RE: Occam's razor and Galileo

Bruce Bacon (bbacon@mtn.org)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 02:04:01 -0500

What a wonderful nostalgia for the mid 60's appropriation of "paradigm"
shifts from astonomy to social science wafted through memory! HOW can
information be reciprocal of entropy? Paradigm is another name for culture
construct. It was the time when cybernetics made sense of system, feedback
a criterion. Two heroes illumined the arcane epicycles of what defines a
social system:
* R.B. Fuller defined entropy as "...the first subdivision of the
universe, into inside the system and outside the system."
** Norbert Weiner defined entropy as "...regions in phase-space."

As I recall, the helpful lesson in this to be the necessity of
'point-of-view' as an irreducible construct for placing self and others in
a dramatic historical and everyday cultural nexus. Either experience or
knowledge, freedom, even imagination and dreams, is a product of a lived
life, pragmatic and existential.
The folk aphorism about walking a trail in another's moccasin's as
a guide to understanding and antidote to projective judgment is an apt
summary.

So I suppose today's lesson is that 'sustainability' is about erudite
discourse as well as nutrition and soil humus.
I'm also fond of Luce Irigaray's cautionary definition of 'dementia' as a
the condition when one is not able to say anything other than what has been
heard.
One of my favored erudite discussions of this paradigm shift is a
book from the 70's, titled System and Structure (out of print last time I
checked) by an author from Simon Fraser Univ or Univ B C whose name escapes
me now. My highlighted and annotated copy burned up in a fire, or maybe I
loaned it.
So thanks for the impassioned discussion; my razor is 'point of view'.

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