Kuhn’s Paradigm and paradigmatic crisis

Thomas Kuhn wrote his most famous work entitled “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” based on the idea of “scientific paradigm”. In the beginning his “paradigm” was only restricted to the field of Hard Science. Step by step it became a tool applied to any other fields, and it even became a kind of a “fashion word” used in several circumstances. Anyway, as we have a succession of scientific paradigms in the History of Science, we could think if there is also a “succession of paradigmatic crisis” that we see or read through contextual concepts. Maybe, the Human History is a succession of crisis... or this is a vision of an after-postmodern point of view. 

After-postmodern Narratives 3

In After-postmodern times we live in a paradoxical situation in terms of the deep meaning of Narrative and its value for the West Society.

As the author Siva Vaidhyanathan explains in the book “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy”. Nowadays people do not care too much to read books and explore its deep meanings. Everybody is very busy with distractions and shallow things in Facebook, even with good things that in the beginning the   founders of it thought that was happening.

Maybe we can add to that reflection that some explanation of the situation is “the archetype of the shadow”, in a Jungian concept. The shadow of the human being is in every human activity. Any activity. Even if we think that it is the purest activity ever. The purest faith, the purest religion, the purest brotherhood, and so on.

The human being must learn how to deal with “the shadow”. Ancient traditions, religious or of other nature, have some keys to deal with the shadow. Even Narratives are a way to deal with the shadow. It is a very ancient way.

In After-postmodern times, some fields learnt to use Narratives to get a deeper knowledge and to deal with the shadow, as, for example, the Narrative Medicine.

Maybe Facebook must learn to deal with the shadow, or the users of Facebook. Or maybe people can have some time to read books or deeper narratives. Facebook is not good or bad. It depends on what use we make of it.

After-Postmodern Narratives 2

In 1966 Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg published the book “The Nature of Narrative”. It was something that emerged in the zeitgeist of the sixties, in postmodern times, when new perspectives appeared together with ideas of “deconstruction” of any concept, mainly the old ones. The last two decades of the 20^th century saw a victory of the pragmatism and objectivity over creation and subjectivity. As history has a kind of intertwined ways, the narrative studies continued. In the 21^st century started a transition to a new period: a shift to after-postmodern times. The narrative became something visible to different fields of study and practice. So, this is the time of Narrative.

After-Postmodern Narratives

In Postmodern Period, in the second half of the 20^th Century, some scholars started to think and write about “narrative”. At that days, each field of study was constrained to stay inside it’s own limits, although some interdisciplinary movements begun. Narrative was object of interest of some people. But in After-Postmodern current time, “narrative” became a kind of “interdisciplinary tool”, helping to understand different sides of human being.

After-postmodern Watch

     Watchmaking was a very interesting activity for centuries. It was a special kind of art and a technical ability.

     The now old watch worked with the “fingers energy”.

     The postmodern watch became something that needed a “battery”.

     In human progress and evolution, many times we lose something to get something.

   The change from fingers to battery was progress by one side, but a continuous expense for battery production by other side. 

    At the same time, we lost the tic tac sound and that old contact with the watchmaker.

    In after-postmodern times it does not seem that the old watch will make a comeback.

     At same time we have other “watches”, computerized watches, mobile watches…

     Maybe even the time changed, not just the times…

    We live in transitional times, and we are still learning to deal with a new time in new times…

After-postmodern Rescue

The Thai Rescue can be a sign, a symbol, an example of a new kind of “globalization”.

In the end of the 20^th Century, the end of postmodern era, the word “globalization” acquired an ambiguous meaning, some ambiguous hermeneutics.  

It was understood as something “not so good” when used in the economic sense.

Nowadays we have “new globalizations”: in the media, in the web, and even in human gestures.

It seems that the after-postmodern globalization is becoming a “humanized” globalization…

After-postmodern and Peace – Part 3

Some anthropological allegations say that the cultural or even biological evolution, as in epigenetics, occurred more by collaboration than by confrontation among human groups. We could ask why this kind of thing could still be present in Mankind. Why this is not only a characteristic of prehistorical times? Maybe there are some human conditions that linger, although the technological and scientific progress, not only the impulse to fight but also the needing to aggregate.

After-postmodern and Peace - Part 2

One era starts in the era that comes before. The Middle Ages started in the Antiquity. The Modern Era started in the Middle Ages. And so on...

The after-postmodern has roots in postmodern movements and thoughts.

The idea of cooperation to be so or more important than competition and struggle started in the transition of 19th and 20th centuries with the Russian thinker Kropotkin, but acquired argument and strength in the last decades of postmodern era, with some thinkers as Stephen Jay Gould.

After-postmodern and Peace

The after-postmodern conditions lead to Peace, is what seems to someone that looks to postmodern and after-postmodern times. We can think it is a kind of utopy, or dream, but Peace is not something that is definitive and closed. Peace is something under construction all time. But modern times and post-modern times were times of confrontation. Even the anthropology thinking explained Evolution by confrontation at modern and postmodern times. Nowadays the cooperation is more importante than the confrontation. So the anthropology understands too, about the cultural Evolution of Mankind.

The “End of Normal” and the After-postmodern era

     When James K. Galbreith wrote about “the end of normal” he was not talking about some kinds of “normal” that we can find in several discussions, mainly in Humanities. We can see, for example, in the book of the French physician and philosopher Georges Canguilhem, “On The Normal and the Pathological”, a discussion about the concept of “normal” under biological conditions and studies of the constrution of medical knowledge. In a general way, what is “normal” in one culture, can have a diferent meaning in other culture, and so on.

     The “end of normal” for Galbreith is the end of the paradigm that says that the world economy can grow on and on, under a traditional concept of progress. Now we have to put in this equation the factor “resource” and “sustainability”. In postmodern times, this was a kind of dream, although the environmental movement was already present. So, the pragmatism of industrial,technical,etc development need to change in After-postmodern era. Maybe it is even a new kind of pragmatism dictated by the necessity of Mankind’s survival.