Natural Science: Hegemony of the Right Angle Paradigm?

[coberst]

Natural Science: Hegemony of the Right Angle Paradigm?

 

If we watch carefully a group of carpenters building a house we can see that their building paradigm is the right angle and this constraint is standardized by the plumb-bob and the level. The building integrity is assured by the support of right angle structures and these supports are interconnected with linear members. The building paradigm is right angle support interconnected with liner members.

 

The natural sciences have a similar type of universal paradigm. The natural sciences’ greatest instrument for success is linear mathematics. Anything that is non linear is generally discarded or is solved by brute strength over design. These sciences have been successful by eliminating the negative and accentuating the positive; that which is linear is positive and that which is non linear is negative. Recent studies in fractals have helped us to better comprehend the nature of the natural sciences.

 

Philosophy has been determined to emulate this sort of paradigm in the hope of achieving similar success in the domains of knowledge focused upon human to human interrelationships. Recent efforts by cognitive science and associated neurological sciences have, in the last few decades, shown us the errors inherent in these attempts.

 

Objectivism is a philosophy that understands the world as made up of determinate, mind-independent objects with inherent characteristics or “essences”. This philosophical view of reason is that reason is capable of “mirroring” objects with their qualities and relationships in a linear and undistorted fashion. Objectivism holds that principles are high order generalizations that can function as fundamental laws that characterize categories, which are the necessary and sufficient definition of objects of reality.

 

Rationality is framed and contained by the systematic nature of human conceptual processes. “Human rationality is motivated…imaginative rationality is indeterminate in more-or-less predictable ways.”

 

“The concept of motivation…has nothing to do with subjective intent, but rather refers to what makes sense of—that is, what structures, constitutes, and enables—particular thought.”

 

Traditional philosophical objectivism assumes (i.e. takes for granted) “that reason is available to control and direct the movement from authoritative sources to the logical decision of a concrete case”.

 

In legal matters “reasoning consists in abstracting from a judicial opinion or other authoritative legal text the principles that express the necessary and sufficient conditions, properties, or criteria that characterize it.” In normal everyday considerations reasoning consists in ascertaining the categories that characterizes the situation.

 

Quotes from A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind Steven L. Winter, Law Professor