Subject: Re: Gaia, Kuhn and paradigms
From: Ania Lian (ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au)
Date: Mon 10 Jan 2000 - 23:35:37 MET
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 08:35:37 +1000 (EST) From: Ania Lian <ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au> Subject: Re: Gaia, Kuhn and paradigms
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On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Chris O'Hagan wrote:
> It is not easy to say how postmodernism is helpful in a few words,
> Bob. Perhaps I could put it like this: belief in absolutes, and the
> belief that one thus has 'the objective truth' has probably killed
> more people and done more damage to the world and truly creative
> thinking, and continues to do so, than scepticism and relativism ever
> will. That is defining it by a negative, if not killing people is a
> negative. I'll leave the positive definition to another day. This
> is already too long.
Let me thus take over and supply your comments just with the following
quote:
"The most important new results of nuclear physics was the recognition of
the possibility of applying quite different types of natural laws, without
contradiction, to one and teh same physical event. This is due to the fact
that within a system of laws which are based on certain fundamental ideas
only ceryain quite definite ways of asking questions make sense, and thus,
that such a system is separated from others which allow different
questions to be put." (Calhoun, 1995: 8)
The notion of relativity needs not be confused with a belief that nothing
therefore can be understood. What postmodernism (and I am not quite sure
what this would be in detail) can contribute is that the issue is not
whether we can understand, as we all of course do. The issue is of
knowing what we have actually understood.
The relativity that we talk about stems from the bias which is inherent in
the categories that we use to explain. Calhoun regading this issue talks
about the double nature of this bias which he locates (after hermeneutics)
in the task of interpretation. In fact he talks about the phenomenon of
the "double hermeneutic" (Calhoun, 1995: 49; cf. Giddens, 77). The notion
of the double hermeneutic refers to the recognition that the
interpretatory bias is not only a product of the distance between reality
and the abstract categories of its description, it is also a product of
the distance between individuals and hence between the ways in which
individuals interpret these categories. The bias thus is double and the
idea of unproblematic relationship between theory and practice becomes
increasingly impossible:
"In both these senses, then, we face difficulties in interpreting
social life that is differently constituted from our own. In a nutshell,
our resources for making sense of it, for giving meaning to what we can
observe of it, derive from our own culture (including intellectual
traditions) and from previous experience. These are the only resources we
have, but in applying them we necessarily run the risk of failing to grasp
meanings operative in other contexts while constituting for ourselves
meanings that were not at work there." (Calhoun, 1995: 49)
Ania Lian
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