Paradigms and Fairy Tales

Volume 1

Julienne Ford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000158281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is an introduction to the epistemology and practice of social science. It provides an exposition and critique of the ideology and practice of social science, and an examination of the professional social scientist as a manipulator of ideas and appearances.

Chapter 1
I Beg Your Pardon

Plac'd in this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great,
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god or beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Chaos of Thought and Passion all confus'd,
Still by himself abus'd or disabus'd;
Created half to rise, and half to fall,
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

(Pope, An Essay on Man)

Even today 'the lord of all things' may find that this sentiment can have a very powerful effect on his bowels. And, two centuries after Pope we find Thomas Kuhn reiterating the riddle, though in a less romantically enematic form. Closing the argument of his famous treatise on knowledge, Kuhn asks: 'What must the world be like in order that man may know it?' He concludes that the problem, 'as old as science itself . . . remains unanswered'.¹

In a most profound sense, of course, he is right. In fact, as common sense has it, 'the more you know, the more you realize you don't know'. As science enables us to devise more and more sophisticated apparatus with which to grope for the 'truth', it seems only to drive us further away from the homely comfort of knowing-that-we-know-what-we-know. Current advances in the exploration of both outer and inner space - with the aid of rockets, spaceships, psychiatric techniques, and psychotropic drugs - serve only to emphasize how blurred is the line between 'phantasy' and 'reality'. And this dilemma has itself become a major focus of contemporary popular art, particularly in its acetate forms: via films and records we can join vicariously in the soul-cries of those who think they know only one thing for sure, that they do not know!

I've looked at life from both sides now,
From win and lose, and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall,
I really don't know life at all.

(Joni Mitchell, Clouds)

The question does remain 'unanswered' in this fundamental sense. There is no single solution to the reality-problem that has been found to be universally acceptable. Yet it is the argument of this book that the question is being answered ail the time. The myriad solutions which men have devised, and are still devising, are the substance of those stocks of knowledge which are called common sense or folk-lore on the one hand, and philosophy, theology, philology, psychology, alchemy, magic, science, etc. on the other.

Kuhn himself has provided us with a brilliant historical account and analysis of the way in which scientists might be said to go about producing their particular sort of answers to that very Original Question. They do so by creating and maintaining paradigms of thought.

Thought paradigms - Kuhn calls them simply 'paradigms' - are conglomerations of exemplary thoughts. They include various fairy tales about what the 'real world' might be like all bound up in cover stories about how it may be known. They consist of thoughts wrapped up in thoughts about thoughts. And these devices serve as patterns both for knowledge itself, and for the acquisition of knowledge.²

I am going to suggest that the paradigms of latter-day Western science can be envisaged as having analogues in contemporary Western common sense on the one hand, and in other systems of academic thought on the other. That is to say that the methods of reality construction, the paradigms of thought, employed by modern scientists are formally synonymous with those used - at least since the turn of the seventeenth century in the West³ - by most philosophers, theologians, and magicians, and by ordinary people in their everyday lives.

But let us begin at the beginning, with the Original Question in a less cryptic form. Let us consider:

WHAT IS REALLY REAL?

What a conundrum! Better minds than yours and mine have pursued this one to the point of sheer lunacy. Of course, Lewis Carroll issued an eloquent warning of that danger in his allegorical nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark. But alas! It came too late for some. Here the Baker relates his uncle's advice on the subject of snark hunting:

'You may seek it with thimbles - and seek it with care;
You may hunt it with forks and hope;
You may threaten its life with a railway share;
You may charm it with smiles and soap - '
('That's exactly the method', the Bellman bold
In a hasty parenthesis cried,
'That's exactly the way I have always been told
That the capture of snarks should be tried!')
'But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,
If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
And never be met with again!'
'It is this, it is this that oppresses my soul,
When I think of my uncle's last words:
And my heart is like nothing so much as a bowl
Brimming over with quivering curds!'

The unfortunate Baker eventually ran the Snark to ground, but, as you have no doubt guessed:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away -
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Many others, having more regard for their sanity, have resisted the temptation to get actively involved in the chase. The sociologist, Alfred Schutz, for example, wisely confessed Ί want to say that I am afraid I do not know what reality is, and my only comfort in this unpleasant situation is that I share my ignorance with the greatest philosophers of all time.'⁴ In making this confession Schutz follows in a tradition of thought which is usually known as Phenomenology. The phenomenologists warn us against the dangers of assuming anything about the 'reality' of those 'facts' which appear to present themselves to us either through the taken-for-granted framework of common sense or through the more seductive reality-maker which nowadays is called science. Yet, while stressing that we cannot, in one fundamental sense, know what is really real, they do not urge us relentlessly to pursue the Snark, chasing it in ever-decreasing circuits until we inevitably disappear up our own cloacae.⁵

One phenomenological technique which has been suggested to avoid this undignified end is that we resist the bait, yet at the same time keep the problem in mind, through the trick of bracketing.⁶ Aware that we do not know what is really real, we can none the less get on with the job (whatever it is) by simply putting brackets around whatever-it-is-that-we-take-to-be-reality. You can do this discreetly in your head if you wish, or you can do it when you write, writing '(the world)' thus, so that your reader is warned that you wish him, like you, to suspend judgment on the nature of the (reality) about which you write.

