> Carrol, Paul, Angela, Yoshii or anyone: Maybe you could help me assess the
> usefulness of the term meta-narrative if you would explain the difference
> between meta-narrative, theory, and paradigm, as you understand those terms.
I have a somewhat different, tho not mutually exclusive answer to the one provided by Angela.
In large part, I'd say the differences between "meta-narrative" and "paradigm" reflect the social history of the intellectual populations using the words. But there is an important distinction that I think is worth trying to preserve. Both are somewhat plastic and contested terms, tho the contests have been more like episodic flare-ups than full-scaled wars--at least following the initial high-voltage attacks on Kuhn in the 1960s lead by Karl Popper & his circle.
Kuhn's notion of a paradigm was a bit elastic, in part because he was a historian of science groping to articulate a new perspective in that field (tho he certainly wasn't alone in doing this, as routinely assumed). He got jumped on by an Anglo-American gang of philosophers who ripped him to shreds for this lack of definitional clarity, which had the ironic result that it stiffled the process of refining it's specificity, but if anything made it even MORE popular in an ill-defined sort of way.
>From the POV of contemporary cognitive science, what Kuhn lacked was a
proper understanding of how reason actually works. He had seen
something wrong in the classical account of scientific reason, but still
accepted the basic framework Western folk theory of reason.
Specifically, what he needed was the notion of of 'prototypes' that play
an important role in the understanding of categories as laid out by
George Lakoff in "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things."
Rather than explaining categories in terms of boundary conditions, simple binary inclusions and exclusions, Lakoff show how categories have a radial structure, with prototypes that are the best examples, and the possibility of numerous different extensions that share little or nothing in common with one another beyond where they started -- sorta like Route 66 and Interstate 10 both starting in Santa Monica, or like Buffy and the Clippers both coming from LA.
How this relates to Kuhn is simple: Kuhn saw that high-level concepts (one sense in which he used "paradigm") reorganize conception & perception of facts and theories, but he continued to believe that this was radically different from "normal" thinking. He saw a strict dichotomy between "revolutionary science", when one paradigm replaced another, and "normal science", when an existing paradigm was simply followed in solving problems, or at best extended to cover new situations.
Drawing on Lakoff one would say that the same kind of thinking goes on all the time, and at all levels of abstraction. Some of us are more fluid or have a more fluid environment for employing multiple prototypes, and we shift more readily between different categories (which can be at any level of abstraction or 'meta'-ness), some of us less so, but we ALL use categories that don't at all work the way "normal thinking" is supposed to work. Scientists are no different from anyone else in this regard. "Revolutionary" re-conceptualizations happen all the time.
There is no 'commensurability' between paradigms, just as Kuhn claimed, but 'commensurability' as assumed by the folk theory of "normal thinking" doesn't exist at ANY level of abstraction, because it's an operation on (or employing) concepts or categories that ARE defined in terms of binary inclusion/exclusion -- and such concepts or categories DO NOT EXIST.
Okay, so how does this contrast with mata-narratives?
My quick & dirty answer: a meta-narrative is iteself a narrative about narratives. Narratives are stories, at a bare minimum action sequences, but at their best when they are fleshed out with motives as well, and developed actors, etc.
Our minds build the world out of two things: prototypes and stories.
For example: "Death took him" is a simple story. It involves using the person prototype to represent death not simple as an entity, but as a person. The story then makes death not just a person, but an actor.
'Paradigm' is an attempt to understand high-level conceptual organization via prototypes, 'meta-narrative' is an attempt to do the same via stories.
Finally, "theory" is much older and far too diversified in its meanings to discuss here. Suffice it to say that this lack of specificity is reason enough to resist the suggestion that 'meta-narrative' and 'paradigm' are simply redundant, even show-off, terms for theory. They may be show-off terms, but they aren't simply redundant.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"