Kuhnian paradigms, however, ought to call our attention to the way our individual perceptions and interpretations are not “private” or peculiar to each one of us. They are mediated by powerful intersubjective frames that are very carefully worked out and constantly tested in the free-for-all of on-going conversations. Thinkers in the tradition stemming from Saussure call this “the objectivity of inter-subjectivity.” It means that we as human beings have had our consciousnesses conditioned by the language and other organized vocabularies of various ways of knowing, and this both empowers us to know and also (by focusing) will limit our knowing, in some respects.

This is not to be regretted as a loss of “absolutes,” however. Knowing for human beings is always heuristic. It is a discovery procedure, directed twards the knowing of things that always exceed our grasp as knowers through complexity and interrelationship with other difficult and complex kinds of things.

This was the older theory of knowing that began with Plato and called us to become agile knowers, able to employ and integrate many ways of knowing to deal with urgent problems and to press ahead in knowing better the kinds of things we most desire and need to know.

The Christian faith is just such a way of knowing, and as much or more than Socratic philosophy calls us to constant examination of our paradigms rather than any kinds of absolutisms, because our God more than any other object of knowing is not “an object” and exceeds any formulations we can make. This is very exciting and compelling, actually.

But with the rise of science, we became accustomed for several hundred years to think of “knowing” as the accumulation of “knowledge” that was certain and absolute. The natural sciences explosively outgrew this mistaken paradigm of rationality, but we Christians and others remain stuck in that paradigm, at least in the English-speaking world. This is one reason why I am working on the older theory of knowing that began with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and lasted 2000 years until the rise of Newtonian mechanics.

It seems to me that the main difference between modern Enlightenment Christianity and the more traditional sacramental Christian traditions involves our theory of knowing. Fundamentalism arose as an attempt to transfer scientistic norms for absolutely authoritative Knowledge from the sphere of science into the sphere of religion. As Hannah Arendt shows, totalitarianism, and I would add, fundamentalisms of the religious or scientific rationalist kind are MODERN phenomena in the West. And we seem to be exporting them to the global community as well.

Well, that was longer than I planned, so I guess I’ll post this over on my own website, too. Cheers!

Thanks!