paradigm

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat Jun 1 10:18:18 PDT 2002



>Thomas S. Kuhn, _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, 2nd edition, U. of
>Chicago Press, 1970
>
>Ch. II, "The Route to Normal Science", pp. 10 - 11
>
>In this essay, "normal science" means research firmly based upon one or more
>past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific
>community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further
>practice. Today, such achievements are recounted, though seldom in their
>original form, by science textbooks, elementary and advanced. These
>textbooks expound the body of accepted theory... Before such books became
>popular...many of the famous classics of science fulfilled a similar
>function. Aristotle's Physica, Ptolemy's Almagest...these and many other
>works served for a time implicitly to define the legitimate problems and
>methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.
>They were able to do so because they shared two essential characteristics.
>Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group
>of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity.
>Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems
>for...practitioners to resolve.

Is it possible to think of pre-modern knowledge producers as being globally governed by dominant "paradigms" in the same way that modern scientists are? Before a new mode of production -- capitalism -- gave birth to a new mode of knowledge production -- science as we know it -- pre-modern knowledge producers worked with disparate local & regional (as opposed to globally unified) frameworks of thinking which didn't consistently separate "scientific" from "artistic," "economic," "moral," "spiritual," "political," etc., as we moderns do:

Cf.

***** Pythagoras founded a philosophical and religious school in Croton (now Crotone, on the east of the heel of southern Italy) that had many followers. Pythagoras was the head of the society with an inner circle of followers known as mathematikoi. The mathematikoi lived permanently with the Society, had no personal possessions and were vegetarians. They were taught by Pythagoras himself and obeyed strict rules. The beliefs that Pythagoras held were [2]:

(1) that at its deepest level, reality is mathematical in nature, (2) that philosophy can be used for spiritual purification, (3) that the soul can rise to union with the divine, (4) that certain symbols have a mystical significance, and (5) that all brothers of the order should observe strict loyalty and secrecy.

Both men and women were permitted to become members of the Society, in fact several later women Pythagoreans became famous philosophers. The outer circle of the Society were known as the akousmatics and they lived in their own houses, only coming to the Society during the day. They were allowed their own possessions and were not required to be vegetarians. ***** -- Yoshie

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