Definitions (Evolution)

by whitecraw, Tuesday, April 01, 2008, 16:07 (5866 days ago) @ George Jelliss

'So does this mean that you and I just can never agree on anything because we belong to mutually incompatible "knowledge communities"?' - If we did belong to mutually incompatible knowledge communities, there would be much that we could never agree on and our disputes would be literally nonsensical. The situation is analogous to that which exists between people who argue about democracy from radically different understandings of what democracy is. Groups of scientists whose knowledge-seeking is informed by different sets of epistemological values will simply and inevitably misunderstand each other. The only possible way out of this is to create some sort of 'meta-discourse' which transcends their epistemological differences and provides a common currency in which meaningful exchanges can be made. - 'Would it be correct to identify yourself as belonging to a "postmodernist" knowledge community, and myself to a "rationalist empiricist" community?
' - I wouldn't call it a 'knowledge community' and I wouldn't call it 'postmodernist'. I'm still stuck in the modernist epoch, with guys like Hume and Kant through to Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists who turned their critical attention to the structure of knowledge and the limits of what we can know. Postmodernism is generally a reaction to modernism and, in particular, to its anthropocentrism and logocentrism; i.e. to the crucial importance that modernism ascribes to human linguistic activity in the construction of knowledge and the world as an object of knowledge. But, in either case, we're talking in this context of a philosophical rather than a knowledge community: neither modernists nor postmodernists are in the business of the pursuit of knowledge; both are concerned primarily with examining critically the presuppositions that underlie the claims we made, including our knowledge-claims. - 'In this case how will our differences ever be resolved? Do we have to wait for some "paradigmatic historical case or episode" to occur?' - Such differences, when they are resolved at all, are resolved politically. The classic study in the sociology of such conflicts and resolutions is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.