Paradigm Shifts
2nd July 2019
Severian looks at knowledge.
We Normals think of “science” as a process. I’m not going to go full Vox Day here and start making up words, but when we say “science,” we mean it almost like a verb. “Science,” for us, means something like “functioning as a scientist, doing science, science-ing” — that is, testing a theory against the bedrock of Reality.
The PoMos, by contrast, use “science” like a noun — “science” is whatever the community of scientists say it is. It’s not a process, it’s a thing, a body of “knowledge” handed down like Scripture. That’s why they love the idea of “falsifiability.” It’s why the phrase “the science is settled!” makes sense to them. Actually doing science — behaving as a “scientist,” science-ing — is, to them, a process that we Normals would call “hermeneutics.” Hermeneutics is the interpretation of scared texts. The Bible doesn’t contradict itself all over the place. Nor was Karl Marx wrong in every prediction he ever made. Rather, the apparent contractions are all perfectly consistent in the light of the Higher Truth.