I guess I was getting at what Ken is describing. I think people might try
to hold consistent beliefs and one might insist that they ought to...I'm
not sure, but I'm not opposed to the idea.
A paradigm is an abstraction that allows one to understand and make
predictions about the world. For instance, the Boston T subway map shows
stops along four lines. If you look at a street map, however, it's obvious
that the stations aren't in straight lines and don't have the same distance
relationships as shown on the street map. But, in loosing that overall
accuracy the T-map gains a great deal of clarity and utility.
In the same way intellectuals have Marxist, Feminist, Darwinian, and other
paradigms to use in understanding and expaining things. It is possible to
understand more than one of these ideas without "throwing out" the others.
In addition, I don't belive it is possible to completely hybridize a
Feminist and Darwinian paradigm into a consistent and useful whole...in the
same way that a geological survey and a subway map aren't going to
integrate well.
I think it's important not to be caught in the fallacy of looking for the
"most accurate" representation of reality among self-consistent
representations that have different focuses. One ought to be able to apply
which ever model seems most appropriate based on their judgement (or
discrimination memes, or whatever).
It may be that our argument is over the definition of the word paradigm.
I'm using it almost interchangeably with "perspective" or "methodology" or
"mental-map".
Reed
Reed Konsler
konsler@ascat.harvard.edu