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Mental Toolbox

15:54 / 14.10.03

There's a common view (that I hold) of different belief systems as conceptual tools to use as necessary. The metaphor is a toolbox filled with skills (in this case paradigms) that you apply, the right tool for the right job.

So for example, discussing spirits in the Magick forum here, you believe in the existence of spirits and the validity of techniques for dealing with them. Then, without a pause, you post in the Lab on the lack of rigour in genetic research into crops, believing in the necessity of replicability and reliability.

The two mindsets are completely different, and appear mutually exclusive, yet the 21st century person has little trouble holding both. Flexible minds for the information age, or new age gullibility? Are we coping with information overload or losing the ability to discriminate? Have we transcended dualistic thinking or have we got broken bullshit detectors?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of a mental toolbox?

16:37 / 14.10.03

Errrm…not sure if what you’re saying is: “is it a strength or a weakness to be paradigm-agnostic?” or able to recognise the strength of different worldviews without being stuck in one… it’s obviously quite good, isn’t it?

Actually, on a kind of a similar subject, there was an interesting essay by Thomas Pynchon in the Guardian a few months back (which I've been too disengaged to start a proper thread on), talking about George Orwell's 1984 and the concept of doublethink. Some comments from it are jogging my mental cogs a bit in relation to this topic. For instance:

"Doublethink also lies behind the names of the superministries which run things in Oceania - the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and eventually kills anybody whom it deems a threat. If this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the present-day United States, few have any problem with a war-making apparatus named 'the department of defence,' any more than we have saying 'department of justice' with a straight face, despite well- documented abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media are required to present 'balanced' coverage, in which every 'truth' is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed 'spin,' as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time - it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever."

There’s a full version of the article here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/elvis_christ/50047.html) (waah- can some nice, HTML-informed bod do the honours?)

21:19 / 14.10.03

Choice is always weakness; it introduces hesitation and the possibility of choosing wrong.

It might be a good workaround for Darwinistic selection pressures, but that which is consistent and survives tends to do better than that which is inconsistent... at least in the short term.

01:45 / 15.10.03

Oh, my, we're sour this evening...

What survives long-term (Darwinian or not) is flexibility and idversity. (Um, make that diversity - I think that's one of the most interesting and least appropriate typos I've ever made, so I'm leaving it even though it's so wrong...)

I'm not sure I understand "that which is consistent and survives tends to do better than that which is inconsistent" - surely "that which survives tends to do better" is sufficient? {/snark}

In any case, I'm not sure that assuming a consistent set of conditions is valid (the only case in which a relatively stable "that" will be most sucessful) - the environment is changing rapidly, the political situation in general seems more than a little unsettled, and culture is (still) mutating wildly.

I'm all for a fully stuffed "tool-box." But then, I'm a career scientist with a bent for magick - I've definitely transcended my bullshit Newage gullibility discrimination detector.

07:28 / 15.10.03

The problem I tend to have with the 'toolbox' image is that it comes from that tradition of intellectual labour being metaphorized (and valorized) as manual labour. It also seems to rely on a fairly strong divide between the 'doing' subject, who handles the tools, and the 'passive' object undergoing transformation by the tools.

Different phenomena, texts, or discourses, require you to use different models or assumptions to think/read them. So the availability of multiple, um, paradigms/tools is necessary, really. The downside is probably a sort of 'weak relativism', in which the insights gained from one model aren't applied to a different model... but I need some breakfast before I can think this one through.

08:50 / 15.10.03

Being flexible is all well and good, but the downside would seem to me that it could be too easy to have a double standard. To pick an example that most here would recognise as a double standard, if you look at the way terrorism is assessed, there is one rule for *us* and another rule for *them*.

I think that this kind of thing is no less a potential pitfall in the mental sphere.

09:27 / 15.10.03

I don't think having one rule for "us" and another for "them" is necessarily always a bad thing: at least to the extent that things signify and are experienced differently across lines of race, gender, religion, etc, and that has to be taken into account. But I don't think this is quite the same thing as paradigm shifting.

I tend to think of it more in terms of reading protocols than 'tools'. You don't read a list of experimental results in the same way that you do a romance novel (and you don't read a romance novel in the same way that you read a crime novel). 'Reading' works better for me, as well, because of the tradition of textual criticism/theories of textuality that I mostly work in, which posits a subject position that is created by the text being read as much as a text that is created by the subject who reads...

09:29 / 15.10.03

This reminds me a lot of the Contradiction thread in general and my post in it in particular.

09:53 / 15.10.03

Deva: Not necessarily bad, but not necessarily good. It depends. And there is a danger of saying that every experience by every person is unique and should therefore be approached separately and distinctly. Which is true in a sense, but is a rather useless way of looking at the world and the question becomes one of where to draw boundaries.

Tom: Much as before, I thought your point was off the mark. People are worried by absolutism, which I understand. But I think inconsistency isn't pretty either and is far more evident. Actually you often, but not always, find that one goes hand in hand with the other. (There maybe good reasons for this.)

.

10:22 / 15.10.03

[Sorry this doesn't follow exactly, I wrote it up earlier but have only just been able to post].

As a "postmodern paradigm switcher" myself, I try and justify such switches with a "horses for courses" approach. In other words, some belief systems (while not necessarily being more true) are more useful than others in certain situations. If that means holding two mutually exclusive belief systems, I think the key requirement is that they're not held simultaneously. In other words, one belief system can be said to hold true in one instance, another in a different one, and as long as you take each belief system to be what a "toolbox" would imply, ie. a tool to use with regards to a certain task.

So yes, I guess that does lead to inconsistency. But at least it's methodical inconsistency.

11:08 / 15.10.03

inanimate voyeur- not sure if what you’re saying is: “is it a strength or a weakness to be paradigm-agnostic?” or able to recognise the strength of different worldviews without being stuck in one… it’s obviously quite good, isn’t it?
Well that's what I don't know. I think it's good (otherwise I wouldn't do it) but it's a mistake to think that paradigm agnosticism isn't itself a paradigm. Contrast with a hardcore believer in objective moral truth, who *knows* what's right and wrong, and would presumably see toolboxing as moral turpitude and uncertainty.

There's certainly a psychological difference, switching paradigms makes you more likely to fall into endless internal debate and postmodern paralysis as you argue with yourself. Having one paradigm tends to make you more decisive and secure.
And as Lurid says there are dangers like having double standards, and applying whichever paradigm you want to rather than the appropriate (most useful as . says) one. Paradigm agnosticism lends itself to self delusion and wish fulfilment much more than it's opposite (monoparadigmatism?).

I guess the four stereotypes that spring to mind for me are the good and bad of each position- a self-delusional gullible new ager and a postmodern metasceptic, a fundamentalist fanatic and a hard scientist.
The weakness of a totally relativist position is that without an anchor it's easy to believe anything, no matter how silly, as all beliefs are equal- the strength is flexibility and holistic thinking, the ability to embrace contradiction etc. The weakness of a monoparadigm is dogmatism and closed mindedness, the strength certainty and truth.

I of course consider myself the 'good' version of paradigm agnosticism, using the most appropriate tool even if it tells me things I don't want, keeping the bullshit detectors on full, but I'd rather spend time with a 'good' monoparadigmer than a bad paradigm agnostic.

What I wanted to examine is the implications and pitfalls of adopting a metaparadigm that allows toolboxing, because a lot of people do it but it's not often that stance itself is examined, just expounded.