Unfortunately this technique can be a little confusing to read, so I would like to suggest that, instead, we adopt the practice of bracketing those-words-whose-meaning-has-yet-to-be-determined with question marks.⁷ For example, we can write ¿reality?, ¿fact?, ¿phenomenon?, ¿thing?, ¿knowledge?, ¿science?, etc., and thus we can remind ourselves, and each other, of the uncertainty with which we write.

Now you could be forgiven for thinking that all this is a load of 'philosophical' mumbo-jumbo. If every time you were about to step on a bus you stood pondering as to whether or not the ¿bus? was ¿really? ¿there?, you would find yourself left standing at a very real bus stop, quite probably getting unmistakably wet from what would seem remarkably like real rain. In fact, of course, in the context of our everyday lives we are pretty certain for the most part what is 'really real'. Though we may sometimes enclose people, things, and situations in imaginary interrogative brackets, this is only as a preliminary to finding out what they are. Moreover we are aware that we don't understand what these particular items mean (what they are) precisely because they stand out from a background of taken-for-granted 'reality'.

One everyday way of coping with the invisible interrogative brackets around those phenomena, events, and processes whose meaning is as yet unknown has been described by sociologists as glossing.⁸ An example may be helpful. In the following imaginary conversation Β does not know what A is talking about, and apparently does not want to ask A, for reasons which are none of our business. Β is bluffing along while trying to get enough clues from what A says to find out what it is that they are both talking about.

A: 'I've had enough of this business.'

B: 'Yeah.'

Α: Ί can't stand any more of it.'

Β: Ί know what you mean.'

A: 'What can we do about it?'

B: 'Search me. I durino, I really dunno.'

A: 'No, seriously, I want your advice. We must do something.

B: 'Well I don't know where to begin.'

A: 'It's not exactly a complicated issue is it?'

Β: Ί suppose not.'

A: 'What do you mean "suppose"! There's no "suppose" about it. It's obvious.'

B: (Says nothing but shifts from one foot to the other.)

A: 'We've got to have it out with him.'

B: (Still says nothing at all. This is the first real clue he has had.)

A: ' You'll have to go, it's better coming from you than from me.'

Β: (Desperate by now) 'What shall I say?'

At this point A could have said, 'Oh use your bloody head!', in which case Β would be right in tnhinking that he simply did not know what A was talking about. B's luck was in, though, and what A actually said was:

A: 'Oh I'd play it real strong, something like "Look here Mister Robinson, putting in extra hours is one thing, but staying 'til eight on a Friday without any sort of overtime is ridiculous. We may not be unionized but you can't get away with that."'

The meaning of the whole setting has now manifested itself to B. ¿Whatever-we-are-talking-about? has now become 'what to do about unpaid overtime work on a Friday', What is important for our purposes is that Β has found out all that he needs to know about the situation in question. Whether that conversation ¿really? took place or not doesn't matter; whether Β is ¿dreaming? the ¿whole incident?, or whether the ¿conversation? took place ¿not? between ¿A? and ¿B? but between their ¿doppelgangers? in a ¿parallel universe?, it simply doesn't make any difference. Β has enough information to feel that he knows what is going on and to decide what to do next, whether this is to tell A to fight his own battles or to tell Mr Robinson where he gets off. For Β to say that he doesn't know what A is ¿really? talking about would be absurd. (This would also hold for those situations where Β does not have the option of asking A directly what he means, as those where, for example, the two people speak different languages.)

The aim of everyday bracketing, for example glossing, is, then, to locate a particular reality-gap in a background of ordinariness and thereby fill it in. For ordinary people in their everyday lives:

THE ¿REALITY? OF HERE AND NOW DEPENDS UPON THE ¿REALITY? OF NORMALITY.

When academics take off their white scientific coats and funny philosophical hats they turn into ordinary people too, and like all ordinary people, they have to start somewhe'e. They must have a backgrou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 I Beg Your Pardon
• 2 Just Another Fairy Tale
• 3 A Trip Through the Library
• 4 Advice from a Caterpillar
• 5 Cross My Heart and Hope to Die
• 6 Testing Rituals
• 7 The Worlds of Why-Because
• 8 Battles for the Bridges
• 9 The Magic of Meanings
• Notes
• Glossary of Fairy-Tale Words