Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1998 16:50:32 EST Subject: Re: Paralogy I thought some might be interested in a long quote from a paper I wrote ten years ago for a graduate course. For those who would rather not suffer through the text, just check out the last paragraph. I think it describes paralogy =93It seems to me that philosophy formulates or at least attempts to articulate the epistemologies around which the sciences and humanities develop their projects and methods. That being so, one might look to philosophy for an understanding of the past and present presuppositions and methods of those disciplines. But philosophy for all its variations and complexities, as I see it, splits into two camps and this split is relevant for the points I wish to make in this paper. First there are the foundational philosophies which are both prescriptive and restrictive. Then their are the anti-foundationalist philosophies that are nonprescriptive and open. Where the former make claims such as, =91this is so=92, the latter make claims like, =91that is other=92. What is implicit throughout this paper is that the former have largely determined and continue to influence methods of historiography and that the latter, especially of late, challenge those methods as unsubstantiated and often unconscious claims to certainty. The schism is by no means new however; there has developed over the last two centuries what Paul Ricoeur has described as a =91hermeneutic of suspicion=92 within the philosophical disciplines. One might say that there is a crisis of representation, or in other words a challenge to the ways in which reality is socially constructed in the Western world. In this century, existential, phenomenological, hermenueutical and Marxist informed philosophies have each in their own way mounted this challenge. Enlightenment philosophy, in which a knowing subject, through reason, comes to grips with an objective world, has in the eyes of many contemporary philosophers, lost its efficacy. Nevertheless it is still the traditions of Descartes, Locke and Kant that inform the logical positivist position that determines modern rationality. From them and others like them we receive our traditional notion of knowledge which presupposes: 1) the privileged standpoint of the guarantee of certainty, 2) perception as the paradigm case, 3) the universal truth of claims to knowledge and 4) the impotence of reflection to disrupt self evident tenants (1). The dominant form of structuring reality couples with a rationalism which employs a positivist logic in the service of a :methodical attainment of ends.. by way of an increasingly precise calculation of means=94; in other words, an instrumental rationality. (2) The debilitating effects of a positivist rationality are summed up by David Helde as follows: With positivism, science is no longer understood as one possible form of knowledge but is identified as knowledge as such. There is no mode of thought left which may criticize the conceptual forms and the structural patterns of science. the consequence is Horkheimer maintained, a ghostlike and distorted picture of the world. Positivism restricted to a program of investigating observable particulars, cannot grasp the self formative process of man as process. It hypostecises the abstract concept of fact or datum. By declaring meaning to be revealed in sensory observation and in identifying, in the social sciences, legitimate scientific experience with the sensory observation of manifest and overt action, positivism closes off central aspects of social reality. (3). I do not take lightly Max Weber=92s warning =93that a loss of the ability to see the world as intrinsically meaningful is a part of the price to be paid for the progress of rationality =93. If we are not to give up the place of rationality as meaning formation, then it seems we must free the term from its narrow instrumental usage and develop a more substantive approach for determining what is rational. In this regard, there are some who would replace instrumental reason with what might be called a more substantive rationality, one that would allow for indeterminacy and not insist on some ultimate =93word, presence, essence, truth or reality to act as the foundation of all thought, language and experience=94. This new rationality although acknowledging the interconnectedness of things, would not insist that all things exist within a field of cause-effect relationships. Meanings would be continuously negotiated, not with the restricted boundaries of positivist logic but within a radical paradigm; radical in the sense that it would insist on a reflexivity that recognizes the contingent nature of knowledge.=94 1. Wachtrhauser, 1986, 398 2. Girth & Mills, 1961, 293 3. Helde, 1980, 172 Don Smith
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