Thank you for your commnets.
Names/Propositions = Epistemes/Paradigms
How do you use your distinction? Could you give me a significant narrative
in which you use this distinction?
If you talk about names as categories then that relation myight hold.
Paradigms are unspoken sets of underlying assumptions of an argument.
I do not use the word proposition for what is unspoken. But then again
once we become aware of paradigms we try to speak of them and end up
usually with aphorisms.
Kent
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Kent D. Palmer, Ph.D. :Administrator of ThinkNet {aka DialogNet}
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On Sun, 26 Feb 1995, Jim Michmerhuizen wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Feb 1995, Kent D. Palmer, Ph.D. wrote in LO157:
>
> > This is the whole point of Socratic Ignorance. Socrates came to the
> > conclusion that he was the wisest of men (as the delphic oracle had
> > called him) because he alone knew he did not know anything.
>
> A fine point, but perhaps relevant: Socrates' conclusion was not
> unconditional. He was careful to state that it was the only way he could
> find a coherent interpretation of two indubitable propositions: a) the
> oracle's statement that he was wise, and b) his own perception that he
> knew far less than anybody else, at least, than anybody he'd ever met in
> dialogue.
>
> Now, the oracle is supposed to be infallible. And, whatever the oracle
> might have meant by a), Socrates clearly wasn't willing to give up b) in
> any direct way. That would have meant re-interpreting the word
> "knowledge". So his resolution was, in effect, to reinterpret the word
> (or concept) "wisdom" instead.
>
> None of this generalizes to anything like a denial of your statement. I
> supply it because it's interesting in its own right, and because it sets
> up an important and reverberating dissonance between "knowledge" and
> "wisdom". (Well, actually, I guess I get two slightly different readings
> of Socrates the man here. On one reading, Socrates _states_ "I am wise
> because of my ignorance"; on the other, he _deduces_, in a kind of head-
> scratching confessional mode, that the only way both he and the oracle can
> be right is if wisdom consists in knowing that you are ignorant.)
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > In your post and in my response the words paradigm and episteme are used
> > as if they were about the same thing. They are similar pheomena on
> > different levels of knowledge generation within our tradition. But we
> > should strive to keep them apart as epistemes are categorizations that
> > allow us to make distinctions and paradigms are assumptions about things
> > that use categories that have already been established. I think you are
>
> Trying to translate your terms into those I habitually use to address
> these kinds of issues, I find a strong tendency to map your
> "epistemes/paradigms" into my "names/propositions". You will guess from
> this, correctly, that we are not near neighbors in the big wide world of
> philosophy. Let me urge that I'm not being a conceptual reductionist
> here; my conceptual pairup is in fact a huge and almost poetic extension
> of the ordinary meanings of the terms "name" and "proposition".
>
> Anyway, if epistemes are basic or primitive (i.e. not further
> decomposable) acts of distinction -- for example, the _ABSOLUTE_ kind of
> "before/after" distinction each of us experiences nine months after
> conception -- then I feel safe with the translation. And if that is the
> case, then I also feel confident about identifying -- at least as a
> best-guess starting point -- your "paradigms" with my "propositions".
> Well, actually, there's a couple of alternative terms I might use, but
> let's run with this one a bit.
>
> Of course, in no way does this effort at translating reduce to a simple
> algebraic sort of identity of terms. If common human natural languages
> don't work that way, and there's no reason to expect that two individual
> sets of usages would either. I think the basis for my second observation,
> associating "paradigm" with "proposition", is that a paradigm (in your
> usage as well as that of this group generally, myself included) is a kind
> of model, or an image functioning metaphorically to represent the
> structure of some complex system. The paradigm is simpler than what it
> represents -- that's what it's for -- but it's _NOT_ logically primitive.
> It has "parts". If we try to analyse the paradigm, whether for the
> purpose of questioning it, rejecting it, understanding or changing it, we
> wind up dealing with it in some set of propositions. The terminology of
> these will be given in, or derived from, or based on, something like your
> "epistemes": atomic categories or classifications.
>
> [ big snip ]
>
> I responded in another post to this same thread. I hope it's valuable
> (the whole thread, I mean) to the group -- it connects bigtime with an
> earlier thread (the one that persuaded me in fact to subscribe) on models
> and metaphor and paradigm.
>
> Regards
> jamzen@world.std.com
> There are more different kinds of people in the world than there are people...
>
>
>