepts down to their atomic facts in order to fully comprehend not only the whole but the parts that constitute it. Or so it seems to me at present. Tomorrow I will likely have changed my mind!